Free While the City Slept by Eli Sanders Page B

how she remembers all the different drinks. She tells him she’s just making the same thing for everyone. It’s 2006, a time when better-paying jobs are easy to find if she can just get herself together. Eventually, she does, landing work at a company that manages office buildings all over the world, including some in downtown Seattle.
    Her new co-workers adore her, the confident Teresa returns, and she decides to make another change. She sells her condo in Renton, takes the $80,000 in equity she’s amassed during the hot housing market, and buys a small red house in South Park, a much shorter drive to work. The house isn’t her first choice, but this is 2007, the height of a real estate bubble that’s been inflating for years now, fueled by unsustainable calculations made in rarefied neighborhoods on the other side of the country, neighborhoods about as unlike South Park as one can find. She’s already been outbid about a dozen times on homes in other parts of the city, and if she wants a house with a yard, which she does, and if she wants to hold to her beliefs about not incurring unreasonable debt, which she does, then this is what she can afford: a $286,000 home with two bedrooms, a yard, a ball field nearby, and a river a few blocks away.
    The yard is tiny, the ball field is no Carondelet Park, and the river is a Superfund site. Still, Teresa feels intense pride. She walks people through the place, saying, “I know it’s not much, but it’s mine.” She sticks a GeorgeBush magnet to her fridge, a totem of the small-business Republican politics she’s inherited from her father. She thrills at meeting her new neighbors and having old friends over for dinner. She sets to work on the yard, which her father comes out to help clear. “It was nasty,” he says.
    Because secrets do not keep long in families with eleven children, Norbert senior now knows Teresa is having relationships with women. He keeps his mouth shut and gets to clearing weeds. “We just never really got into it,” he says.

14
    J ennifer stays in the gospel choir even after the split with Ann, and Ann laughs at how Jennifer is now becoming more popular at her former church than she ever was. Jennifer thinks, “I’m singing a lot. It’s on my terms. It may not be my career, but this feels pretty good.” She gets a new apartment and a new desk job and then, after a time, ends up moving back into the Park Slope building she and Ann used to share, buying a studio there with help from Ann and from her grandmother in Seattle.
    She gets into another relationship, of a sort, this one surprising to her and disappointingly one-sided, an extended crush she’s developed on a handsome Orthodox Jewish guy. Still open to all kinds with the right qualities, Jennifer has found herself drawn to him after “incredible conversations about God, and light—and straight in the eyes.” Conversations about mind, body, spirit. “Things that I’m a sucker for,” she says.
    By 2006, the housing bubble that followed the dot-com crash that followed the tech bubble is well inflated—close to bursting, though few people are focused on the possibility. With her relationship with the Orthodox Jew going nowhere, Jennifer isn’t sure what’s left for her in New York except the studio apartment in Brooklyn. When she purchased it, monthly payments for the $120,000 mortgage were cheaper than if she’d been paying rent, and now the place sells for $265,000, more than double the purchase cost. She repays Ann and moves back to Seattle in the summer of 2006, thinking, “Maybe I’ll meet a nice Jewish guy there.”
    —
    She meets a Catholic lesbian instead.
    Not at first, though. First, she gets on JDate and goes out with a few nice guys. Nothing much happens. She lives again with her grandmother, who’s in her nineties now and getting sick. It feels good to be able to help the woman who helped her when she needed it in childhood, and it feels good to be near her mother,