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house? My dead father’s house?
    I backed out the Bonneville and drove south along the water. I lit another cigarette and I kept seeing Nick’s face the morning he left, the way he looked in the shadowed room after he woke me with a nudge, sitting on the side of the bed. At first I thought I’d slept late and he was on his way out the door to work, but then I saw how early it was, and I could smell all the cigarettes on his breath, and I knew he’d been up a long time. I moved to switch on the bedside lamp but he touched my hand to stop me. Then he held it. In that dim light, I couldn’t make out his eyes.
    “What, honey? What?” I said. I was thinking of his father or his mother, a late-night phone call I’d missed. But as soon as he opened his mouth and said, “Kath,” I knew it was about us again, and I started to sit up, but he put his other hand on my chest and I stayed still and waited for him to say what he was going to say. But he never said another word; he sat there and stared in the direction of my face, and even when I asked him what, what’s the matter, Nicky, my heart jerking all confused under his hand, he only stared, and then, after another half minute of nothing, he squeezed my fingers and left the room, and I jumped out of bed in just a T-shirt and followed him through the house to the front door, saying, “Wait, wait.” I stopped and watched him get into the used Honda we’d just bought as a second car. Daylight was breaking out over the yard and the woods across the road. Then I saw the two suitcases and his bass guitar in the backseat, and I ran out into the driveway, the January air hitting me like a bat. He was already backing up and I rapped on the driver’s window and screamed his name and kept doing it until he shifted gears in the street and drove down the hill, not once looking back at me, even in the rearview mirror.
    I started to cry as I drove. The sun was lighting up the ocean, and the sand was getting bright.
     
    I T WAS CLOSE to ten when I drove into the parking lot of the motel. Most of the trailer trucks next door were gone, and the sun was starting to shine bright off the cars in the lot. As soon as I got into my room, I lit another cigarette and called the lawyer’s number Deputy Burdon had written on the back of his card. A man with a soft voice answered and I started to tell him how I’d been evicted from my own home yesterday. I almost cried again and I hated myself for it. The man said he was sorry to hear of my dilemma but you’ve reached the Walk-In Legal Aid Society and all you have to do is come in and explain all that to one of our attorneys. He gave me the address in the city and wished me luck. Before we hung up I asked him what it would cost and he told me all services were delivered on a sliding scale.
    I undressed and put on my robe and sat on the edge of the bed. I had about eight hundred in checking, fifty in savings, and this month the house insurance was due. Now I had the storage shed to pay for, and this new lawyer, and there was no way I could pull my shit together for my two cleaning customers today. One was a house over on the San Andreas Reservoir, the other a doctor’s office in town. I called and postponed both, leaving me three jobs to do tomorrow, then took a long shower. I dried myself with the motel’s thin green towel, thinking how even this place could sink me, though I knew there was nowhere else to go.
    I started to blow-dry my hair, which had grown out past my shoulders the way it hadn’t been since I was nineteen and married to Donnie, my first cokestorm, my period late, and we both told ourselves we weren’t ready and he drove me to the clinic in Brookline and the whole family found out. Dad had never really looked right at me anyway, but then he stopped doing it at all, would only give me his quiet profile, usually in his recliner in front of the TV. And Ma started giving me that look, her eyes locking in on me dark and flat,