Meg agreed, though Colin knew the move from Madison to Milwaukee wasn’t what she wanted. By the time they’d settled into their rental home in Whitefish Bay four months ago, Meg was unexpectedly pregnant. Though they’d been trying, they’d put a pause on their plans until they had a better idea of how long they’d be in Whitefish Bay. But there was that one night they hadn’t been so careful, and now Meg, at thirty-five and on the cusp of being a first-time mother, was without her Madison friends and community.

Colin hoped they could go back home in the not-too-distant future, but that, of course, would require his mother dying.

“What’d she say?” Meg asked.

“Something about a woman named Linda.”

“You going over there?”

“Suppose I need to.”

She sighed.

“Don’t stay late.”

He never did. He just made sure his mother got into bed, just as she had done for him four decades ago when he’d been the one unable to figure out the world.

Colin and Meg had rented a house only four blocks from the one he grew up in, and the walk took him less than ten minutes. It was odd being back, smelling the same summer-night air, passing the same houses he did when he walked to school as a boy. With the observational skills he’d honed as a cop, he noted the subtle changes in the old, familiar houses: new paint schemes, reconfigured landscapes, popped-out roofs accommodating new additions. But it wasn’t the little changes he noticed most. Rather, it was a sense that Whitefish Bay seemed a little smaller, more frayed, and less special than Colin remembered. There was a lesson in that, he thought. Maybe the key to living was being continuously on the move, experiencing new things, so the ache of time was never acute; memories and melancholy were inextricably mixed.

One thing he knew for certain. No way in hell was he going to end up like his mom. Trapped in a house, trapped in a mind, and unwilling to attempt escape from either.

Colin walked up the path to his old house and tried the door. Locked. He took out his keys and let himself in.

“Mom?”

“Upstairs.”

He exhaled, ever-so-slightly disappointed in hearing her voice. A small part of him (though larger than he’d ever confess to) was anticipating the moment no voice called back. That he’d arrive to find she’d passed on, her heart or liver having finally given out.

It was a morbid thought, but one he had nonetheless.

Colin walked around a waist-high stack of newspapers and headed to the stairs, shaking his head at how much of his old house was now brimming with piles of worthless things. The worst part of his mom’s descent into her dark twilight was the hoarding. It had started years ago, but until his father died, it was more like heavy clutter than anything more serious. But in the last year, the piles grew, as if she was trying to leave layers of her life’s sediment behind to be studied by future generations.