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, she walked into the kitchen and began to sweep the floors. Cleaning house was the only way she could clear her mind, to avoid thinking about what might happen or what might have been. It was cathartic in demanding focus and concentration. She scrubbed and washed and rearranged furniture, particularly when things got tense—with family problems, shootings, and deaths. The kids knew to stay out of her way, except for Lafeyette, who, like his mother, also found cleaning a useful distraction.
    “Lemme help you,” he begged, still sitting by the wall. “You figuring to start cleaning up ’cause you upset. You figuring tostart cleaning up.” LaJoe didn’t hear him. “Mama, let me help you. Ain’t nobody gonna get killed out there today.”
    “Stay there, Lafie. Someone’s gotta watch the triplets,” LaJoe said.
    Lafeyette shrugged, but resigned to his duties, he slithered down the wall, resting on the floor as he kept the triplets in check and watched his mother work.
    For LaJoe, cleaning the apartment seemed nearly hopeless. The apartment never looked perfectly neat and orderly: a chair always faced in the wrong direction or a rug’s edge curled up or under itself. Eight people lived in the apartment—LaJoe, her five youngest children, and the two older brothers, Terence and Paul. It swelled to nine if the children’s father stayed over. He would sleep on the couch or, on occasion, in the double bed with the triplets. A stack of food-caked dishes, waiting to be washed, often filled the kitchen sink, or the plastic garbage container overflowed with leftovers and paper. Roaches were everywhere. Even when the housing authority sprayed, the roaches came back. Once a small colony of them took refuge from the pesticides in a small portable radio that belonged to one of the older children. The insects were discovered days later, thriving. Maggots nested in the building, mostly by the undersized incinerator, which overflowed with garbage.
    Even had LaJoe been able to catch up with the dirty dishes and misplaced furniture and overflowing garbage, the apartment itself defied cleanliness. In keeping with the developers’ tight-fisted policies in building these high-rises, the housing authority continued its miserly regard for their upkeep. Maintenance was a bare minimum.
    The walls inside the home were what the Soviets first saw, white cinder block. Along with the encrusted, brown linoleum-tiled floor, which was worn through in many places, and the exposed heating pipes, which snaked through the apartment, the home at night resembled a dark, dank cave. The bedrooms were particularly drab. Not much bigger than some prison cells—they were ten by eleven feet—they got little sunlight.
    Because the bedrooms’ shallow closets had no doors, they were an invitation to messiness. Clothes spilled into the rooms. For all practical purposes, there was no distinction between the closets and the rest of the rooms; the closets looked like two-footindentations in the walls. They were constructed to accommodate curtains, but the curtain rods had long been missing.
    The kitchen and living room blurred together. They were essentially one large room partly divided by a cinder-block wall that ran halfway down the middle.
    The thirty-year-old kitchen cabinets, constructed of thin sheet metal, had rusted through. They were pockmarked with holes. LaJoe organized her dishes and cookware so as to avoid having them fall through these ragged openings. She usually piled them in the corners of the cupboards.
    The housing authority used to paint the apartments once every five years, but with the perennial shortage of money, in the 1970s it had stopped painting altogether. LaJoe couldn’t remember when her apartment was last painted. No matter how hard she scrubbed, the smudged walls never looked clean.
    But the apartment’s two bathrooms were in the worst shape of all. Neither had a window, and the fans atop the building, which had provided much