One evening Mike looked across Crawfish Stew Street and saw Nick standing on his lawn alone. He was smoking a cigarette, spirals of smoke drifting upward into the empty night. “He’d lost his house to the sinkhole. His wife was ill. Their dog was dying. But I sensed he was feeling bad about something new,” Mike said. “So I walked across the street over to him. He’s just gotten word that his son had pancreatic cancer.” Mike put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, and the two men wept together for a long time.
