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I got up off the motel bed and washed my face with cold water and soap in the bathroom. I had cried more in the last eight months than in the rest of my life and I had to stop it because it seemed like the more I cried the less I did to change things, or to even avoid the shit coming at me. My new lawyer couldn’t quite understand that, why I threw away all that mail from the county tax office without opening it. I liked her right away, I think because she wasn’t wearing any shoes, just round glasses, a white blouse, and gray slacks over bare feet. She poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down a chair away from me with her legal pad and pencil. She asked me to tell her everything, which I did, including that I already went to the county tax office in Redwood City and signed a statement saying we’d never run a business from our house, so why the five-hundred-thirty-dollar business tax?

“Five hundred dollars? They evicted you from your house for that?”

“You got it.” I lit a cigarette, enjoying my lawyer’s shock at this. She asked where my husband and I were staying, and I looked down at the table, at a worm of a cigarette burn. “He’s not in the picture anymore.” I reached for a seashell ashtray. “I’m booked in a motel in San Bruno.”

She paused a second and made a straight line with her lips like she was sorry to hear that. Then she asked me a bunch of questions about my inherited ownership. Was there a devise in my father’s will? Was it completely paid for? Who was the bank? Do you have a copy of your signed statement to the county tax office? That’s what she wanted more than anything, and I said I could get one to her, though I had no idea where it was. After all her questions she stood and took off her glasses and smiled. “First thing we have to do is keep them from selling your home. Then we get it back. And they can pay your motel bill, too.” She checked the form I’d filled out to make sure she had my room number, then she shook my hand and said not to worry, call her tomorrow late afternoon.

I turned on the TV and sat at the foot of the bed, but still there was only sound, a commercial for a diet drink. I heard a woman laugh out in the parking lot, and I wondered if this truck stop was like some back East: cold beer and live music in the bar, hot steak and eggs in the diner, hookers for the rooms upstairs. I sat there and listened to the beginning of some TV show about cops and DAs and the streets of New York City. Outside my window was the twangy beat of another country band playing next door, and for the fortieth time since last January I looked at the telephone and tried not to call someone back home.

For a long time my mother would call every Sunday afternoon to catch us up on things, but really to see how wewere. The first few Sundays after Nick left, when I answered the phone and heard her voice, I had to hold my hand to my mouth sometimes to keep from crying. But then I’d start lying about how well he was doing at his new job. I told her how his office was on the seventeenth floor of an earthquake-proof building overlooking San Francisco, and that he was making good money and would probably get promoted in no time. This used to be true.