I sighed, dropping more heavily onto my elbows. My hometown had a reputation for being, literally, trashy. It was unfair, horribly untrue, and painted whole communities of people as not caring about their surroundings. But having an accumulation of trash happened all the time in a city with an underfunded sanitation department and narrow, three-hundred-year-old streets that complicated pickups and sweepings. People dumped their trash illegally because there was often no place—and no one—to take it.

“Well,” I called down, “if there’s any common refrain I hear when I interview folks doing community work like this, it’s that you’ve got to start with the first small step even if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Dean picked up an old Wawa hoagie wrapper with a wry expression and dropped it neatly into a trash bag. “Like this?”

I grinned. “Smart-ass. Have you had coffee yet, neighbor?”

He shook his head.

“Give me a sec.” I slammed the window closed, tossed on a bra, and brushed my teeth, skipping down the stairs to turn on Linda’s ancient coffee pot. While it hissed and brewed, I pulled on a newly-clean tank top and a pair of shorts from the pile of laundry I’d left folded on the couch. My aunt’s house was disorienting for a couple of reasons. I was used to long-term hotel stays or short-term rentals, places where the majority of items I lived around I had only a shallow connection to.

This wasn’t the house I grew up in, but we were a tight-knit family so everything here felt personal—old pictures, dusty Christmas wreaths, faded towels that Alexis and I would wrap around ourselves after running through sprinklers as kids.

For the first time, my beloved hiker’s pack looked sad and lonely, propped against Linda’s bookshelf. But owning too many things made me feel as burdened and uncomfortable as the concept of settling down. Alexis and I spent our teenage years witnessing my mother’s transformation into a manipulative, image-obsessed social climber. Less than six months after divorcing my father, she married the man she’d been seeing behind my dad’s back for a very long time.

She’d been eager to leave us for the life she wanted but complained our dad had never given her: a giant, ostentatious house in the wealthy suburbs outside the city; a husband with multiple degrees and a private practice; two children—my stepbrothers—whom she loved and doted on in a way she never did with me and my sister.

I grabbed two chipped white mugs from the cabinet and filled them with fresh coffee, cream, and sugar. Balancing them both in one arm, I pushed open the door and stepped barefoot into the humid air. The stoop was warm beneath my bare skin as I settled down on the top step and carefully placed the mugs below me.