Ted’s dream—a small one, he knew, but a dream nonetheless—was to keep Willard Park the homey way it had been when he and Terrance were growing up, to make the town a constant his brother could count on in an ever-changing world.

“Want to see her picture?” Terrance said, eyes popping open.

“Whose?” He wiped mayonnaise off Terrance’s chin.

“My girlfriend’s.”

“Sure. Let me see.”

Terrance took out a picture that had obviously been torn from a magazine, of a model with heavily lidded eyes and sunken cheeks. “We’re going to New York City. We’re going to stay in a hotel and drink Gatorade.”

Ted looked at Terrance. “This is from a magazine, Terr.”

Terrance smiled.

“She’s a supermodel. You know that, right? Not your girlfriend?”

Terrance put up his hand for another high five. “Got you that time, bro.”

Ted laughed.

Terrance pointed his finger in the air a few times, then toward the ground. Disco moves. “Bee Gees,” he said. “I’m John Travolta.”

Ted took the offered earbud this time, singing along in a falsetto voice, his mood having turned from black, to gray, to the warm yellow of the sun.

A SOLITARY PORCH SWING: CLICK. A MAILBOX PAINTED TO LOOK LIKE the Cape Cod behind it: click. A garden gate with a welcome sign on it. The bell at the top of the town hall. The fishpond shimmering with goldfish. Click, click, click. The lighting was wonderful, the sky a rich autumn blue in spite of the summery heat this morning.

Allison saw the town differently when she walked with her camera—not as expanses of green or copses of trees or even houses in their entirety, but as tiny slices of the canvas that was Willard Park: the first golden leaf after summer. The autumn-toned hand-painted sign above Lucy’s Café. Click, click. It was different shooting photos with a real camera, using lenses rather than snapping away with a phone. There was a weight to it beyond the physical; it endowed her with a sense of responsibility to herself, and to the town.

She and Ted had lived in Willard Park for nearly fourteen years, ever since the winter Ted’s mother died, followed, shortly thereafter, by his father. Ted’s announcement that his parents left him the house led to one of the first serious arguments of their marriage. They discussed selling it (“You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking, Al.”) or renting it out (“to strangers?”), but sentimentality and practicality had won out in the end (“no mortgage!”). They’d let the lease on their Dupont Circle apartment lapse. The lawnmower, the Volvo, and the baby soon followed. So much for the year backpacking around Europe, a plan Ted had agreed to only grudgingly anyway.