A FEW HOURS BEFORE things took a turn for the worse, Jenny and I came home from school to find our father standing out on the gravel driveway, his shoulder-length hair thrown back in the wind and a pencil clenched in his teeth. He wore an old pair of blue jeans that had holes in the knees and a faded plaid pajama top. It was one of his study days, when he often stayed in his pajamas, and I was glad to see that, at the very least, he had his pencil out and seemed to have the tired eyes of someone who had been reading and working over math problems. He was looking at the sky and didn't stop looking at it when we walked up. "We're going to get a nice storm today," he said, taking the pencil out of his mouth and pointing it at the clouds caught in the mountains. "We need some new snow to clean things up." He kicked at the muddy slush beneath him.

"Aren't you cold in just that?" I asked, gesturing at his pajama top.

He was stretching and still looking at the sky. "It's fresh out here," he said, "not cold. It feels good." My father liked to feel good about almost everything, and he liked other people to feel good about things, too. People create life for themselves, and so they might as well create a good one. That was more or less the way he thought.

Inside, I was happy to see my father's papers scattered over the kitchen table—more proof of his studying—which would be important for my mother to see when she returned from ZCMI, where she sold cosmetics during the day. My father's latest ambition, and the reason we had moved from Boise to Salt Lake, was to become a certified public accountant after a two-year program at Salt Lake Community College. It was important that he do well because his courses were expensive and because the last year in Boise—where he'd been let go from National Harvester, and from Raider Truck Company before that—had been difficult for us. But he was not always, I knew even then, the most disciplined of students. Once I had looked at a sheet of his work left out on the counter and saw that, for the most part, his answers were wrong. I was a good student, especially at math, and was getting A's on my Algebra II tests in my first semester as a sophomore at Billmore High. I could see what he had done wrong, the mistakes he was making. But I didn't mention it to him, and I decided not to look at his work again. I was sure he'd improve, fall into the swing of being a student. Besides, he was doing his part, working twenty hours a week at a garage downtown, and was often tired and a little moody.

After studying for a while, Jenny and I went out to our ten-by-ten square of backyard and untangled Noir from his chain. He put on his usual show of unrestrained happiness— leaping, barking, pouncing at our legs—because he'd been freed from his cramped little space and knew he was going for a walk. It was great to see and tended to infect me with the same ridiculous excitement, even if I'd had a terrible day. Noir was a funny name for my dog because he was large and entirely white save for the smallest streak of black on one leg. He'd been named by a German hippie, who had lived two apartment doors down from us in Boise and had given him to me soon before we left for Salt Lake. I hadn't much liked the name at first, though later it seemed to work; it simply became him, whether he was white or not.

With Noir running in front of us, we headed up Ensign Down Boulevard, the main street that ran through the Downs. Like many neighborhoods in Salt Lake, the Downs was built over the foothills in a town where money and class were easy to see: those who had them lived up high against the mountains closer to their God, and those who didn't lived down low, farther away from someone else's God. The streets on the bottom half of the Downs were numbered. We lived in a duplex on Second Street, where most of the small two-room houses were rented by medical students, single mothers, and bachelors who lived with other bachelors. A mile or so up Ensign Down Boulevard, large new houses with balconies, sloping yards, and huge windows had been built into the hills on streets that had names like Joy Road, Paradise Drive, Marvel Circle. Above these neighborhoods, bulldozers carved the land into roads and partitioned it into lots, where dozens of new houses were just then being constructed. It was the early nineties, and there was a housing boom in Salt Lake and in the rest of the country, too. You read about it in the papers and heard about it on the news. People were making money, inflation was low and under control, and though I did not know exactly what that meant, I knew it was a good thing. I knew our family had reason to hope for the best.

Jenny and I were headed to the neighborhood of half-built houses and muddy streets and yards, where NO TRESPASSING signs warned walkers-by to stay out of the construction sites. Because most of those houses had no walls yet, you could walk through the frames and into the middle of the structure, look up at the sky, and imagine the height of the absent ceilings, the color of the carpet not yet laid, the number of rooms and windows, bathrooms, balconies, and porches. A few houses were closer to completion, and once Jenny and I had gotten into one of them. It was a three-story house off to the side of a road so freshly asphalted that you could still smell the tar in the air. Inside, large stacks of white tile lay covered in plastic. Written in pencil on the blank white walls were words like SINK, BATHTUB, KITCHEN COUNTER, WASHER AND DRYER, WOOD-BURNING STOVE. These objects lay heavily over the floor, wrapped in plastic and brown paper, waiting to be installed. They amazed Jenny and me, and we ripped a hole in the covering of the largest object and felt the cold enamel of a tub.

As sometimes happened on our walks, we were followed by a pack of neighborhood boys, some from my class at Billmore, and other, smaller boys who tagged along. They lived in the large, silent houses far above our duplex and knew that we were strangers who lived in every way below them. As we climbed higher into those wealthy neighborhoods, more and more of them came out of their houses and walked behind us. In the past, they hadn't done much to us. They'd called us names. They'd thrown a rock or two. But mostly they'd kept their distance and let us be.

That afternoon they stopped leaving us alone. It was a gray day in early January, and you could see the storm trapped up in the mountains and guess, as my father had, that it would soon be snowing down in the valley. A car or two drove up the hill, but it was around four o'clock, which meant the street was mostly deserted and we could easily walk up the middle of it and let Noir roam free, searching the wet yellow lawns for places to pee. At our backs lay the city—the State Capitol, the LDS Mormon Office Tower, Temple Square, Main and State Streets, the Avenues, and the Upper Benches running south along the Wasatch Front, where Big and Little Cotton Wood Canyons led up to the ski resorts. From the top of the Downs, you could easily see the endless grid of streets stretching west beneath a haze of pollution. When we neared the end of Ensign Down Boulevard, where the asphalt gave way to gravel, and then mud, and from where we could see the strange neighborhood of skeletal houses, Jenny looped her arm in mine. The boys had come within a few paces of us, so close that we could hear the crisp slap of the baseball that they threw back and forth across the street. "Should we run?"...