When she left, Anita took Mom's valise, the round one with the wooden handle from Eaton's department store. Mom was furious. She'd had it on hold at the store for weeks while she earned enough to pay ... [+]
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