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F RIDAY WAS THE BEST AND WORST DAY SO FAR. IT WAS BEST BECAUSEI worked it straight through, cleaning my normal residential plus the reservoir house job and the pediatric office I’d skipped the day before. There was a fog bank pushing in from the beaches and on another day it could’ve sent me over the edge, the way it covers the town in gray, but Friday I just tuned it out and cleaned with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

My customers leave me a key in their mailbox or under a rock on their lawn, which means no one is ever there except for a dog or cat, and I can work alone and fast, chewing gum and listening to the Walkman I keep clipped to my shorts; Nick’s old tapes mostly, loud fast rock that keeps me moving at a good pace and keeps me from thinking too much. When I woke up early Friday morning at the El Rancho, I made up my mind I was going to stop wallowing in my problem and start concentrating on the solution instead. I had to turn it over to Connie Walsh. She wasmy lawyer. By the time I was dressed, I’d convinced myself I’d hear something positive by the end of the day about getting my house back. So instead of booking my room through the weekend, I went down to the office and paid another thirty-one dollars for Friday night only.

I got back to the motel just before the end-of-the-work-week traffic heated up on the freeways. My arms, legs, and lower back were tired out, and my sweat had dried three times on my skin, but before I took a shower I called Legal Aid and Gary had me wait on the line almost five minutes before Connie Walsh picked it up: “I’m sorry, Kathy, but evidently the county has already sold your house.”

I stood still and took short, dry breaths. “What? How?”

“The auction date’s been set for months, Kathy; that was in the mail you’ve been throwing away.” I pictured my mother’s round face, her eyes dark and flat-looking. I heard my brother Frank, who told me and Nick the house was ours as far as he was concerned; he might want his half in twenty years, but hey K, One Day at a Time, right? Then I felt the tears come, my stomach twisting up. “Those mother fuckers.”

“Can you get that to me Monday morning, Kathy?”

“What?”

“Your copy of the tax statement. Hopefully I’ll have their paperwork by then, and we can go from there, all right?”

Connie Walsh was quiet on the other end. I wiped my nose and asked her what she was planning to do.

“Just what I said, Kathy. We’ll demand they rescind the sale or we file a lawsuit against the county.” She said not to worry too much, then reminded me to get that paperwork to her Monday morning.

I spent the first part of the night in the steel storage shed across the street looking for the signed tax statement from the county. But it was already too dark to see much, and I didn’t have a flashlight, so I drove to a convenience store on the other side of the freeway to get one. The streets were fogged in and the air was wet and too cool for shorts. Back in the shed I found one of Nick’s old sweatshirts and pulled it on. It was black-and-white with the logo of a band he used to play bass for years ago. It was clean so didn’t smell like him, but I could still picture him in it, lying on the couch while he read a paperback with the TV or radio on, sometimes both. That was always how he read.