After I left Tom, I rented a house next to a cemetery. My mother offered to help me move. Standing in the gravel lot where I parked my car, she regarded the one-story clapboard partially hidden in ... [+]
Our new house really felt like a home, with cockroaches and two pit bulls and a palm tree and a chain-link fence. On that first day, I heated up a can of kidney beans for breakfast and ate it sitting on the back stoop. Renton was smoking a cigarette; he couldn't stop smiling. The kidney beans tasted bland. The back yard had no grass, just sandy dirt and a pile of scrap wood and the dogs laying out in the sun. To me, it was perfect. Everything looked just like it was supposed to. We got a pumpkin for Halloween. We drove 40 minutes south of town to get it, at one of those u-pick places complete