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and recriminatory,
and then you never have to put your money where your mouth is … right? Never have to try
. Susan was frozen in place, holding her favorite red cardigan sweater up by the arms like a dance partner; she had just dumped out an entire box of packed clothes that needed to be folded and put away.
    Never try, never fail
.
    Susan knew what she should do: put down the sweater, march downstairs, and start painting. No time like the present, right? There was nothing she was doing that couldn’t wait. Instead, she lay down the sweater on the bed and brought its arms down and across, one by one, then folded it deliberately upward from hem to collar, smoothed the crease, and stowed it in the dresser.
    Very nice, Frida Kahlo
, said the voice of self-recrimination, soft and insistent.
Very nice
.
    *
    The man from Time Warner rang the bell at 11:58, two minutes before the expiration of the four-hour window in which the dispatcher had prophesied his appearance. His name was Tony, and he made small talk in a thick Brooklyn accent as he installed the cable box. Susan offered coffee—“No, tanks,” said Tony—and then hovered in the living room, scanning the Arts section and waiting for him to finish.
    “Hey,” Tony said all of a sudden, and looked up from his squat before the entertainment center. “Wassat?”
    “What’s what?” Susan asked.
    “Dat.
Ping. Ping
. Hear dat?”
    She narrowed her eyes and listened. It was very low, barely audible, but the cable guy was right: there was a light
ping
, every ten or fifteen seconds, coming from … somewhere. She walked a slow circle around the room, then up and down the hallway, but couldn’t figure it out. “Weird,” she said.
    “Yeah,” said the cable man. “Anyway, dat’s it. Finished. Lemme show ya the remotes.”
    When Tony from TimeWarner was gone, Susan grabbed the dustpan and handbroom from under the kitchen sink and swept a tidy circle around the entertainment center, gathering up the little bits of clipped wire he’d left in his wake. Before she went back upstairs, she cast a quick, worried glance at the door to the bonus room.
    “Tomorrow,” she said firmly. “I’ll do some painting tomorrow.”
    *
    As was perhaps inevitable, given the speed with which Alex and Susan had decided to take the apartment on Cranberry Street, they started to discover small problems they had overlooked during their one brief tour. The face plate on an electric outlet in the kitchen was slightly askew, so Susan had to angle the prongs awkwardly to plug in the toaster. A long ugly crack marred the wall above the sink in the downstairs bathroom, and the faucet in the kitchen sink had to be tightened with unusual force, or it dripped.
    And then, on Tuesday night, carrying Emma out of the bath in her oversized ducky towel, Susan jammed her big toe on a floorboard on the landing.
    “Ow!” she shouted, “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
    Emma’s eyes went wide. “Mama?”
    “I’m OK, I’m OK, honey.” She put Emma down and clutched at her throbbing toe like a cartoon character. “Alex, can you come up here, please?”
    “Just a sec.”
    Examining the floor while Emma wrestled herself into her underpants, Susan discovered a slight but undeniable gapping between two of the floorboards. One of the boards was minutely raised, creating just enough of a little cliff to jam your toe against.
    “We gotta be careful here,” she said. “OK, Em?”
    “Yeah,” Emma agreed solemnly. “Careful.”
    “It’s not a big deal,” Alex concluded, when he took a look. “If we owned the place, maybe I’d pay someone to sand it out.” Susan raised an eyebrow, and Alex shrugged. “Or whatever you do to floors. But I mean, whatever, I think we can just step around it.”
    “Yeah,” said Susan. “I guess. But let’s keep a lookout for other spots like that. I hadn’t noticed it before, had you?”
    “Nope.”
    Alex padded back down the stairs and returned to the living