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open my door. Even so, I avoided glancing in Tom's direction. I walked around the back of the van instead of the front, slid the side door open, and buried myself in the dark space inside, resting my forehead against the edge of Mollie's car seat until I was ready to move again.
    I pulled the biggest box from the interior and carried it in front of me across the overly lush lawn so Tom couldn't see my face. I wanted change to be easy—I wanted him to let it be easy. But there he was, muddying the smooth transition I'd counted on. His body was sprawled over the white, hot concrete steps, keeping me from the front door that was mine. Behind my box shield, I felt him, maybe I smelled him—the familiar scent of his glistening sweat rising in the hot air.
    I'd told him that if I lived without him for a while, I'd have distance to think about our marriage and about him and what I could and could not commit to. I told him that if he would get out of my sight, out of my path, out of my way for a few weeks or months then I could find my clear head and work out what was best. But when I set the box on the sidewalk Tom was every bit there, grinning, his elbows resting on the concrete steps and a set of keys dangling from one index finger.
    He wore a T-shirt he'd owned since college and a pair of cutoff jeans from which his long legs, coated in a fine layer of blond hair, angled down the stair steps, ending in a worn pair of red flip-flops, one of which he slapped, slapped, slapped against his heel.
    "Where'd you get those?" I asked him, pointing to the keys hanging from his finger.
    "Easy," he said, squinting in a way that made the crow's-feet around his eyes deepen. He jingled the keys, which had its desired effect—I was even more irate. "I told the manager that I'm the husband."
    I reached for the keys but he jerked his hand away. "It's not a bad place," he said, standing up and brushing the dust from the back of his pants. "I left a drawing on the table to show you where to fit the furniture." Shoving my keys in his pocket, he slid on the sunglasses
that had been hanging from his shirt's neck and walked past me to his car.
    "Don't come back here!" I shouted at him. He smiled, waved, and then he drove away.
    I talked the landlord into changing the locks on the doors, but that didn't keep Tom from appearing all the time. There he was in the pool delighting the girls with four new squirt guns when we went out for a swim. There he was parked in my space when my daughters and I arrived in the late afternoon, inviting us out for green-corn tamales and cheese quesadillas. At night, he'd phone me five or six or ten times to ask when I was coming back, when I was going to get over my bad stage, my crisis, my fit of selfishness.

    Five days before Halloween in 1991, a few months after my move into the apartment, I drove to the elementary school to pick up nine-year-old Stephanie from basketball practice. I pulled to the curb and slid open the door, and she climbed in over sacks of groceries, past Mollie, who was strapped into the middle seat of our van, past the box of clothes I'd been intending to drop at Goodwill for weeks, and into the far back corner. Stephanie wasn't speaking to me at the moment. During a costume-buying trip the day before, I'd declined to rent her a real cheerleader's uniform for $24.99. Yes, it came with thick pompoms and had a fat blue
S
sewn on the peppy red sweater. And it had a swingy skirt that flashed a blue satin lining when she danced about. But it was $24.99. That was too much when we could throw one together at home that would be just as good, I told her: she already owned a skirt and a too-big red sweater. I could pick up football pompoms at the university's bookstore, and bows for her hair. I was sure, I said, that we could find an old school letter at a thrift shop to sew on the front of her outfit.
    Now Stephanie buckled herself into the farthest bench seat back and stared out the window.