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my father’s wheezing a counterpoint from in front of the television. The mirror was always sitting atop her bureau, propped against the wall.
    They’d given me low expectations, all those places. All I wanted was a house that felt like home, where the furniture matched, where the carpet was clean and a color I liked. I wanted to sit in a big chair in a den somewhere, with my feet up on an ottoman, and look around and think: this is my home. I wanted to be able to picture myself in that same room thirty years in the future, with my kids grown and my grandchildren babies and the smell of my cooking so familiar that no one even noticed it anymore. It didn’t seem like too much to ask, and there was a while there, with Bobby, when I thought I had it nailed. I’d had a neighbor who kept the key to my house in case I locked myself out, a butcher who knew that I wanted loin of pork with the bone out, a school at the end of the street, a climbing rose working its way up the supports of the deck out back. I’d had roots. I knew how deepthey’d gone.
    Knew it so powerfully when we stepped into that fugitive apartment, my boy and I, my eyes burning as we stood on the threshold. It was not an anonymous apartment, this narrow duplex somewhere in central Florida, miles and miles from the coast. That would have been bad enough. It was, like those others where I’d spent the years before I married Bobby, redolent of the lives of dozens upon dozens of strangers who’d smoked cigarettes, fried chicken, taken showers, slept late, risen early. It was a transient place, right down to the ubiquitous sound of the tap dripping into the scarred stainless-steel sink. When I entered that apartment I hated Bobby Benedetto with a ferocity I had never allowed myself to feel while I was living with him. I hated him on behalf of my lost life, on behalf of my bedspread and dust ruffle, my landscape over the couch and my guest towels in the powder room. Forced back into the rootless life I thought I’d left behind when I married him, I hated him so that, in that moment, I thought if we ever met again, I’d be just as likely to murder him as he me.
    But after two weeks the feeling dulled, and I kept thinking I should count my blessings. Isn’t that what Daddy always said, coughing in his recliner, when I complained about not being able to go away to college or take a job at the beach with my girlfriends in the summers because then Grace would have no one to look out for her? Count your blessings. My nose no longer hurts. The bleeding has stopped. And four doors down in the horseshoe of our little apartment court is a family named Castro, and among their five children is a ten-year-old boy who has mastered the sixth level of Double Dragon, whatever that is. “You know the finishing move?” Bennie Castro asked Robert the third horriblybright morning we had been there. The games kept them grounded, so that Robert was either upstairs or on the front steps, he and Bennie shoulder to shoulder bent together over the flickering screen. Bennie has two sisters, twelve and four, and brothers who are seven and five, and it is a great luxury for him to be almost alone, with no siblings demanding his attention or his toys. So every day now he comes to our apartment and he and Robert sit upstairs, the ninjas punching one another incessantly. Mrs. Castro just smiles and nods and says in pidgin English that this is very nice of me and acts as though there is nothing noteworthy about the fading bruises on my face. With her round cheeks, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, her Tasmanian Devil T-shirt and dimpled knees, she seems younger than any of her children. “Good boy,” she says, nodding at my son.
    Occasionally the two boys go outside to ricochet around the quadrangle of stunted grass and cement, and I stand guard and watch their every move, flushed and sweating in the Florida heat. Sandy, the youngest Castro, shadows them as Gracie once did me, running