Simon, however, fixed the date, memorized it, and came before the appointed hour to stand at the front of the house. It was the sixteenth of April, a little over a year since his release. He takes a step toward it, then, in a hurry, mounts the porch steps and walks through the gaping doorway.

Everything is gone. The couch, the battered coffee table. The kitchen looks grungy and cramped. How, he wonders, did all of us sit in there? It is empty and grimy, tracked by dust bunnies that blow around like tumbleweeds in the chill wind that shoots through the de-glassed windows. It is not the home he remembers. There is no sense of permanence, no halo of smoke-smudge around absent pictures, no worn linoleum to mark their old habit of shedding shoes and leaving them over the kitchen vent that exhaled the fierce but ineffectual coughings of the furnace below. There is nothing to say that they’d been there, that they’d endured, and finally, finally, outlived the house. Betty’s compulsive rearranging had taken care of that. There are no hidden treasures—old baseball glove, extra coat hangers, lost checks or stray change—left in closets or under the sink. Simon walks through the whole house looking. There are no rent receipts that Betty kept hidden, afraid of curious comparison between the rent demanded and the actual money paid. If there are, tucked along the baseboard or slipped down the vents, they don’t show the cost, the price Betty, in her way, and Simon in his, have paid to make ends meet.

But here and there, on the wall under the now-absent phone, on the sill next to the removed bunkbed in the girls’ old room, there are phone numbers hastily written in pencil, green candle wax dripped on the sill, dented plaster. In the living room Simon notices something he has never seen before: a long scratch in the sheetrock, through the paint and paper. A long score like a claw mark. Standing in the living room Simon knows what made it: a shovel blade raised overhead.

He looks down at his feet. The carpet had been put in shortly after the police led him gently to the squad car. It covers the wood floor that soaked up Lester’s blood. Should have known that wood was greedy. Should have guessed that the floor, ignored most of the time, was ready to accept what they gave it.

There is a thump on the porch boards. Simon turns but does not move.

“Hey, buddy. Hey. You gotta move out.”

“I moved out a long time ago. Just came to see you guys pull her down.”

“A guy’d have a better view from outside.”

“I’m comin.”