All but a handful of our first neighbors are gone now. They have died in their own beds or gone off to die in beds that smell vaguely of bleach. No one will ever live in their houses again. One morning, after one of them leaves—for the retirement home, for the funeral home—I wake to the sound of a backhoe chewing down what’s left of their lives here: the small rooms where their babies slept; the doorways where they stood when trick-or-treaters came at Halloween and carolers came at Christmastime; the windows where they waited, worried for a teenager who had not come home.
