Bemidji

There is always something of interest hidden in the dark corners beneath basement stairs. I tried not to think about the mess beneath me as I creaked down the wooden steps to the laundry room. I also tried to ignore the two blackened light bulbs overhead and the grit edging into the hole of my right sock. I went through socks faster than tissues and lately soaked through tissues at breakneck speed. It was likely all the running. And the crying. I rarely bothered summing up those unavoidable expenses. Though at the rate I was burning through my alimony, I knew I should. As I overstuffed the new energy-efficient front-loading washer, the one I bought just in the nick of time before being cut off from all the marital credit cards, I tried to tune out the tinny banging coming from the furnace, which had been fixed twice the year before and once the year before that. “Save your pennies, Mrs. Dunn. This beast won’t last,” warned the handyman who had begun servicing all my falling-apart things (the mechanical things, anyway) two years earlier after Adam, my second husband—the good one, I still believed, despite all—left. I kindly thanked the handyman for his warning, then paid no heed to his advice. I relied on luck, ignoring my grandmother’s sagacious warning that nobody ever said the luck of the Irish is good luck.