“So you don’t own it.”

If she detected my passive aggression, she didn’t let on. “No, it still belongs to Dad’s sister out west,” she replied. She looked out the window. “It’s so unfair. I keep telling her I’d look after it. I’d pay rent and everything. But she asked me to pack it up instead. She really wants to sell it.” She swirled her spoon around in her bowl in an annoying way that meant she wasn’t going to eat. In the last year she had become near skeletal, for reasons I did not like to speculate upon. “I don’t think the mortgage payments have been made,” she said. “I don’t think she really cares.”

“Oh? What makes you think that?” I asked. I was cramming my mouth full of ice cream, hoping she’d take the hint and do likewise. I wanted to set a good example, and I wanted to leave.

Krystal set her bowl on the counter and shrugged. “I might have called the mortgage company,” she said. She looked out the same window, out to where I was looking, but the crows had flown away. “I had to know. I told them I was an interested buyer.”

A stupid, glazed look came over her face. “If I win I’m going to buy it and live here.”

I had had enough. I finished my ice cream. A sharp pain overtook my skull because I’d eaten it too fast, and I was a little out of breath. But I rinsed my bowl and set it in the sink. I turned toward Krystal.

“This isn’t good for you,” I said. I looked her in the eyes. “You know what I mean?”

The hope in her face crumpled. Her eyes got all red and I felt terrible, but as love rushed up at me, pricked at me, she said, “But it’s mine. I grew up here.” She shook her head. “It should have been mine.”

My love instantly turned into an urge to shove her, to hit her.

You hated this house, I wanted to say. You couldn’t wait to ditch it. To ditch them. All your wishes have come true.

I only sighed. “I want to leave,” I said.

She started to cry, but that didn’t stop me. I walked out the door, and two hours later I won the lottery, and by the end of the year that version of me was gone for good.

When potential workers arrived, I took them into my new living room, where I had added a desk to the AA setup, and where several papers waited for them.

Three’s Company premiered on the ABC network at 9 p.m. on March 15, 1977, a Tuesday. Its premise: Sensible flower-shop worker Janet Wood and naive secretary Chrissy Snow need a third roommate to make rent in their Santa Monica apartment. They find Jack Tripper, culinary student and aspiring chef, in the bathtub one morning after a party, and take him in. However, their stodgy landlord Stanley Roper will not allow unmarried heterosexual people of the opposite sex to live together, as it was against the conservative social and sexual mores of the time. Janet tells Roper that Jack is gay, and the living arrangement becomes acceptable. Helen Roper, Stanley’s love-starved wife, learns Jack’s true sexuality but keeps the secret—she, and all of the younger generation, are all-in on putting one over on old-fashioned Mr. Roper.