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.

She did not want to look at Harmon or touch his body and so she went and sat on the front steps of the White House for a while, letting tears run down her face and shatter her clear view of the lights of Denver. She did not have any shoulder to rest her head on and so she scooted over to one end of the step and leaned against the white vinyl siding of the house, which gave a little under the weight of her head.

After a while, she walked back in through the open front door and went back into the living room. She picked up her husband's crowbar from where he had thrown it away. The floor was dented beneath it; he must have hurled it down there in a rage when the door jamb had shattered. From there he had probably gone straight to the Volvo.

Eleanor worked the point of the crowbar underneath the portion of the doorjamb that was still nailed down, and prying gently, a little at a time, moving the crowbar up and down its length, worked the jamb loose from the frame of the house. It held together okay and she knew that a little Elmer's glue would fix it right up. She would ask Doreen's boyfriend to nail it up to the wall of the trailer and then she would have Clarice and Harmon, Jr., stand against it and she would measure their height and mark their progress. They would roll their eyes and say it was stupid, but they would secretly love it.