As I drove, I kept an eye on the passing street signs. Having committed myself, I could picture my spotting the old homestead. Perhaps I’d park and get out. I might knock on the door to ask the current occupant if I could make a quick tour of the rooms. It was possible the present owner had bought the house from someone who knew when it was built or how many hands it had passed through. I slowed in anticipation of my turn and took a left, checking house numbers as I proceeded from 4800 down to the 4600 block with a mounting sense of dismay. There was no 4602. The entire neighborhood was gone. I pulled over to the curb.

Where the Millhone house had once stood there was a settlement of condominiums; identical six-story stucco structures, arranged in a staunch grid spread over twenty-five or thirty acres. The few trees I saw were young and newly planted. The streets that branched off of Choaker Lane had been named after New England states—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. If the colony continued to expand, the Eastern Seaboard might be called into play, starting with New Jersey and running all the way down to Florida.

I pulled away from the curb and proceeded along Choaker until I reached a set of ornamental gates. I turned in and cruised the roads that ran between the monolithic buildings. There wasn’t much to see since they were all identical. My grandparents’ house had been erased, as had the houses on either side—as had the homes extending for six or eight city blocks in every direction. Even the soil had been excavated and carted away, so any relics—arrowheads, sun-bleached bones, the caps from old soda bottles—were gone now as well. I could take a metal detector and scan the surrounding area for two square miles without turning up so much as an old spoon.

This is your reward for denial, I thought. You decide you don’t care and the family home vanishes. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The Universe was having a little tee-hee at my expense. Whereas the Kinsey branch of the family was chockablock with cousins, aunts, and uncles, even an ancient living grandmother, the Millhones had disappeared. As further punishment, I was now saddled with a cluster of second or third cousins related to me tangentially through Rebecca Dace, and I was far better acquainted with that bunch than I wanted to be. I’d also inherited the family corpse, a dead guy whose last rites had fallen to me. The only upside I could see was that the Daces made my mother’s side of the family look like bastions of mental health.