They finally found a place within walking distance of Corey’s school—a godsend, absolutely—and she picked up a temporary job as a receptionist at a dentist’s office that would help tide them over till Fitz’s teaching stipend kicked in at the end of the month. The apartment was on the ground floor of a brick building that looked as if it had been around since the Revolutionary War and could actually, from a certain angle and in a certain light, be described as charming. It had the requisite two bedrooms and an enclosed porch and was ten dollars a month cheaper than what they’d paid for their last apartment. The only problem was that the landlord had given the previous tenant—an old woman in a grimy neck brace who was headed to the nursing home—an extra two weeks to vacate, so they couldn’t move in till the fifteenth. Which meant draining even more income on the motel (which did, thank God, have weekly rates) and eating out two meals a day, breakfast emerging from a cardboard cereal box and whatever she could manage to fix on a hot plate.

Was it miserable? Was it their low point? Was the group mind all but extinguished and higher consciousness to be replaced by the great shining hope of moving into a ground-floor apartment that would forever stink of old lady, not to mention her two cats? She tried not to think about it. Actually, she was scrambling so hard just to keep things together she didn’t have time to think. What she knew was this: their clothes and furniture were in storage and on the fifteenth they would no longer be. On that day they would take them out of storage, make ten trips back and forth in the station wagon, arrange the furniture in the new apartment, stow the pots and pans under the sink and hang their winter clothes in the closets. Then she would go shopping for the essentials, fix dinner, and their lives would go on. That was it. And it was a whole lot better than nothing.

Then one evening, after the dentist had drilled and filled his last cavity of the day and she’d picked Corey up in front of the school where he’d been waiting for two hours, since none of the school buses ran as far out as Waltham, she pulled into the motel lot and saw, with a flash of irritation, that someone was parked in the spot reserved for their room and that all the other spots—what else?—were already taken. “Shit,” she cursed, pounding the wheel with the flat of one hand. “Shit, shit, shit!”