Free The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

financial perdition for some months. The property was far from Eilo's house, almost beyond the outer suburbs. The suburbs broke apart and subsided into disconnected gated communities strung along the wide road, each block a mile long, and then there were gaps between the walled villages with straggly trees and enormous signs advertising future developments, the occasional enormous church or synagogue, a sprawl of outlet stores. The outlets had been far out of town when Gavin was a kid, but now the city of Sebastian had come out to meet them.
       The house on Emory Street was small and neat, the lawn an impeccable rectangle. He took a photograph of the house from the street— the camera had a maddening way of beeping when the picture was taken— and another of the freshly painted front steps with pots of roses on either side. He took unnecessary pictures of the neighborhood from his position on the front step until a woman answered the doorbell.
       "I'm Gavin Sasaki from the real estate company," he said. "I believe you spoke with my colleague Eileen earlier in the day."
       "Oh," she said. "Please, come in."
       She was polite and embarrassed, a straightforward cash for keys transaction— they settled on two thousand dollars for her and her husband to clean and vacate the premises within thirty days— and he was gone in a half-hour with a camera full of photographs. There were two more stops to make but he suddenly couldn't stand it. He pulled off the freeway and drove into a mall parking lot, turned off the ignition and sat still for a moment. Missing New York and Barbès and Karen. With the air conditioning off the heat crept in quickly, so he got out of the car and crossed the white light of the parking lot to the mall.
       There was something familiar about the place. He wandered through the Cinnabon-scented air, looking for anything that might trigger a memory, but he wasn't sure if he'd been here before or if it was just that all malls looked the same to him. He went down to the food court, bought a blueberry smoothie that tasted mostly of sugar, and found a secluded bench beside a pillar. His forehead was damp with sweat beneath his summer fedora. Halfway through the blue smoothie, his cell phone began to ring. Washed-up ex-journalist and re luctant digital photographer Gavin Sasaki contemplates the number on his cell-phone screen for just a moment before he answers.
       "How did it go?" Eilo asked.
       "Fine. I gave her two thousand dollars."
       "Good. That's perfect. You could've gone higher."
       "I know," he said. "I started at one."
       "Good work. You're going on to the other two houses?"
       "I just stopped at a mall for a minute."
       "Take your time," she said. "It's a hundred and five degrees today."
       The next two houses were easy, although the woman at the second house was crying a little. "We just didn't think it would come to this," she kept saying, and he wanted to tell her about his apartment in New York, the rain dripping silently from the bathroom ceiling and the gaping abyss of his credit-card debt, he wanted to commiserate about ruinous financial decisions and lost homes, but instead he just said "I'm sorry about all this," which was against Eilo's rules. She'd warned that apologies weakened his bargaining position.
       He reached an agreement with the tearful woman, and the drive back to Eilo's house was long and still. The heat made everything unreal. Palm trees in the distance separated from the earth and floated upward. There was something dreamlike about the movement of cars on the expressway, false lakes shimmering on the pavement ahead. He liked the solitude of driving, all these cars traveling around him with one passenger each. He wondered where Karen was at that moment. Living her life in New York or in some other city, waking each morning and putting on clothes that were unfamiliar to him, perhaps even spending time with someone else by