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could.” Mom squeezed her eyes shut when she realized she’d snapped at Jack. I could count the number of times on one hand that she had done so in his entire life. In the next instant, she spread her arms, inviting Jack to sit beside her on the cot, but Mom’s purse was slung over her shoulder and resting across her chest like an appendage. Since we’d moved into the shelter, it had never left her body. The woman on the cot closest to us was folding pants and shirts into a pile on her bed but by the way her eyelids flickered, I could tell she was totally eavesdropping, which wasn’t hard to do when the cots were spaced less than two feet apart.
    Jack reached for Mom’s hand, patting it, comforting her, as though he were forty instead of fourteen. In that split second, I saw Dad in the angle of his expression and my jaw quivered. It was bad enough that Jack had to sleep in another room with the other older boys and men. “I know, Mom,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. I’m just...I’m just not sleeping very well here.” In a smaller voice, he added, “I miss my own room.” Like Mom, he had dark circles beneath his eyes. They looked like purple bruises against his pale face but were just the result of sleep deprivation, which was what all three of us were experiencing. It was a wonder that anything intelligible spilled out of our mouths. To boot, we were wearing the same clothes—and underwear—from three days ago and mine were starting to stick to my skin in ways that I didn’t want to think about. Most of our clothes were still in bags in the back of Mom’s car, currently parked in the dirt lot behind the three-story shelter, with the gas gauge hovering above E.
    Mom exhaled. “It’s just temporary.” She opened her palm. “All of this is just temporary. Just until I can get us back on our feet again.” Then her gaze darted between us and the gray office door at the opposite side of the room. We were waiting to meet with one of the shelter’s family counselors to find out about a transitional facility not far from here.
    I didn’t like the sounds of that. Transitional? Facility? It sounded as if we were one step from prison or something. As though we’d stolen a car or robbed a bank instead of lost our house and our pride. The only thing I wanted to hear was that we could transition back home, transition to our own living room and bedrooms and family photos on the wall that Mom hung just about everywhere, where the kitchen always smelled like cinnamon. Not like old socks and strangers.
    “What about any of your friends from work, Mom?” I lowered my voice, my eyes lifting to the lady behind Mom. She kept folding and refolding the same pair of jeans. “Do you think we could stay with any of them? You know, just for a few days?”
    Mom shook her head and widened her eyes the moment the words left my mouth. “I couldn’t. It would be too...” She paused to inhale. Then she swallowed, as if she wanted to swallow her words. “Too embarrassing.” She covered her mouth with her hand and her eyebrows squeezed together in a tight line. I wished Mom would let out everything that she kept bottled up inside and just freak out, right in the middle of this gigantic room where everything echoed, so that we could get it all out in the open and then really begin to start over again. Until then we were all just pretending, pretending that we were lucky to be in this room, to have these cots. Pretending that everything would be okay and trying to force that glass-is-half-full attitude instead of taking that glass and throwing it against the wall and watching it smash into a million pieces. Because everything was a million miles from okay. Until those men showed up with their badges and drills at our house, I hadn’t realized how bad it had become. Or had I? Had I seen the signs and pretended them away?
    But I kind of knew what Mom meant. I supposed I could have called some of my friends from school, like Olivia and