The phone rang at ten. Ray had turned off the lamp and gone into the room behind the office, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with one boot off when it started. He didn't get up. Nobody called on a Sunday night about anything that couldn't wait until Monday.

Through the door he heard the machine click on and his own voice tell whoever it was to leave a name and number. Daisy barked once on the tape, from some afternoon years back when she had still barked at the gate, and on her blanket by the office door the real Daisy lifted her head.

"Hi, my name is Theresa Albright. I'm calling about my mother's house in Rialto, and a car in the driveway, a Ford Taurus. I want the house cleared out. Everything in there, it doesn't need to be sorted. You can take the car too. Call me at this number and we'll set a day."

She read the address twice, and her number twice, with a pause between the digits. Ray didn't need the address. He had stood at the curb in front of that house less than an hour earlier with a flyer in his hand.

He went out in his socks and turned the lamp back on. He played the message once more, standing, with his hand flat on the desk. Everything in there. The notebook was where he had left it, open to the page, and under White Honda on street and the two prices he wrote her name and number.

Daisy put her head back down. He sat with his feet on Walt's toolbox until the machine reset itself with a click, and then he turned off the lamp a second time.

He called her Monday at eight, from the office, with the door open so he could see the gate. She answered on the second ring in a voice that was already at work.

"Theresa Albright."

"Ray Kostecki. You called about a house."

"Yes. Thank you for getting back to me." Paper moved on her end. "I'd like it done as soon as possible. I won't be there while you do it."

"I'll need to see it first. And a key."

"Tomorrow after work? Five-thirty?"

"Five-thirty."

She thanked him again and hung up before he did.

The white Honda was at the curb when he walked up Tuesday, in the same spot as Sunday night. In daylight it was cleaner than he had thought. The parking sticker from the office in Ontario had this year's date on it, and the wiper blades were new. Somebody took care of that car because that was what you were supposed to do.

She was standing on the front step with the keys in her hand, a small woman in slacks and a blouse from work. Reading glasses were pushed up into brown hair that was going gray at the part, and between her eyebrows was a crease that stayed there when she wasn't frowning. She was built like the old lady, narrow through the shoulders, and she held the keys out in front of her with both hands, the same way the old lady had held the wheel on her way to Albertsons. She looked at Daisy first.

"She's fine," Ray said.

"I'm sure." She unlocked the door and held it open for him and stayed on the step. "Take whatever time you need."

He went through the house room by room. The living room had a sofa from the seventies with plastic runners on the arms and a console TV that nobody would buy, though somebody might buy the walnut cabinet. Along the walls stood moving boxes with the flaps folded in, labeled in a round, careful hand: Reading Gr. 1 1988–89. Easter crafts. Letters (capitals). On the refrigerator were children's drawings, yellowed under their magnets, and a real estate agent's business card under a magnet shaped like a strawberry. In the bedroom closet hung dresses in dry-cleaner plastic, in sizes that had gotten smaller over the years. The vacuum cleaner in the hall closet was from the eighties and had a bag in it.

In a box labeled Classroom misc. he found a hand puppet, an owl in brown felt with one button eye. The other eye had been gone a long time, and the threads had stopped fraying. He put it back.

It came to what a house like this usually came to. A dealer would give a little for the furniture, and a thrift store less for the kitchen things. The boxes would bring nothing, and the money was out in the driveway.

He went out the kitchen door to look at it. The Taurus had dust on the roof and the hood, and the left front tire had gone down another quarter inch since Sunday. From the rearview mirror hung the red thing he hadn't been able to make out in the dark. It was an apple sewn out of red felt, with stitches that were too big and a loop of green yarn for a stem. A child had made it by hand. He stood at the windshield and looked at it until Daisy leaned against his leg.

She was on the front step when he came around the side of the house, in the same place.

"I'll give you four hundred," he said. "For all of it, the car too. I haul everything, and you don't pay for a dumpster."

"Fine."

She didn't ask what the car was worth, and he didn't tell her. She opened her purse and took out a ring with two keys and handed it to him. Then she worked the house key off her own ring, which took a while because her thumbnails were short.

"When do you think you'll be done?"

"Come by Sunday. It'll be empty."

She nodded and typed something into her phone. She walked to the Honda and drove away without looking at the house, and Ray stood in the driveway with the keys in his hand and Daisy sitting on his foot.

He drove the Taurus to the yard on Wednesday morning with the tire aired up. It pulled to the left, which the old lady had never had fixed, and it started on the first try, and on the way the felt apple swung against the windshield every time he braked. He parked it by the scale where he could see it from the office.

The rest took three days and four loads in the tow truck. He had meant to put the boxes in the shop, but the shop was full by Wednesday night, and after that they went wherever there was room: along the office wall under the shelf, under the window, two high on the chair nobody sat in. The furniture went into the long shed, the kitchen things into the bins he used for glass and metal. The sofa he left in the back bay next to the F-100 and pulled the tarp over both.

He sorted as he went, by weight and by what it would bring. The dresses were nothing, and the console TV was thirty dollars. He took the drawings off the refrigerator one at a time, magnets and all, and put them in a folder, and the folder went in the top drawer of the desk with the titles.

The owl went on the shelf next to the hard hat. He looked at it there and left it.

On Wednesday the radio in the shop had the news on while he was carrying boxes in. A man had been found dead in his home in north Fontana on Sunday night, and his seventeen-year-old stepdaughter was in the hospital with serious injuries, and police were investigating. Ray set the box down and went out for the next one.

On Friday morning he swept the living room and put the house key under the mat by the front door, where she would find it.

The woman from 412 came on foot on Friday afternoon. He saw her through the office window while she was still out on the street, and he knew who she was before she got to the gate. The van with its wheels turned crooked against the curb was hers, and he had stood at her mailbox on Sunday night.

Daisy got up from the doorway and went to meet her, which she didn't do for many people. The woman stopped at the gate and let Daisy smell her hand before she looked up. She was younger than he had thought from the street, and built like a work truck, with nothing on her that was for show. Her hair was short and uneven at the back where she had cut it herself, and her forearms were crossed with thin white scars, old ones, from teeth and claws. Her boots had been resoled at least once.

"You had a flyer out," she said. "You sell cars too, or just buy them?"

"Depends what you need."

"Something that runs. Nothing anybody looks at twice." She scratched Daisy behind the ear. "Cash."

He took her to the Taurus. He had washed the worst of the dust off on Thursday, and in the afternoon light the blue came close to what it had been in 1997. She walked around it once and crouched to look under the front end, and he could see she had bought cars before.

"What's that?" She nodded at the mirror.

"Came with it."

"How much?"

"Twenty-five hundred."

She looked at him. It was a lot for a '97 Taurus, even one that had lived in a garage, and they both knew it. He let her look.

"Title?"

"Stays where it is."

She was quiet. She nodded once, took an envelope out of the back pocket of her jeans, and counted the bills out on the hood. He didn't ask what she wanted a car nobody looked at twice for and she didn't ask whose name was on the title and he gave her both keys, the one for the car and the one for a garage she would never see, and she drove out through the gate with the window down and the felt apple turning in the mirror.

Ray stood by the scale with the money in his hand.

The feeling had come after every good deal since he was nineteen, warm and solid, somewhere between his chest and his stomach, and this was the best deal he had made in years. He had paid four hundred for a whole house and gotten more than six times that back for one car. He stood there and waited. A freight train came by on the embankment and went on east, and nothing came.

He tried to fold the bills and couldn't close his fingers on them. The tips had gone numb. He carried the money into the office flat on his palm and put it in the safe under the hard hat.

He didn't open the gate on Saturday. On Sunday somebody came by and hollered, and Ray heard it from the office, and after a while a truck started out on the street and drove off.

In the mornings he fed Daisy. The senior formula went into her bowl, a cup and a half, with fresh water beside it, and he stood in the doorway while she ate. After that he went back in and sat down at the desk. He meant to eat something himself, and then it was afternoon.

The notebook lay open on the desk to the page for the Taurus, with the crossed-out price and the lower one and her name. At the bottom there was room for a date and the words picked up. He didn't write them.

The shop stayed shut. The F-100 stood under the tarp next to Shirley Albright's sofa with its bolts loose, as he had left them. Nobody fed the soda machine all week.

At night he sat among the boxes with his feet on Walt's toolbox and the lamp off and looked at their shapes against the window. His father's hard hat was on the shelf, and next to it the owl with one eye. Out in the rows stood three hundred cars that nobody had come back for, and along the back fence the row he never sold from, and Walt's truck between the Silverado and the Buick. He had never counted it all up at once before. He tried now, sitting there, and lost his place.

Daisy slept by the door. Sometimes she got up and came over and put her chin on his knee. He put his hand on her head until she went back to her blanket.

It came on the seventh night after the Taurus left, a little after three.

He was in the chair. He hadn't been asleep. A train had gone by on the embankment a while earlier, and the office was quiet, and he could hear Daisy breathing by the door.

Something came into the room from the dark by the boxes. It was warm, like the feeling after a good deal, and it came toward him slowly, the way Daisy came when she wasn't sure she was welcome, and stopped a little way off, and waited.

He had been waiting all week too. He let it come.

It closed around him like a coat put over somebody's shoulders in the cold. He thought about the hard hat, and about Walt's two coffees from 7-Eleven, and about his father in the spring of 1984 with the tow truck and the welder on a lot nobody else wanted, and all of it went with him, carefully, as if somebody were carrying it for him. After that there was nothing left to hold on to, and he let go.

The man in the chair opened his eyes.

He sat for a long time without moving. The office was the same office. The boxes were where they had been, and the lamp was off, and the hard hat was on the shelf. He knew whose hat it was. He knew the price of every car in the rows and which ones would never be sold, and why. All of it came when he reached for it.

What came without reaching was older. Every box on the floor had come from somewhere, and he could follow each one back. The owl had been bought at a school supply store in Dayton in 1968 and had crossed the country in the back of a station wagon. In the drawer lay drawings from four different classrooms. The blue Taurus was parked a few blocks north, behind a white van. He had laid the paths once, for water and animals and people, and known where everything on them was going.

Daisy lifted her head by the door and looked at him. She looked a long time. She put her head back down on her paws and went to sleep.

He cleared his throat, and the sound that came out of him was low and heavy, a man's sound, and it stayed in his chest after it was done. He sat and listened to it.

Toward dawn he got up. His knees had nothing to say about it. He held his hands up in the gray light from the window and closed them, and opened them, and closed them, and the joints moved like they had when he was thirty.

He filled Daisy's bowl, a cup and a half, and ate two slices of bread standing at the counter. He took the leash down from its nail. Daisy was at the door before he had turned around.

Outside it was cool, the only cool hour the valley got. He opened the gate and let her go through first, and they went out along the fence toward the tracks at her pace, with the leash slack between them. At the first corner she stopped to sniff the post, and he waited for her, and when she was done they went on.