Chapter Text
The house sat on a street so steep that delivery drivers parked at the bottom and walked up swearing. It was white, with a red tile roof and an arched front window. There was a garage too narrow for anything built after the war and more stairs than anybody needed, inside and out. On a clear night you could stand on the front step and see all the way down to the city, lit up like a switchboard.
Daffy had wanted something with a gate, a circular drive, and an address that made people look at him different when he said it out loud. They looked at eleven houses in the fall of 1970 and fought in every single one. 2071 Escarpa Drive was the last.
The realtor went out to wait in the car, and the two of them stood in the empty living room for a while without saying anything.
"Well?" said Bugs.
"It's a dump," said Daffy, and that was that.
They moved in that November and stayed for forty-three years, which was longer than either of them had ever stuck with anything except the pictures and each other. Neighbors came and went. The jacarandas along the street grew up past the power lines. The street got paved properly, and the delivery drivers kept parking at the bottom anyway.
Most of what happened to them in those years happened somewhere else: on soundstages and in the papers, on lunch and cereal boxes, and on television. This is the rest of it.