Clarence Perkins Homes was two hundred and forty-four acres of brick, concrete, and asphalt. It was a world unto itself. Billy Hoyt moved there with his family from South Carolina when he was ten.

Perkins didn’t look anything like Billy imagined it would be from his mother’s description. Spring Court must have had a hundred front doors crammed onto a couple of dozen little concrete porches, all looking just alike. For as far as you could see, from one court to the other, across street after street, the same buildings were laid out like dominos. Billy felt like, if you could push one over, the rest would fall, clackety-clack, until they all laid on their sides.

What he learned though, was that behind each one of those wooden doors was a different family, a different story.