Stop.

Sadie’s leash slips from Mark’s hands. He’s stepped onto his driveway—it’s a Monday—and the morning light slams at his aching temples, seems to pulse at the back of his head when he bends to pick up the lead. Sadie waits for him, wagging her stub of a tail. Outside it’s a warm December morning. The sun and unseasonable temperature have caused a sudden melt; it’s like watching water run down a drain. The subdivision where his family lives is a mishmash of mid-century ranches and Dutch Colonials, some with wreaths on their doors and string lights in their evergreens, some without. There are no sidewalks. Mark shambles after Sadie, a terrier mix, who is following his son, Oliver. Through squinted eyes he watches his son skitter around the shattered ice and zagged slush on the road that leads to the bus stop. It is unforgivingly bright. Mark steers Sadie between the deeper puddles but yanks her from the Walters’ lawn—she’s briefly airborne—where the melted snow reveals patches of zoysia. As they pass the house, Mark glances at the side porch, at the fake terra-cotta urns whose mums, even more withered since last Tuesday—when he entered the house and then Shauna Walter, she having just finished her period and not feeling it, stand forgotten. Unpacked swimsuits and flip-flops covered the bed. The Walters left for Fort Lauderdale the next day.

Up the street, Oliver halts at a trash bag. It’s been dumped near the recycling bins behind the subdivision’s entrance. The wrought-iron lettering reads FOX CHAPEL ESTATES and is strangled by garland. What looks like a heap of scrap wood peeks out from the plastic. Sadie catches up to Oliver, sniffs at his find, at his boots, and noses in and out of the pile. Oliver pulls off his thermal gloves, then looks up at his father and says, what is this stuff, all of this super great stuff, and removes a toadstool from the pile. It’s wooden and painted stop-sign red, its umbrella cap speckled with white dots. Fishing around the bag, he pulls several more objects from it, some broken, some cheerfully intact, and looks at each with astonishment.

Indeed, Mark thinks, these contents once formed a whole. It had been mounted at the end of a hallway in the Walters’ split-level, its very presence and placement seeming to thumb its nose at the Barcelona chairs and George Nelson lamp, at the Eames lounger and the Noguchi coffee table, garish glass and steel shapes in the style that Ron Walter favors. Something Mark saw with some regularity, up until last Tuesday, when Shauna had said that they were finished, they had to stop, meaning at a certain o’clock, or half past, or a quarter hour after receiving her text, when Mark would leave the financial services branch in the strip mall where he worked, drive the short distance back to the subdivision, retrieve a key from the inside of a ceramic rock left beside the fake terra-cotta urns, and follow her into the bedroom. Before he could pull the string of her denim dress or unbutton her cotton blouse or unzip her hooded sweater, he’d have to wait while she fingered the shingles, patted a fawn, traced the circles of the waterwheels. Let me wind it, she’d say. Look at the funny man in the lederhosen, look at this stack of logs, look at the waltzing couples, at the cute little snowy trees, it’s from the side of the family from Düsseldorf, they had nowhere to go after the war except Brazil, they spent the rest of their lives selling beer steins and bookends at Sunday markets, I mean you’re not my first, I was engaged to a Jew once, he had rosacea and drove a Mercedes (yes, a Mercedes) with a manual transmission and a diesel engine, it was so goddamn loud! There’d be so much talking that Mark’s hand throbbed for want of that drawstring...