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Times had actually been good for several years. They should
have taken advantage of that to squirrel some money away. But the
Richmonds were the only people in their respective families who
had managed to make the breakthrough to the middle class, which meant that each one of them had a coterie of siblings, nephews,
nieces, and cousins living in various ghettos up and down the East Coast, all of whom felt they had a claim on what they all imagined
was the family fortune. They wired a lot of money back East. It
didn't come back.

They broke even until the early nineties, when Harmon's
company got LBO'd, and the financiers in New York who had
bought it began to break it up and sell off the little parts to various
people. The particular part of it that Harmon worked for got sold
to Gale Aerospace, a defense contractor based in Chicago. They
gave him a choice: move to Chicago or move to Chicago. But they
couldn't move to Chicago without selling their house, which now was worth half what they had paid for it. Harmon got fired.

They following year, the bank that Eleanor worked for was
bought out by a huge California bank that already had millions of
branches all over the area - including one that was directly across
the street from the one where Eleanor worked. They closed her
branch and she lost her job.

The foreclosure on their house had not been long in coming.
They had bounced around from one big apartment complex to
another for a few years and finally wound up in the trailer park in
Commerce City, next to Doreen. They still had two cars, a 1981

Volvo wagon that they had bought used, and a rather old Datsun
that did not work anymore and -was parked, permanently, in front
of the trailer. Harmon had taken the Volvo with him when he
disappeared, stranding Eleanor in the trailer.

She had sought him everywhere else. Now, just for the sake of
being complete, she was back in the old neighborhood.

It was amazing how quickly you forgot the street patterns. It was
almost as if the people who laid these things out wanted you to get
lost. She drove for a quarter of an hour down the winding lanes,
courts, and terraces, flipping U-turns in circles. The voice of the
President of the United States continued to whinny from the radio.
The words seemed almost devoid of meaning and the rhythm of
the speech was constantly broken up by outbursts of applause and
cheering. The pale, desiccated prairie grass, dusted with powdery
snow, reflected the moonlight through the windows of the empty
houses. Many of the streets had never been finished, the asphalt
would simply terminate and become a hard-packed arroyo lined
with uncompleted houses, their naked studs and unconnected
plumbing lines projecting into the dry air like the rib cages of dead
animals.

Finally she saw some landmarks that reminded her of where she
was, and her old reflexes took over, guiding her automatically
through the twists and turns.

Their house sat up on a little rise at the end of a cul-de-sac, a
lollipop-shaped street that broadened into a circle at the end. Their
house was right at the top of the lollipop, looking down the length
of the street and out over a nice view of the Rockies rising into the
night sky with the lights of Denver lapping up against them.

The house shone tonight in the moonlight. The "White
House." They had called it that partly because it was white, and
partly because moving into it had made them feel like they
white people.

It was meant ironically. Feeling like a white person had been one of Eleanor Richmond's big goals in life. She had grown
up in the heart of Washington, D.C., and had often gone for weeks at a time without seeing a single white face. People would come in
from other parts of the country and complain about how the system
was stacked against them; the cops and the judges and the juries
were all white. But in D.C., the cops and judges and juries were all
black. As were the teachers and the preachers and the nuns who had
educated Eleanor. She had never gotten the sense that being black
singled her out in any way. In some ways that had actually made it
easier for her and Harmon to settle down in a predominantly white
middle-class area.

Still, moving into a white house in a suburban development in Colorado had made her feel like a pioneer on the edge of the
wilderness. She had often longed to jump into the Volvo and drive back to D.C. It felt better if she joked about it, and so she called it
the White House. And when her relatives from D.C. came out to
visit and bum money off of them, she laughed and joked about the
White House all the way from the airport, so that by the time they
got there, and saw just how white it was, they were ready for it, and
they didn't take her for some kind of traitor.

When she pulled into the old cul-de-sac, the White House was
dead ahead, sitting up on its little hill, and it was all lit up from
within. The only house within a mile that was lit up. Someone
must have broken into it and turned all the power back on at the
circuit panel.

Someone named Harmon.

Eleanor braked Doreen's little car to a halt, there in the handle
of the little lollipop street, and sat for a couple of minutes, staring
through the windshield, up the hill, at the White House full of light
and good cheer.

The Volvo was not visible anywhere. But the light inside the garage was turned on. Once he'd gotten the power restored, he
must have used it to open the garage door, and parked the Volvo
inside, just like in the old days.

Eleanor was trying to make up her mind what she should do
now. Because her husband had clearly gone crazy. Either that, or gotten so drunk that he might as well be crazy.

She was tired of having crazy relatives. Her mother had
Alzheimer's. They had moved her to a much cheaper nursing home
and might have to move her into the trailer any day now. She was basically crazy. Her kids were both teenagers, hence crazy by
definition. Now her husband was crazy.

Eleanor Richmond was the only person in the whole family who
was not crazy.

Not that she wasn't tempted.

Eventually she reasoned that, crazy or not, it wouldn't do her
husband any good to wind up in jail. He might think, in his own crazy, drunk mind, that he still owned this house. But he didn't.
The Resolution Trust Corporation owned it; they had taken it
over from the defunct savings and loan that had foreclosed on it.
Eventually the RTC would probably sell it to speculators who
would come and strip out the usable wiring and carpets, or maybe
just bulldoze the whole thing down to its floor slab and turn the
neighborhood into a dirt-bike track or a toxic waste dump. Eleanor
knew that this house was walking dead, a real estate zombie, and
that it was going to be wasted. But that didn't change the fact that
they didn't own it anymore and Harmon could go to jail for having
broken into it.

Maybe going to jail would do Harmon some good. Shame him
a little, snap him out of his depression.

But she kept saying that to herself every time something bad happened to them and it never worked; he just got more depressed
and bitter. He didn't need any more shame.

She'd better go get him. Once again, Eleanor, the solid one, the
noncrazy maternal figure, would bail everyone else out. Someday
she would have to indulge herself and go crazy a little and let
someone else bail her out. But she didn't know anyone who was
up for the job.

The front door was unlocked. The house smelled funny. Maybe it
had been shut up for too long, baking in the sun that poured in
through the windows all day, peeling all kinds of fumes and
chemicals out of the paint and the carpet and making the air stink.
She left the door open.

"Harmon?" she said. Her voice echoed off every wall.

There was no answer. He was probably dead drunk in the living
room.

But he was not in the living room. The only things there, the
only sign that Harmon had been in the place at all, were a few tools
dropped on the floor in one corner of the room, over by a little
broom closet where they used to store the slide projector and the Monopoly game and the jigsaw puzzles.

The door to the broom closet was open, the tools spilled out on
the floor next to it. A hammer and a crowbar. Eleanor would have
known that they were Harmon's even if he had not carefully painted
RICHMOND on the handle of each one, in her nail polish.

The thin strip of trim that ran around the door had been
removed entirely and thrown on the floor, little nails poking up
into the air. Uncovered drywall had been exposed where the piece of trim had covered it up, and Eleanor could see dents in it where
Harmon had inserted the crowbar.

The door opening was lined with another piece of trim, a
doorjamb with a little brass strike plate about halfway up where the
latch of the door would catch. Harmon had tried to pry this jamb
off.

Eleanor squatted down in the doorway and put her hand on the doorjamb. An uneven ladder of pencil and ball-point pen marks
climbed up the wood. Each mark had a name and a date written next to it: Harmon Jr. - age 7, Clarice - age 4. And so on. They
reached all the way up to nearly Eleanor's height; the last one was
marked Harmon Jr. - age 12.

Harmon had tried to pry the jamb off and take it with him. But
the wood was thin and cheap, and under the twisting force of his
crowbar, it had split in half down the middle, half of it remaining nailed down to the door frame, the other half pulled halfway out,
white unstained wood exposed where it had shattered.

She wondered how long Harmon had been sitting there on their
broken-backed sofa in the trailer in Commerce City, his beer in his
hand, meditating over this doorjamb, planning to come and take it
away. Had it been eating away at him ever since they had moved out?

Clarice's birthday was next week. Maybe he intended to give this
to her as a birthday present. It had great sentimental value, and it
was free.

"Harmon?" she said, again, and heard it echo again off the bare
walls of the house. She went to check the bedrooms, but he wasn't
in any of them.

The sound of music finally drew her to the garage. Faint, tinny
music was coming out of the Volvo's stereo. It was barely audible
through the mud room door. She went into the garage.

Harmon was sitting in the driver's seat of the Volvo, reclined all
the way back. Once she got the door open, she recognized the music: Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Harmon's favourite.
Years ago, on their first trip to Colorado, they had parked on the
summit of Pike's peak and listened to this tape, loud.

She walked quietly up the flank of the Volvo and looked in the driver's window. Harmon had leaned the seat all the way back and
folded up his jacket to make a little pillow on the headrest. His eyes
were closed and he wasn't moving.

The keys were in the ignition, in the ON position. The tank was
empty. The engine was dead. The volume on the stereo was turned all the way up. The tape had been running for hours, possibly even
days, auto-reversing itself back and forth, playing the symphony
over and over again, running the battery down until hardly
anything came out of the speakers.

Harmon was dead. He had been dead for quite some time.

Before she did anything else she reached inside the car and
pounded the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor. The big door creaked open, letting in a rush of fresh clean air and opening up a clear glittering view of the suburbanized foothills.

It was a very sensible thing to do. Eleanor Richmond did it
because she was not crazy, would not allow herself to be crazy,
would not allow herself to succumb to the poison gas that her
husband had used to kill himself. Her kids and her mother needed
her and she could not indulge herself the way Harmon had.