244

While it wasn't the house they had wanted, it was a house, which seemed a great step up from apartment living.  Despite the lack of running water in the first floor kitchen and the boarded windows across the front, that is.  The pipes had been stolen from the kitchen for the copper, and, like closing the barn door after the cows had left, the city finally secured the windows with plywood shortly after.  Luckily, in this one instance, the robbers had ignored the fact that the house had been converted into a triple.  In all ways, it was bad for the house, excepting that it meant there were two working kitchens.  The home had once been grand, as had the neighborhood, but had been passed from uncaring person to unlucky person to unskilled person through the decades and it was now, like the neighborhood, a shameful wreck.

243

Martie hated when she thought Jon was mad at her.  Intellectually, she knew the fights were usually in her own head and that he had moved on hours ago, or was never really angry in the first place, but the feeling nagged at her and caused her to make mistakes in her work, which she couldn't afford to do.  Martie sighed and cleansed her hands with air, moving them in the intricate patterns ingrained into her bones from years of repetition.  She would just have to find Jon and ask him.

242

The trailer was hot, which made the carpet smell and the trash smell and the bathroom reek.  Sheila stepped inside only long enough to fill a tumbler with iced tea and go back out to the lawn chair overlooking the low rolling desert towards the hills.  The paperback romance she had been reading lay splayed open under the metal and nylon chair, but Sheila didn't reach for it.  She watched the clouds move slowly across the blue sky before she watched the sun lower itself to the hills before disappearing in a brilliant red display of light.  She watched the stars come out and she shivered as the cool night stole away the heat of the day.

241

"You are never happy."  Denise pointed the wooden stir stick at Harry to help make her point.  "Never."

"That's not true!"

"Are you happy today?"

"No, but..."

"Were you happy yesterday?"

"But that's when it all happened, Denise.  Weren't you listening to my story at all..."

"Do you plan on being happy tomorrow?"

Harry sat up straighter.  "Yes."

"Nobody who is happy plans on being happy tomorrow."

Harry was tired of Denise and her Junior Psychologist ways that disguised her love of cruelty and superiority.

"Then I don't need to plan."  Harry stood, bumping the cafe table and making Denise catch her latte.  "I'll go be happy right now, which starts with me getting the hell out of here."

240

As Sam shuffled through his apartment on the way back from the bathroom, even with sleep still in his eyes, he noted the dishes on the counter, the crumbs that stuck to his foot, the swinging door that rubbed on the floor, the laundry piled behind the door, and the sweaty, wrinkled sheets on the bed.  While not thinking about it too hard, Sam vowed when he woke up for real he would make today the day he made progress.  He shoved around the towels he had stuffed into a pillowcase and flopped back into bed, sun streaming in through a gap in the papers covering the window, and fell fast asleep.

239

Clara knew it was stress and tried purposefully to loosen her jaw, relax her shoulders and stop her mind from its desperate circling.  She took deep breaths as she tapped the papers on her desk into a neat pile and forced herself to set it down rather than throw it against the wall.  Clara put away her pen and closed her monthly calendar while she concentrated on this moment, then the next, and the next.

She desperately wanted to be productive, but all her to-dos seemed pointless.  Despite using the women's magazine techniques she had read about, the overwhelming weakness flooded into Clara's arms and her posture collapsed.  She hated crying, and public crying was even worse, but here she was, in her cubicle, trying not to sob out loud.

238

The house smelled bad.  You didn't have to see the "A Home without Cats is Not a Home" pillow to understand why.  The first floor's catty stench reached out onto the front stoop and knocked you back one step before you even hit the second cement stair, but the first floor wasn't the worst.  The worst was the basement, where the litter boxes were kept.  For a while, litter boxes were not cleaned out, but new boxes were added.  The basement reeked.  No one could stay in it for long and some even turned around on the stairs to flee.  If you made it out and traveled to the second floor with the bedrooms, you might actually think it didn't smell up there at all.  But it did.  The house and all its contents smelled like cat: cat fur, cat urine, cat poop, cat vomit and, yes, even dead cat.