I’m in the backyard with my daughter when the neighbor comes outside to tell me her son is dying. He’s been dying for over a year now—heart cancer, extremely rare—but she means it this time. Her face is red, her eyes puffy, and she nearly collapses onto the chain-link fence that runs between our properties. They are taking him off the machines, she tells me. They are sending him home to die. I say something useless and Olivia clanks against my thigh in her oversized bicycle helmet. The neighbor’s son is about my age, his son a couple of months older than Olivia. Biggest fucking teeth you’ve ever seen on a toddler. Unable to look her in the eye, I stare at a weed that has woven itself into the fence, zigzagging up through the warm steel lattice. My wife is a doctor and the neighbor wants to ask her all sorts of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers. But Caroline is at work, attending to other people’s crises. I think about calling her before realizing how cruel it would be to everyone involved. The neighbor smiles painfully at Olivia, who hides behind my legs. Hi pretty girl, she coos. All done, Olivia says. The neighbor looks back at her yard, past the clothesline where her husband’s t-shirts—all of them adorned with an American flag or a bible verse—billow in the wind. We’ve been meaning to get the back fence replaced, she says. Our fence looks worse than theirs, leaning in and out at odd intervals. Rotten posts, I’m sure. It’s one of a hundred things I need to fix around the house. We thought we’d gotten a good deal, right before the market went crazy, but everything is falling apart all the time. It’s got good bones, everyone kept telling us. Who knows. It’s probably still better than renting. We have a friend who said he could replace it for cheap, the neighbor continues. Maybe he could do yours, too. I nod, say something polite and noncommittal. Though the back fence is the one that needs fixing, it’s the chain-link fence that Caroline and I talk about most. How nice it would be to have a little more privacy, to be able to let the dog out without listening to him bark his head off at the yippy little terriers next door. But we won’t ever do it for the same reasons we won’t ever complain about her and her husband feeding the squirrels that skitter across our roof and chew through the water line to the swamp cooler, those reasons being they are old and nice enough and their son is dying. Well, anyway, have a nice day, the neighbor says. Byeee, Olivia says. The following week there are cars parked up and down the block. It’s that time of year. Graduation, barbecues, pool parties. I listen for music or splashing or midday drunkenness but our street is quieter than it’s ever been.