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house in which I grew up. As a kid, of course, I’d called him Mr. Sparks, but most of the adults, including my dad, had called him Sparky. I didn’t realize until much later that it had to do with his profession as an electrical engineer and his ham radio hobby. The Shady Banks neighborhood had been a close-knit community where all the adults looked after all the kids, and as often as not Molly, Pit, and I were in someone else’s yard or kitchen or garage. Sparks himself had been a crotchety fellow, balding and with a comb-over hairstyle that we kids found hysterical. He didn’t know much about kids since he and his wife had never had any of their own, and we did our best to stay out of his way. He worked at a local research and tech firm called Motowave, and he would scowl at us on our bikes as he left in his big white sedan for work.
    After our brief embrace, he mumbled a soft hello and said, “Wife and I have a house on a canal here.”
    Arlen’s wife had been the favorite of the whole neighborhood. She was the children’s librarian at the county facility just west of Shady Banks. On weekends, she’d invite us into her kitchen with offers of home-baked brownies and then let us look at her collection of signed first editions of children’s picture books from the 1930s and ’40s.
    “Really? I had no idea.” I patted him on the shoulder. “You lucky dog. You must have bought it back when mere mortals could afford real estate in Key West.”
    He nodded. I hadn’t seen him in several years, not since Red’s memorial service, and I was surprised to see him look so old and tired. His shoulders hunched, the waist of his pants seemed to cut across his lower chest, and his head bent forward, his eyes cast down.
    Twenty years ago, when I was only ten years old, I had thought the Sparkses were old. They’d probably been in their midforties then, which meant he was only in his sixties now. He looked at least ten years older.
    “How’s your wife?”
    When he looked up, I saw raw fear in his eyes. “She’s not good, I’m afraid. Sarah has been sick for a long time.”
    “I’m so sorry to hear that. I didn’t know. What is it? What’s wrong with her?”
    “A few years back she found a lump,” he said, lifting a hand and touching the side of his chest, under his arm. “They operated and she did chemo and everything was looking fine. We thought she’d beat it. We were thinking about moving down here to Key West permanently once I retired.” As I’d noticed with many balding men, Arlen’s eyebrows seemed even bushier, composed of long errant white strands. They bounced up and down as he talked. “But then, I got laid off.” The eyebrows dropped down. “Last July.”
    “You’re kidding. Just before you retired?”
    He nodded. “And then in the fall, her cancer came back. I don’t know if she can take this again. She’s not strong. The doctors say they have this new treatment they want to try on her, but the benefits went with the job and we have no more supplemental insurance. Medicare won’t cover it because it’s experimental, and I can’t afford it. That’s what I’m doing here now. Going to put the house here on the market.”
    “Arlen, how can they do that to you? I don’t understand. They can just drop you after you worked for them all those years?”
    “It came as a surprise to me, too. Used to be you put in your time working for a big company like Motowave, and you retired with your pension and reasonable benefits for the rest of your life. Things have changed now. Big business doesn’t think it owes anything to the workingman.”
    I hardly thought of Arlen Sparks as the workingman . He was more like the mad scientist. When we were kids, sometimes we’d go out to his Florida room where he had all his ham radio gear set up, and we’d watch him tinker with his soldering iron and circuit boards. Being kids, we’d start asking questions about what he was doing and what he did in his job