Arthur Baladino is out of jail again. Next door to the home to which he's returning, a little boy in a baseball uniform asks his father, "What happens when you die?" It's a question the father will soon confront in a terrible and surprising way. Just down the street, a young woman is trying to figure out how to restart her life after her husband has lost his money, and hers, and the home in which they were living by day-trading in the basement. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, several women and a coupel of men - two of them accomplished arsonists who've worked for Baladino from time to time - dram of what might have been had they been wiser, more patient, or luckier in a past long dead everywhere but in their imaginations. On a landscape more often than not indifferent, these people seek mercy, if not in love, than in the sometimes rickety, temporary connections they can find with their fellow seekers.
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