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CHAPTER ONE 

CASS

There's a Shell gas station across the street. That was the first thing I noticed when I moved here because I arrived at dusk and the sign's S was burned out. As I approached the motel, the only thing I could see on the dusty horizon was the word HELL lit up in orange and yellow, which seems appropriate once you get to know the area. I only saw the sad S hanging off the billboard by a hinge and swinging ominously as I got closer, and I wish to God that I took it as an omen and turned around.

There are a few other landmarks on this desolate stretch of two-lane highway between The Sycamores apartments and the good side of town—an Arby's, a Motor Inn, Larry's liquor store, some strip malls with hand-painted signs, and Teaser's Gentlemen's Club.

I shuddered when I saw this dump that's now my home. It used to be a motel, and they didn't even change the name. It's three strips of two-story building connected in a U shape, with a dumpy pool in the middle. They renovated the motel rooms to be apartments...sort of. They are now slightly-better-than-a-shitty-motel-style apartments with a couple bedrooms, but they didn't even change out the paisley carpet or burgundy drapes. I literally gasped when I first laid eyes on the semen-stained bedspread in my fully furnished oasis.

Room 10. It used to be apartment 100, but one of the zeros is missing, and in its place is a gash that looks like someone once took a machete to it, but I don't ask questions. It's the smallest apartment and sits adjacent to the boiler room, so now I'm Cass from room 10. It's so pathetic the others don't even consider it an apartment.

I'm used to it now. The shock wore off weeks ago, and here I still am, just after Christmastime, curled up in front of my window with a Brandy Alexander, watching sleet tap the icy pool water's surface with a backdrop of Barry from number 206 trying to jump-start his pickup in the parking lot.

I think I'll start to cry again, so I close the hideous drapes and sit in front of my laptop at the table. The tears don't come. Today is one of those numb days, as it turns out.

I can't really predict what I'll get from day to day. Sometimes it's the impossibly sad version of myself who will sit for half a day scrolling through my ex's social media sites to torture myself with images of him and my replacement, Kimmy. What sort of grown woman calls herself Kimmy? Sometimes the Diazepam works, and I feel the emptiness of it all in a different way—the pain presents as a dull ache around the edges, but I can function, put one foot in front of the other, offer a thin smile when I pass people, sometimes even a nod hello so I appear relatively normal. Whichever version of myself shows up from day to day, I don't forget for a second that Kimmy is living in my four-bedroom house in Santa Fe, and I'm in this dumpster fire of an apartment complex outside town. With nothing.

It all unfolded too fast for me to explain why I'm even here. I was being kicked out. I wasn't just being cheated on and left but was actually displaced from my home with nowhere to go, so in my desperation, and after scrolling through dozens of cheap short-term apartment ads that someone with no job can't afford, I answered a want ad for this place because they needed someone to do the apartment cleaning and light repairs in exchange for free rent.

In my old life, you couldn't pay me to stay here for one night. But that life is so far away it's like it never happened—like leftover wisps of a dream you try to hold on to and remember when you wake up, but they float through your fingers. When I saw the ad, I took it, because what choice did I really have?

A red flag, my dad said. "A man who doesn't believe in marriage but will live with ya and play house. Reddest of all the reddy-red flags, Cass."

I argued it was noble because Reid thinks marriage is a sexist construct and we don't need a piece of paper to prove our love. My dad sprayed his sip of beer out through his nose on that one.

And he was right about it all. I have no protection now. I didn't work the last few years because that was how we both liked it—I was able to volunteer and cook my way through Julia Child's cookbook like someone in a movie.

He liked the way it looked, that he was a bigwig Realtor who could support us both, and he liked his crpe suzette and quiche lorraine ready to eat when he got home. It worked. There is nothing wrong with that, I told myself.

And then it stopped working. And I have no job or money, and although I think I had every right to punch him in the back of the head when I discovered them at a restaurant together—discovered he was cheating—with my own eyes, I made it worse because there were no late-night crying arguments or discussions about how we'd get through this—no sobbing apologies or denials on his part, begging me to stay and telling me it didn't mean anything. Just an eviction and a cold shoulder. After six years together, it was over just like that.