THE SEEPING DARK

Tuesday, October 14th -

The U-Haul hit the pothole on Miller's Creek Road at exactly forty-one miles an hour, and Claire Pendelton heard the coffee maker shatter against the inside of the truck's aluminium wall. She didn't turn around. She didn't need to. She had packed that coffee maker herself-wrapped it in three towels and two bedsheets, tucked it into a corner behind the boxed-up winter coats-and she had known, the moment Arthur swung the wheel to avoid the hole, that it was gone.

"That was the Cuisinart," she said quietly, staring out the passenger window at the bare, brown fields rolling past.

Arthur didn't take his eyes off the road. His hands were at ten and two on the steering wheel of their 1978 Ford LTD, the way he always drove, the way his father had taught him back in Homestead before the mills started closing.

"I'll buy you a new one," he said.

"It was a wedding gift. From your mother."

"I'll buy you two new ones."

Claire laughed. She actually laughed. It came out before she could stop it-a short, surprised sound, like a hiccup-and Arthur grinned, and for a moment the two of them were just people in a truck, moving toward something, and the coffee maker didn't matter.

"Your mother's going to kill you," Claire said.

"My mother's going to kill me anyway. She still hasn't forgiven me for selling the Camaro."

"You didn't sell the Camaro. You traded it."

"Same thing."

"Arthur, you traded a 1969 Camaro for a station wagon."

"A station wagon with a V8."

Claire shook her head and looked out the window. The fields were giving way to something else now-neat rows of nearly identical houses, each one a muted shade of beige or grey or pale yellow, each one sitting on a flat rectangle of green lawn that looked like it had been laid down with a ruler. Sycamore Ridge Development. The signs were everywhere, nailed to wooden posts at every intersection: white background, green lettering, a small drawing of a tree that looked like it had been drafted by someone who had never actually seen a tree.

"Mommy, I have to pee."

Lily's voice came from the back seat, small and urgent, the way it always did when she had been holding it too long because she didn't want to interrupt whatever was happening in the front seat. She was sitting in her car seat-which was too small for her now but which Claire couldn't bring herself to replace because Lily had slept in it as a baby and it still smelled faintly of the Johnson's baby lotion they used to use before they switched to the cheaper brand from the Giant Eagle on Route 22.

"Honey, we're almost there. Five minutes."

"But I have to pee now."

"You can hold it. You're a big girl."

"I'm six."

"Six is very big."

"It's not that big."

Ethan didn't look up from his Walkman. He had the foam headphones clamped over his ears, the cord disappearing into the pocket of his army jacket-a real army jacket, not a fashion one, that he'd found at the Goodwill in Monroeville for three dollars. He was fourteen and had recently decided that speaking to his family was a form of collaboration with the enemy. The Ramones were playing at a volume that Claire could hear through the headphones, a thin, tinny buzzing that sounded like angry wasps trapped in aluminum foil. She didn't ask him to turn it down. She had learned, over the past six months, to choose her battles with Ethan the way a general chooses terrain: very carefully, and only when the advantage was hers.

Arthur slowed the truck as they entered the development proper. The street widened, and suddenly there was more to see than sky and field. The first house on the right was a pale yellow ranch with a blue minivan in the driveway and a Big Wheel tricycle upside down on the lawn. Next to it, a grey two-story with American flags in the front window-not one flag, but three, different sizes, arranged in the window like a patriotic still life. After that, a beige house with a wind chime on the porch that was moving in the breeze, making a thin, scattered sound like someone dropping coins on a glass table.

There were people. That was the thing Claire noticed-not the houses, not the lawns, but the people. A man in khaki shorts and knee pads was edging his sidewalk with a half-moon tool, working his way down the concrete in slow, careful strokes. A young woman in a jogging suit was pushing a stroller along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, and the stroller had one of those little plastic rain hoods on it, even though it wasn't raining. A kid on a red bicycle came out of a driveway without looking, wobbled across the street, and disappeared around a corner. A blue pickup truck passed them going the other direction, and the driver-a man with a bushy moustache and a Pittsburgh Pirates cap-gave them a nod that Arthur returned.

This was not the country. Claire had grown up in Swissvale, which was a neighborhood, a real neighborhood with row houses and corner stores and Mrs....