Aurora

There had been a house. She held onto that, out in the emptied world, the plain enormous fact of it, that there had been a house in a town called Aurora on the flat land east of Denver where the mountains were a blue idea at the far edge of things, and that she had lived in it and been a child in it and had not known that any of it could ever end.

She could walk through it in her mind room by room and she did, on the bad nights, the way some people say a prayer. The kitchen with the window over the sink where her mother stood in the mornings with her coffee not drinking it, reading something, always reading something, a woman whose mind was never fully in the room. The living room her father had made out of the garage himself, badly, proud of it, the floor not quite level so a dropped ball would roll to the north wall on its own. Her own room with the glow stars on the ceiling that her father had stuck up there when she was small and that she had pretended, at twelve, to be too old for, and had secretly still loved. Henry's room, that had been the baby's room, that still had the smell of a baby in it even when the baby was walking and talking. The back yard with the swing set going to rust and the good climbing tree and the fence Rosco could not get over though he tried his whole life.