Days in the shop often passed in meditative quiet. I tended to the flowering plants and nursed the dying ones, breathing in the earthy scent of all the fauna and counting myself lucky to be surrounded by so much life, a tiny oasis in the middle of a city. I created and rotated window displays. I made phone calls, I processed new plants that appeared in the back room, getting them ready for sale. I did and redid the price sheets. Customers came in and browsed but rarely bought.

Around 6:30 p.m. I closed up the shop, double- and triple-checking the door, and I waited for and caught the bus back to the apartment building. The ride home was filled with the light of sunset as the year waned, and I leaned my head against the window, occasionally dozing off until my stop. Upon exiting the bus I often met Chrissy at the curb, who’d just hopped off another bus coming from Westwood, and we walked the remaining block and entered the building together, trudging up the stairs to 201. Then we opened the door and threw ourselves on the couch, flopping our purses and jackets lavishly on whatever furniture was closest, the joy of being home and free exhaling from every pore, the whole evening ahead of us.

The dog would return around this time and paw at the door. Reluctantly I’d let it in. Tucked away, in the farthest corner of the fourth wall in the apartment, was an auto-feeder and water bowl Ray had left.

And what did I do in the evening? Jack arrived home from cooking school before us and often had supper on the stove waiting to be served or in its final stages. After eating we sometimes watched television together, depending on the night and whether we could agree on the channel (I liked Police Woman until it ended its run in March of 1978, and The ABC Friday Night Movie), and sometimes I read or took the bus to the library, and sometimes I went on dates with men who turned out to be cartoonishly evil. How do I end up with such men? I’d ask Chrissy later, speculating that I’d been cosmically cursed with bad luck in romance, and she sympathized—being blonde, and more naive, she attracted men twice as terrible.

At night the apartment glowed, and I sometimes had the rooms to myself, and on the cozy occasions I was in the living room alone, I’d lie on the couch with a bowl of popcorn on my chest, drowsing, listening to the drone of the television in front of me and Jack clacking in the kitchen as he tested a new recipe, filling the air with new and wonderful smells, and Chrissy was in the bathroom showering, the patter of the water adding to the white noise, and I ignored the bird, and the night was at the window but the rooms were all bright and sheltered, full of warm colors, and the hum of contented happiness, of freedom, echoed back at me and allowed me to doze off, flush with the dream of a life I had always believed, in another life, as another person, was impossible.