When we get up in the morning, I make my coffee with lukewarm tapwater, and if the packets of hot chocolate haven't run out, Gabe gets a cup. Picture a woman sitting tranquilly beneath a reading lamp, turning the pages of a poetry book as her child runs a toy train around the floor. That doesn't describe us. We do few things in the room, actually. I call landlords who claim to have big hearts and who have placed affable, often quirky ads.
Houses are out of our range.
I call madly until Gabe starts to throw things, to punch buttons on the phone and shout into it. Then I try not to hurl the ads or topple the table. We are not so safe, not so attractive to landlords as I once was. The job I will soon have I don't yet have, and it is in a different career from the one I left behind. This is a process, each intricate piece helping to fulfill a final design that exists, of course, only as a blueprint.