You glue the tiny Welcome mat outside the front door. You hook up the tiny lights inside. You glue the mailbox beside the front door. You glue the tiny, tiny milk bottles on the front porch. The tiny folded newspaper.

With everything perfect, exact, meticulous, it must be three or four in the morning, because by now it's quiet. The floor, the ceiling, the walls, are still. The compressor on the refrigerator shuts off, and you can hear the filament buzzing in each lightbulb. You can hear my watch tick. A moth knocks against the kitchen window. You can see your breath, the room is that cold.

You put the batteries in place and flip a little switch, and the tiny windows glow. You set the house on the floor and turn out the kitchen light.

Stand over the house in the dark. From this far away it looks perfect. Perfect and safe and happy. A neat red-brick home. The tiny windows of light shine out on the lawn and trees. The curtains glow, yellow in the baby's room. Blue in your own bedroom.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details. This is how we must look to God.

As if everything's just fine.

Now take off your shoe, and with your bare foot, stomp. Stomp and keep stomping. No matter how much it hurts, the brittle broken plastic and wood and glass, keep stomping until the downstairs neighbor pounds the ceiling with his fist.

Chapter 4

My second crib death assignment is in a concrete-block housing project on the edge of downtown, the deceased slumped in a high chair in the middle of the afternoon while the baby-sitter cried in the bedroom. The high chair was in the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink.

Back in the City Room, Duncan, my editor, asks, "Single or double sink?"