The walls were white, not yet scuffed with dirt and fingerprints. She saw family photos in frames that hadn’t been rehung yet. If she inhaled, she still caught the tiniest whiff of fresh paint. A couple of months earlier, she’d been here, with the furniture pushed into the center of the room under a plastic tarp, and a roller brush in her hands. She’d painted the downstairs, and Anna had painted the upstairs bedrooms.

That was when she’d met Al. He came home late, exhausted from his second job at the Anchor. She remembered the smile on his face when he saw the walls all white and clean. It was something new in a house that didn’t see many new things. She remembered the look in his eyes when he saw her, too. Men usually looked at her like a lion looks at food. Al’s eyes were different. He didn’t assume that she was for sale. He didn’t even notice the little pooch that said she was pregnant. He’d looked at her with a sense of wonder, as if she were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. Cat – tired, dusty, with flecks of white paint in her hair and on her golden skin – saw that look and fell in love with him right then and there.

She was such a fool.

Al’s mother wandered into the living room from the kitchen and handed Cat a can of warm Mountain Dew. The woman fell into a corner of the sofa that was nearest the recliner. ‘Silence. Isn’t that grand? Everybody’s finally asleep.’

Cat sipped the pop and smiled nervously. ‘It’s not like that a lot, huh?’

‘No, hardly ever. Except late at night like this. Mostly, it’s jabber jabber jabber.’ She put a hand gently on the wall behind her. ‘Gotta tell you again how sweet that was of you to paint this place. Real nice.’

‘It was nothing,’ Cat said. She wasn’t looking for praise for painting the house. Right now, she wanted to forget all about it.

Al’s mother was friendly, but her eyes weren’t naive. She sized up Cat like a butcher who didn’t need a scale to know how much ground beef was in her hand. ‘Is Al the daddy?’ she asked, pointing at her bump.

‘Oh, no, he’s not.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

The woman took short, shallow breaths, but despite her emphysema, Cat caught an aroma of cigarette smoke on her clothes. It was hard to stay away from the things you shouldn’t touch.

‘How old are you, Cat?’ she asked.

‘Seventeen.’

‘I had Al around the same age. Believe me, I know the drill. Is the daddy still in the picture?’