At any hour, the father can be seen tending his property. We’ve awakened at midnight to the sound of his mower. There is little in the way of ornament, though the shrubs are kept neatly cubed.

Between their lawn and ours is a child’s playhouse, sturdily built, with real glass windows and a slide and two swings. When the snow melts in bleak spring, the father sands the sides of the family’s house and the playhouse and touches up the peeled places. He stands on a ladder, using the same paint, a medium milky brown, for both buildings.

In the early evening when daylight lingers a little longer than it did the day before, when the father has finished his work and put away his tools and stands in his bare brown yard, appraising, we see how the two structures look like two of the same animal, large and small, grown and juvenile, or parent and offspring.

On an afternoon while the parents are away, the boys are outside doing things they are forbidden to do. Slowly they start to shove each other toward the playhouse. They stand in front of it a while, throwing pieces of grass as hard as they’re able, but the grass only falls peacefully to their feet. They sit on the swing seats, their bottoms hanging out the backs and their ankles dragging under them.

The boys stand and put their hands on the playhouse. They grab it and mount their long bodies onto it, rocking it from its rutted resting place. They climb inside. We can see wedges of them pressed up to the glass. The playhouse shudders on its stilted legs, and the boys do not come out. The sun drops into the trees and the grass goes dark.

When the parents return, the car’s beams swing across the lawns—ours and theirs—and come to rest at the raw, unfenced spot where the playhouse sits. The mother and father wait with the engine running. The ungainly thing begins to tremble, then one boy drops out and stumbles into our early flesh-pink rhododendron. The other son follows and falls face-first into our bleeding heart. There is some permanent damage.

Our house is similar in color to our neighbor’s—awkward and glass-fronted. The houses on our block are not old but look vaguely historical, all built, it seems, with no concern other than getting the best possible view of the sunset.

HAPPY WIFE, HAPPY LIFE

When my wife died I did not want to live, so when my heart stopped I thought, Good. But my daughter took me to the hospital and they opened my chest and found me in there.

My wife would say, Arguing with you is like talking to a bowl of potatoes! So I would argue with her sometimes just to make her happy.

FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS

My parents wanted me out from the start. In good weather they turned me loose at dawn to wander door to door. I was liked by neighbor women with grown children—they’d put me on their laps and feed me sticky rolls and milky coffee while they smoked and talked about their husbands. At dusk—with reluctance—my parents unbolted their home and whistled for me to come. They kept me in the basement in a large room with a tiled floor and a window that looked onto the ground of the backyard, where I watched their sandaled feet cross and uncross in the grass.