Later, at a nearby plant nursery, I said: “They’ll be upset. I shouldn’t have lost that work. I should’ve kept it no matter what.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about it.” She was holding two chubby baby cactuses, each adorned with a lopsided flower, like toddlers playing dress-up. “Your job’s so strange that there’s really no point in going into so much detail like you always do.”

“But I don’t have a job.”

“Do you get what I just said?”

“That I don’t have to go into so much detail with my folks.”

“That’s right. Because tomorrow you’ll take on an editing job, a translation, some proofs, and you’ll be back at it. And in the meantime, write for the paper. Maybe you’ll go back to working for that moron on his terms and you’ll tell your parents you’re still an editor. How you work is your business and no one else’s! You’re an intellectual—you can always pretend you have more work than you do.”

The guy from the nursery came up to us, and Barbara and I joked about the discount he gave us last time: “Maybe this time, you won’t make us pay at all, since you’re such a nice fellow?”

At the checkout counter, we added a bag of fertilizer. The girl at the register handed me the bill, and Barbara took it from me and paid.

Up on our roof, we tended to our plants: it had rained hard all week. Then we carried up some laundry to put in the washer in the cement shed and afterward, we caught our breath a moment while we lay on the wooden deck chairs, in the shade of the solar panels and Barbara said: “You don’t need to tell your parents anything at all.”

On the surrounding lower rooftops, laundry hung limp in the sun; we heard the sound of a power drill, carried in the chilly air.

What bothered me the most was that I’d lost that work just after meeting with the notary to cosign for the condo, but I didn’t tell her this because I didn’t want to sound passive-aggressive.

Barbara got up to look at something, and after a moment, she spotted a small gap between the wall and the metal windowsill, at the top of the spiral staircase, a crack, and a line of ants streaming in. She told me to go get the hose lying filthy and tangled on the roof terrace. We swept them away in a jet of water. Then we went down to kill all the ants bustling around the foundation: outside, black armies had built fortified paths into the bedroom and living room. Our coats off, our sleeves rolled up, we took a bottle of whitewash from the cupboard and let it snow down through the perforated cap, onto that flood of ants—all of them, bleached white and dying.