So they got an apartment that was like a prison cell and if it wasn’t for the Saturdays at Tim and Dick’s—every other Saturday, that is, as Fitz decreed it—she would have hanged herself. Sure. Fine. It was Fitz’s decision because it was Fitz’s degree—Fitz’s life—and her life was reduced to cooking and cleaning and hustling for tips in a too-short skirt at a diner full of Greek and Italian immigrants who kept telling her how great she looked, how hot, how sex-ee. And now, after the disaster that was Zihuatanejo and an endless drive across country with a depressed husband and a withdrawn son (You want to stop for a cheeseburger, Corey? I want a taco. How about clam strips? At Howard Johnson’s? Your favorite, right? I want a taco), they were right back in Boston and right back in the same boat. Only this time they didn’t have the option of going to Dick’s because Dick was done with Harvard and so was Tim and nobody really knew what to do since the rest of the inner circle was left out in the cold too.

Desperate, they went back to their landlord from the previous spring, but he had nothing for them, and then they tried the building where they’d had their first apartment only to find that it had changed hands and the new owners were renovating. They went through every listing in the want ads and dragged themselves from one place to another, but just about everything was gone by the time they got there and what wasn’t was so shabby—no curtains, no blinds, no shower, refrigerators crusted in filth, silverfish, cockroaches, mouse turds scattered like rye seed across the kitchen counter and buried in the burners of the stove—she got a headache just walking through the door. In the meanwhile, they were staying in a motel all the way out in Waltham, living off what was left of their savings and the check her father had given her to tide them over when they left New Jersey, and clearly that wasn’t sustainable.

And then it was the Labor Day weekend—ninety-two degrees, the sun like a hammer and the sidewalks burning right through the soles of your shoes. They could have been celebrating the holiday, picnicking in the park, flipping burgers on a charcoal grill and tossing a Frisbee back and forth like any other family, but they weren’t. Corey was due to start school the next day, Fitz the day after that. She hadn’t even begun to look for a job because there wasn’t much point if you didn’t have a place to live—and how could she leave a call-back number if she didn’t have a phone? Her stomach was a vat of acid. She couldn’t sleep. Mexico, if she thought about it at all, was just a cruel joke.