She said a woman like her deserved better.

And she slammed the door.

Almost all of that is true and it is arranged in a way that makes it a lie.

What actually happened over the eleven days between the second and the thirteenth of September 2010 is this.

We had been in trouble for about two years.

Not dramatic trouble.

I was on nights, she was doing accounts receivable at a building supply company in Stockton, and we had five children and then six, and the last one was not planned, and we had ten thousand dollars of credit card debt and a 1998 Windstar and a two-bedroom apartment with five girls in bunk beds in one room and a crib in ours.

I want to describe what that is actually like because it is the whole context.