68 Hollyhock Avenue

68 Hollyhock Avenue is the two-family house Domenico Tempesta built for his family, and the setting of Dominick Birdsey’s visit to Ray Birdsey after Thomas Birdsey has been committed to Hatch. The house has outlasted the family arrangement that once filled it: Ma is gone, Thomas lives elsewhere, and the unused half stands empty while Ray remains alone in the sixteen-room building. On returning, Dominick encounters a home whose physical disrepair makes visible both the change in Ray’s habits and the emotional history that keeps Dominick from moving back in.

The family duplex and its changing occupants

The house is a sprawling, sixteen-room, two-family residence. In the period Dominick describes, Ray occupies one side by himself, and the other remains unrented. Its vacancy follows the departure of the previous tenant, Little Sal, who moved to Arizona to live near his daughter. Ray says he does not need rental income; his reluctance to take on troublesome tenants also informs the decision. Instead, he deposits $350 each month into an account naming Dominick and Thomas as beneficiaries. The property thus sits within a larger arrangement of family ties and financial provision, even as the brothers no longer live there.

After Dominick’s divorce from Dessa, Ray invites him to move into the vacant half and save the cost of a mortgage. He tells Dominick that the brothers already own half the property and that, after Ray dies, the whole house will belong to him. Dominick recognizes the practical appeal but refuses: moving back would amount to emotional self-harm. He buys a condominium instead. The empty half is therefore more than unused space; it marks the difference between inheriting a family home and choosing to inhabit it.

The return and the neglected house

Dominick approaches slowly and looks up at the building before getting out of his truck. The outside first signals that something has changed. The shrubs are overgrown, the hedges untrimmed, and the garbage barrels still wait at the front of the house, although they were emptied the previous day. Such details matter because Ray had once been exacting about the lawn and hedges and had lectured the family about putting the barrels away. The neglected yard reverses the order Dominick associates with Ray.

Dominick lets himself in with his key rather than knocking. Inside, the house is cluttered, though many objects remain arranged in neat piles: tools, old newspapers, and an unfinished jigsaw puzzle crowd the dining-room table. The rugs are dirty, and kitchen items sit stacked on the counter instead of returned to the cabinets. Ray’s blood-pressure and diabetes medication, a stack of Reader’s Digest, and two bundles of mail are laid out on the table. The day’s Daily Record is open to a report about Thomas’s commitment to Hatch. From the newspaper, Dominick understands that Ray already knows what has happened.

Dominick finds Ray asleep in the back bedroom, tangled in his blanket. Since Ma’s death, Ray has been sleeping downstairs. He gives a neighborhood prowler as the reason, after someone forced open the Anthonys’ cellar door across the street, but Dominick doubts that this is the real explanation. The account leaves that suspicion unresolved; the change in sleeping arrangements nonetheless registers as another alteration to the household after Ma is gone.

The backyard and remembered family life

On his way out, Dominick sees the garbage barrels again and carries them up the front stairs and around to the backyard. The small act of care recalls the household’s old routines without restoring them. In the yard, he passes the two cement urns where Ma grew parsley and basil, and remembers her asking him to pick basil for the sauce. The plants connect the present visit to Ma’s everyday presence in the house and garden, which Dominick can now recall but cannot recover.

The backyard also holds memories of the twins’ childhood. Dominick remembers playing there with Thomas: pogo-sticking, staging battles with plastic cowboys and Indians, and chasing garter snakes toward the stone wall. In June they sucked nectar from honeysuckle blossoms, one drop at a time. These recollections interrupt the image of the overgrown yard with an earlier season of shared play. The picnic table Dominick and Ray built one summer remains, but one end of its seat has rotted. Dominick considers hauling it away and perhaps planting a garden the following spring; he also sees weeds choking the grapevines and grass grown to his knees.

Memory, access, and inheritance

The house’s condition contrasts sharply with Dominick’s memory of Ray’s strict standards. What had once been maintained as an extension of Ray’s authority now appears cluttered and unattended. The difference is not simply a change in upkeep: it gives physical form to a family home after Ma’s death and Thomas’s departure, with Ray left there alone. Dominick’s observations remain grounded in practical details—barrels, medication, mail, hedges, and a broken bench—while those details draw him back toward the childhood he associates with the address.

The key gives Dominick entry, but it does not make the house feel safe or welcoming. He recalls that returning to 68 Hollyhock Avenue makes him feel angry and small, as powerless as he was at ten years old. He calls it the House of Horrors, a sardonic name set against the domestic familiarity of the backyard and Ma’s garden. The visit holds these meanings together: Dominick is able to enter, help Ray with a mundane task, and imagine tending the yard, yet the prospect of living there remains unacceptable. As a setting, 68 Hollyhock Avenue is both an inherited family property and a repository of memories that practical ownership cannot resolve.