Dale would have known exactly what to think of that paper. This coming March will make two years since he passed, and I still catch myself waiting for his opinion. But the next chair was empty, and Todd was studying the salt shaker as if it had said something clever. My Social Security check is $1,640 a month, and I didn’t need a pencil. They were asking for nearly half of it, in exchange for a room with a window barely bigger than a cake pan and a dehumidifier muttering in the corner.
“Could I take another look at the room?” I asked. We went down thirteen stairs, and Sadie bumped down on her bottom one step at a time because she insisted on coming along. The air at the bottom smelled of wet cardboard and laundry soap. The dehumidifier hummed, and the cake-pan window showed a square of dead grass. Sadie, who is four, took my hand and looked up with perfect seriousness. “Grandma, are you going to sleep in the underneath?” “Maybe, sweetheart,” I said. “We’ll see.”
