“Look after yourself.”

I rested the phone on my knee and looked out across the empty driveway.

The street was quiet, just the way Grandfather Arthur had left it twelve years earlier.

The craftsman house stood tall behind me, its heavy dark cedar siding holding in the crisp morning air.

At eleven o’clock I was pushing a heavy metal wire cart down aisle four of Oak Ridge Hardware on Main Street.

An older clerk in a faded red apron came out of the lock department and pushed his reading glasses up on his nose.