Free The Rest of Us: A Novel by Jessica Lott Page B

privacy, have to go out on nights when my roommates wanted to have a party. How could it have come to this? Why hadn’t I gotten further by now? Why was I still struggling alone with no one to help me or even to share my life? I thought angrily of Rhinehart, and then, despairingly, about myself and my inability to progress. How small my problems were, an apartment and my own self-image, and yet the fear was palpable that night. It felt real. It felt like a failing in me, and as I lay there, getting myself more and more worked up, my failures seemed the only truth.
    I was so alone. I wondered if my father ever felt this way. He used to pray for my mother every night before bed, even though she’d been dead for thirty years. He’d been mostly quiet about his faith, although he’d attended the Presbyterian church in town and insisted that I go to Sunday school up until sixth grade. Whenever I was struggling, he’d use a firm tone I found comforting. “If you want to talk to God, He’s always listening. He can fix anything.” I never did, and the problems always resolved themselves on their own. That night, though, I got out of bed and slid down to the floor and began talking, my hands clasped together so hard my knuckles ached. I started with a long description of my problem followed by a lot of equivocationand backtracking. Then I began speaking directly, as if my father had asked me, “What do you need?” I remembered a time in junior high school when I’d accidentally offended a girl in my math class by whispering about her failing grade, and afterwards she had scrawled the word “bitch” on my locker and was threatening to beat me up. After I’d told him about it, my father stayed up half the night writing a list of solutions that ranged from him visiting the principal to things I could say to the girl to diffuse the situation. He handed it to me in the morning, and I’d angrily rejected it. He’d scrambled to come up with something more, scratching his head underneath his cap, saying “Gosh, honey. Maybe we should call your Aunt Maryanne. Maybe she’s had an experience like this one.” Neither of us liked Aunt Maryanne—she had objected to my mother’s marrying him, a farmer, and had tried to get custody of me after she died, but he called her in Florida whenever he felt he needed a woman’s advice on a problem. What I’d done was just apologize to the girl when I saw her in class, which had been the first suggestion on my father’s list, and she’d acted like she’d already forgotten about it. I came home and told my father, and he’d said, “See—we shouldn’t have worried so much.” How blessed I’d been to have him. Maybe he was even still out there watching over me. In the end, what difference did it make if I had to share an apartment temporarily?
    •  •  •
    Marty, who was most eager to solve my problem, had mentioned my situation to his sister, who had six kids and owned a house in Staten Island with an illegal basement apartment. “Only a microwave and one of those mini-fridges, but she’s real nice and a lot of times, if everyone gets along, the tenant is invited to have dinner with the family. You may even be able to earn a little more baby-sitting.” I wondered if this arrangement, which sounded terrible to me, was my sign. Baby-sitting? Perhaps I should have been more specific. But I had seen a place on the Internet this morning that looked great—in Manhattan even, on the Upper West Side. Even though they hadn’tgotten back to me yet, I was feeling optimistic. So optimistic that I decided to cancel an appointment to see a studio in Brooklyn on the border of Bed-Stuy. It was a great price, lower than my range, but I wasn’t so sure about the neighborhood.
    “Just go,” Marty said.
    “I don’t know if I feel like going all the way out there to be disappointed.”
    “What else are you going to do this afternoon—we’re dead here. And if it doesn’t look good,