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We lived close to the street way back when, closer to the street than the rest of the apartments below us. So you can tell how the economy's 'improved', I guess, ever since I was born. I mean, since now we don't have the sort of scare that came up in the suburbs all the time. Then again, now we don't have that sort of clean air.

Wrong track, anyways.

We could walk to touch the gravel easy at a time like that, early morning but still no cars, and the only danger being something like a baseball or a soccer ball. The pebbles were all pushed up to the sides because of the boys out there, and they made little mountains of ball-game breaks. The dust on the roads had sneaker prints running around in them, some of their chalk-white fingers touching down. We walked on the road, too, since nobody really drove out there. None of us were that smart, or none of us were that trustworthy. Or maybe both.

We had real houses then, too; we didn't live in stacked-up boxes on the side of the road, the type with carpet that can tell you how the sex was for the last tenants. What we lived in was more the type of house where every footstep echoed across the floors, and the house breathed when people whispered. There was one of those view-the-sunset windows in the top story, one of those ones that you bought broken and never got around to fixing it because of the breeze that came through, and you set up lawn chairs in front of it to talk in little voices with people you loved. Except there was always something going on, like a kid learning about space and planets and always babbling, or that Mom was just making phone calls to her sister 24/7 and you hear some funny stuff.

Yeah, that was just where we were, right about then. Mom on the phone.

'We' were me and my brother, close as nothing. We were the type of people you'd expect to see on the Wanted list, with mug shots as quiet as we were day to day. We had actions loud as a riot, though, and they talked more than we did. He and I should have played charades every day since we had nothing else to do but sit on the porch powdered with dust. The porch had faded nearly as light as the dust, though, so half of the time no one could tell.

He and I sat side by side, day by day, almost touching on the narrow stairs. Our mother, tense and quick, would pace behind us with the phone glued to her ear like it kept her pulse regular. And you know, it was like she wanted us to hear what she was saying, almost. Things about her life to our life, namely, and Dad's life, and Aunt's life. Sweet little conversations to squeeze out her stress, but most of the time she still cried afterwards.

So, on the porch, we were getting snippets of conversation depending on where we are physically and mentally both. She talks about everything that she doesn't tell us, and I guess it's how the info commutes to the kids. She came up close to us, heels from work clunking on the wood, as if just in her circle.

And she goes and says, "He called to ask if I'd hired a private investigator against him."

And yeah, we knew pretty much everything about then.

At least, I did.

We'd piled ages upon ages of stuff in the basement for selling. A garage sale of lives, I guess. I hadn't been involved, really, other than a few notices while I sat down there to escape the heat, and the parents were taking everything out. After hearing that, I went down and saw the ocean of things we'd never sell marked for exchange. These were the type of useless items you always found shoved away for safe keeping, the stuff that you'd one day sell to be rich; what Mom never wants to give away because they remind her of this or that. Lives were what they were. Children, infants. We were selling us, selling wills, selling how we got up every day. The type of stuff that Mom would cry over when she counted out the fifty dollars for safety.

All that, and then some. It was like giving away all this stuff that kept us together. We'd sold the motorcycle for I don't know how much. We didn't talk about it anyways, since the bike was Dad's by nature and Mom, she didn't like to mention him in front of us even if he was there anyways. Our boat was on the market, and the gazebo- my mother's birthday present from just a few years ago- it was going, too.

And the house. This was all going towards our smaller-house fund since we couldn't afford anything we were used to now.

And our father was going, too. That's what kept us all close to the ground, bankruptcy-wise. Say goodbye to life.

Eventually, we didn't live by the street at all.