I wanted to take a nap but I kept thinking

How does Hardy do that thing where he shows you something from afar and zooms? I can't do that thing.



In the mornings the boy came out with the black dog, leading him down the hill, around the bend to where the park where the cliffs were, down to the gutter so often stuck with leaves. The next time anyone came out of the house it wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children piled into the dark SUV parked diagonally in the drive— the eldest daughter first in cropped hair, chirping and howling for the others to follow; then the youngest, wearing an outfit that that clung to her skin; and then the boy again, forgetting something in the house and jogging back in or perhaps looking down at the pavement, picking something up—one time, a leaf, fletched with disease, whose blooming coloration had seemed to him to be wonderful; another time in the joint of the curb he found a scratched CD, face-down, the victim of a quickly slammed car door that forever robbed the world of music.

In the house the parents sat out of view in dark shaded places. At the island in the center of the kitchen, a glass of half orange juice, half seltzer before her, Maude sat on a high stool, turning the page of her newspaper. In the basement Zed, clumsy at 60, bumped something—a microphone stand—and the stand fell, making a thick, metallic slam on the parquet dance floor she had installed in 1983 when the eldest, Leona, was just born and she had thought to shape up with the high kicks of step aerobics.

From the street the house seemed empty. A gardener would come by and pull his mower across the lawn in thick stripes, stopping at the West side of the yard to put his palm to the paper bark of the Oswego’s birch tree, lean and have a cigarette in the late morning shade. The mother and father would leave in their cars and return with bags or boxes or piles of papers. In the evenings, the spiffy small cars of guests would skirt the curbs all up the block and down by the cliffs, and at nine the lights out among the plants—buried like hooded mushrooms—would turn on and make, thought Margaret, the place look garish. Down the street there was often a powder blue stationwagon with deep, throaty scratch marks pulled by keys down its lean siding.

Alan was sitting in the kitchen reading Parade and he looked up when Margaret said, "Oh good it's the IRS out to get them for years of ducking." His mother was leaning against the plate glass window in the kitchen of the squat ranch house she had been renting for the ten years since the divorce. She was holding her right hand over her eyes. Out across the street, in the steep drive of the Oswego's stucco peach castle, silhouetted against the sunset was a long, black towncar against whose side leaned a man in a black suit, speaking into a cellular phone. The man wore sunglasses, shiny shoes, a tight toothbrush moustache--other than that, he might have been allright.

"Doesn't look like the Feds to me," Alan said, and told his mother to look at their vanity plate as he put down the copy of Parade (He hadn't wanted to read it anyway, it was just there).