Mom cooked tonight: chicken from the Belgian corner store (recooked because, as Mom says of all white cooking, “heat is not a spice”) and djon-djon rice that’s been simmering in the Crock-Pot all day. She always makes sure to cook something delicious on nights before she leaves.

I decide it’s as good a time as any to tell them about Palm Tree and the Troys. I normally avoid updating them on my dog routes or Uptown Updogs in general because Dad would make me shutter the site right away if he learned that I was lying to people—and probably make me reimburse every client—but the fact that Corinne goes to FATE and the Troys are our neighbors means that I have to tell my folks.

“Chantale Troy is a demanding woman,” Dad muses.

“Another dog?” Ma asks, concerned. “That’s a lot of commitments, Henri. Are you sure you’re not overextending yourself? You’re not doing it for the family pot, are you? Because we can manage without.”

No, we can’t. A good chunk of Haltiwanger money comes with a “we” pronoun. It’s all household money. Three people, one set of bills.

I’ve been chipping in since I was fourteen and did grocery runs for some of the elderly tenants upstairs. I throw in a couple of hundreds from my walks and Ma and Dad aren’t well off enough to ignore them. Part of it is because New York City is, simply put, hella expensive. The fact that Mom quit her job to become a firefighter trainee certainly contributed to the collective tightening of the belt, and I know she feels guilty about it.

“I promise you it’s not. I need the money too, Ma,” I say between bites of chicken so spicy you need to blink the tears away when you hit a pepper. “I need to pay back the credit cards on all those college applications, remember?”

Ma nods reluctantly. I applied to nine colleges total, each ranging from sixty to ninety-five dollars in application fees.

“Doesn’t the daughter go to your school?”

“Corinne,” Ma chastises.

That’s how Dad likes to talk about the tenants and their broods. The daughter, the son, the other son. That cousin that stays with them. It’s not that he can’t remember the names, considering he keeps track of which light bulbs are used in which kitchen renovations. To their faces, he acknowledges the first names (especially the “call me Bill” types who love to give fist bumps to the super and in return bestow us pretty good Christmas bonuses), but as soon as we’re home, they revert to their nominal titles.

Ma told me his logic once. It keeps things simple. That’s how your dad likes the world. Simple. She’d then laughed at the face I made. Imagine dating him!