The house, wood-frame with a low brick façade in front, bracketed the back-yard pool, with upstairs bedrooms at both ends. Behind the pool was the steep canted slab of a hillside, which, as we were to discover, acted as a reflector to hammer us with heat all summer long. What was up there? Brush that had to be cleared, by law, every spring when it dried up and turned flammable—one more worry. It was also the province of gophers and lizards and an arm-thick gopher snake I found one morning stretched out all the way from the flower bed to the pool coping, a good six and a half feet. I left it there, for lack of an alternative. I didn’t tell Lacey about it.