Nine hundred dollars a month, on the first, from people who had never once been late.

I want to write down what the first six months in that house were actually like, because the version of this story that circulates in my family has a montage in it, and there was no montage.

Sam regressed.

He had been dry at night for two years and he stopped being, for four months, and he did not want to go to his father’s every other weekend, and then one weekend he did want to go and did not want to come home, and both of those were awful in different ways.

Nina, who was nine, became extremely helpful.