“You’re making a big mistake” was what my mother told me.

“But I’m in love,” I said.

“Love has weak legs. You’ll see.”

I told her I’d prove her wrong, but I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. At this point, the doom feelings were compacted into a small kernel, located somewhere behind my belly button.

Our house in the Central Valley cost three times more than the one-bedroom we’d shared in Lawrence and was, I should mention, not really a “house.” Granny cottage, they called it—whoever they were. At best, it was a room in which someone had accidentally left a sink and a toilet. At worst, it was an architectural side note to the larger, two-story mission-style home in which a history professor and a veterinarian lived with their litter of blond offspring. We were there to help pay the mortgage.

Inside, Alec’s head scraped against the ceiling, where a network of cobwebs stretched from corner to corner like prayer flags. In the kitchen, I put my arms out and twirled like a ballerina, my fingers grazing the cabinets. There were two rooms, one of which was the bathroom. An image came to my mind of a mastiff and a dachshund forced into a gerbil cage.

“Cozy,” Alec said, and forced a smile that read: Do not panic or girlfriend will panic.

I said, “As a womb. Or a very, very small, overpriced home.”

We got to work unpacking and ended up making okay-but-sort-of-forced love on the kitchen linoleum. This is how we discovered the cockroaches. I’d never seen one up close before. Kansas had all sorts of critters—millipedes, brown recluses, cicadas—but nothing as Kafkaesque as a cockroach. Like a rotted thumbnail with legs.

“They say when the world ends, it’ll just be all cockroaches and Twinkies,” Alec said. He was naked, dust on his thighs.

“Where do you want to be when the world ends?” I asked.

He stared up at the ceiling, thinking. “Maybe the ocean. Watching the waves.” He turned to look at me. “What about you?”

There was only one answer I could think of, and because I didn’t know better, I figured it must be the truth. “I’d want to be right here,” I told him. “With you.”

Alec started school and I started researching the state of California, specifically the Central Valley. I had the time—the days had begun to stretch outward in all directions, expanding along with the cosmos. The mornings were temperate but by noon the house was an inferno; there was no air-conditioning unit (the house being not really a house), and so I grew to worship the monstrous box fan that stood by the window, whirring like a jet engine. At night, Alec grew damp with sweat so that sleeping with him was like sleeping with a man-sized baked potato. My time in bed was spent wrestling with the sheets, dreaming of house fires and prairie burns. Most of my REM cycles came in the languid afternoons, when I’d fall into naps deep as a miner’s hole. When I woke up—startled by the sound of an ambulance or the feeling of sweat gliding across my stomach—I had to crawl my way back to reality, back to the scorching surface of my new life.