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have to take a loss to sell it, so I didn’t feel like it was worth it to admit to Leo I was wrong about staying, to let on how frustrating I found my day-to-day life and that I held the apartment responsible.
    Still, I loved our street. Someone once told me that Morton Street is the most photographed street in New York. I have no idea if that’s true, but at certain times of day, it is breathtaking. In a city of straight lines and rectangles, Morton is one of the few with a bend, which allows the street to reveal itself slowly. With its low trees and stately town houses, it’s quintessential West Village. Also, it’s magically quiet. The crowds of
Sex and the City
tourists that can ruin Charles or Perry streets on a Saturday morning seem worlds away, though they are only a few blocks over.
    It seemed unfair—impossible, even—that these two things Iloved so much—my kids and my apartment—didn’t go together at all. I wanted to sit them all down and say, “Can’t you all just try to get along, for my sake?”
    Upstairs, I stuck Sid’s letter into a book under my bed and helped the boys negotiate the bathroom. I didn’t need to open my refrigerator to know that we had nothing to eat. Still, I was poking through its contents in search of the source of an awful stench when Leo returned from his second trip up the stairs with our luggage.
    “Blech. This has got to go,” I said, plunking the loosely wrapped morsel of soft stinky cheese into the trash and tying it up.
    “Fair enough,” he said, grabbing the trash from me. “Hudson?”
    “Yeah, let’s go. I’m starved,” I said, and began herding the boys back out the door.
    The Hudson Diner wasn’t known for its food, but it was right around the corner and never crowded, so we could usually get a big booth by the window. There was something about that place that had a calming effect on the boys. Maybe it was the smell of gravy, the dim orange fluorescent lighting, the geriatric crowd, or the giant pile of individually wrapped saltine crackers the humorless waitress always plunked in front of them as soon as we arrived, but this was the only restaurant where we could eat an entire meal and not have to apologize to a half-dozen different people on the way out.
    While the boys munched on saltines, I took out a pack of baby wipes and asked Joey if I could give his car a wash. He never went anywhere without clutching a little matchbox car. Sometimes I worried that his left hand would be permanently deformed into a little claw, and at night while he slept I’d pry his sweet little fingers away from the silver vehicle and massage his palm.
    With the car scrubbed, I reached across the table and wiped theboys’ hands clean one by one while Leo set up a windy sugar packet racetrack on the table. I cleaned my phone with a new wipe and then scrolled through Christmas pictures. “Hey, Joey, nice camera work,” I said when I got to the million shots he’d snapped at Joe and Margie’s. “Oh, bud, I love this one!” It was a shot of Sid and me sitting on the sofa, my head resting on her shoulder and both of us beaming in the completely unguarded way you do when a child asks you to smile. I posted it to Facebook and captioned it, “Good to be home but missing this gorgeous gal already.”
    It was such a nice shot that I cropped it and brightened it and made it my profile picture. By the time the food arrived, I’d accumulated forty-some likes and nearly as many comments from old friends who hadn’t seen Sid in many years—virtually or otherwise.
    I had to put my phone away when Joey spilled his water, and I spent the rest of dinner preoccupied by the logistics of getting letters from here to Singapore. How long would it take? What kind of stamps would I need? Oh crap, would I have to go to the post office? That in itself could be a deal breaker.
    That night, after the boys were in bed, I got out the stepladder and rifled through the tiny cupboard above the