To the dollar — because a solicitor wrote the figure on a piece of paper and turned it round on a desk and slid it towards me, which is a thing I have now had done to me twice by two different men in two different kitchens, with two very different results.
By the time the divorce was finalised, Dermot had the house and most of twenty years of saving.
Junie and I had enough to begin again and not one thing more.
I found a small duplex in the September.
The rent stretched my budget about as far as it will go, and I took it anyway, inside about four minutes of standing in the front room.
It is not impressive and I am not going to pretend it is.
The floors creak in four places and I know all four. The kitchen is tiny — two people cannot be in it. The porch has needed painting since before I moved in and still does, and it is the only part of that house I have ever been glad about.
But Junie has her own bedroom with a door she can shut, and a window that looks at a tree.
There is food in the refrigerator. The electricity stays on. And somehow — I am still not completely sure how — I have made that place feel safe to an eight-year-old.
She thinks we are fine.
That is the single thing I am proudest of in my entire life, and it has cost more than anybody knows.
What Junie has never known is how often I am awake long after she is asleep.
I lie in that bed and run the same four numbers round my head in the same order.
Rent. Groceries. School. Gas.
Then the utilities, and then round again, and then the question underneath all of it, which is which one I could delay by a fortnight if something unexpected happened.
That is not a worry. A worry has an end to it.
That is an arithmetic I have been doing at two in the morning for about twenty-two months, and I am extremely good at it now, and I can do it in about four minutes flat.
I have about eleven dollars of slack in a month.
That is the honest figure and I have never said it out loud to another adult. Eleven dollars, between managing and not managing, for twenty-two months.
Last Thursday a summer storm came through our neighbourhood.
Proper rain. The kind that comes sideways and gets under things.
Wind bending the trees on the verge. Thunder close enough to move the glass in the frames, four times in about an hour.
Junie was in bed. I was going room to room shutting windows, which takes about four minutes in that house.
And in the front room, through the glass, I saw something move across the street.
An elderly man, crouched under the tree on the verge opposite.
Soaked through. Completely — not caught out, but soaked in the way you only get after an hour of it.
He had an old backpack held tight against his chest with both arms, under his coat as far as it would go.
That is not how you carry a bag. That is how you hold a thing when it is everything you own.
Even from forty feet I could see what he looked like, which was finished.
He was old enough to be somebody’s grandfather.
He is somebody’s grandfather, as it turns out. And somebody’s father. And I did not find out either of those things for eleven weeks, which is the shape of this entire account in one sentence.
I stood at that window for about four seconds.
I want to be honest about those four seconds, because this account is worth nothing if I pretend they were not there.
I thought: I have an eight-year-old asleep upstairs and I am on my own in this house.
And then I thought about my own father.
He went in 2019. He was about that height and he had that way of holding a bag, and for about two seconds at a window in a storm I was not looking at a stranger at all.
And then I opened the front door.
PART 2
