“I know you work very hard, Bawbaw. All the days and almost all the nights of the week.”

I look at my son, at his brown eyes that on a woman would be beautiful, and in Farsi I thank him for his apology and for the tea, and I tell to him he must begin preparing his room for moving.

Today, on the freeway crew of garbage soldiers, we work the southbound lanes of Route 101 where it runs along the tall evergreen trees of the Golden Gate Recreational Area. I wear my new blue hat all the day long but of course the morning fog never lifts and I wish for a light sweater. At the lunch break I eat quickly beside Tran, then rise to speak with Torez as he sits behind the wheel of his truck, the door open very wide, as he studies one of those odd crossword grids in the newspaper. I stand there a moment until it becomes clear to me I am standing at attention. I discipline myself to relax my shoulders and speak.

“After today I will no longer be working here, Mr. Torez.”

He completes writing a word with his pencil, then he looks up and says: “You tell the office, Coronel?”

“No.”

“So why tell me, man?” He regards his newspaper. “You know another word for hurricane?”

I return to Tran and my tea and I have a wish to tell the Vietnamese goodbye, but when I point to my chest then to the road, he smiles and nods his head as if I were telling to him a very old and humorous story.

And now it is evening at the convenience store and my legs are heavy, my eyes are beginning to water from fatigue, but I am filled with cheer as I work my very last shift. Rico, the young man working beside me, has always possessed the habit of chewing gum which on other evenings bothered me a great deal—that nasty sound it makes in the mouth—but tonight this is not the case; none of the usual irritants have their power over me, not the bright fluorescent lighting over all the shelves of overpriced boxed and canned food; not the university students who enter with their stupid smiles after drinking too much beer to purchase chocolate bars and cigarettes; not even when people hand to me a gasoline credit card and I have to use the cumbersome machine beneath the magazine display rack; and even those kaseef and dirty magazines of naked women on their covers, which I have always despised having to touch or sell, even they cannot upset me as they have so many times before. Because this I know of life’s difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.

But many nights after many long days in America, I have forgotten God and thought only of my troubles, of the manner of jobs I was forced to work here, jobs I would not have assigned a soldier under me back in my old life. Here I have worked in a tomato cannery, an auto wash, a furniture warehouse, a parking lot, two gasoline stations, and finally the highway department and this convenience store. Yes, I have earned enough to slow our spending, but each check cashed felt to me like one less bone and muscle in my back, those a man needs in order to stand straight.

My young colleague and I close the store promptly at one in the morning. We lock the evening’s receipts into the small safe in the rear office, and we post our inventory sheet for the day gentleman before removing our paychecks from the coin drawer of the register. We lock the doors and walk beneath the light over the gasoline pumps to our vehicles, and to the young man I only say, “Good night, Rico,” nothing more, and as I drive my Buick Regal down San Pablo Avenue beneath the streetlights so early in the morning, my body feels sewn into the car seat with tiredness, but I nod five times to the east and thank God, my mouth beginning to tremble, for the freedom He has granted me once again, for the return of the dignity I was beginning to believe I would never recover.

FRIDAY WAS THE BEST AND WORST DAY SO FAR. IT WAS BEST BECAUSE I worked it straight through, cleaning my normal residential plus the reservoir house job and the pediatric office I’d skipped the day before. There was a fog bank pushing in from the beaches and on another day it could’ve sent me over the edge, the way it covers the town in gray, but Friday I just tuned it out and cleaned with more energy than I’d had in a long time.

My customers leave me a key in their mailbox or under a rock on their lawn, which means no one is ever there except for a dog or cat, and I can work alone and fast, chewing gum and listening to the Walkman I keep clipped to my shorts; Nick’s old tapes mostly, loud fast rock that keeps me moving at a good pace and keeps me from thinking too much. When I woke up early Friday morning at the El Rancho, I made up my mind I was going to stop wallowing in my problem and start concentrating on the solution instead. I had to turn it over to Connie Walsh. She was my lawyer. By the time I was dressed, I’d convinced myself I’d hear something positive by the end of the day about getting my house back. So instead of booking my room through the weekend, I went down to the office and paid another thirty-one dollars for Friday night only.

I got back to the motel just before the end-of-the-work-week traffic heated up on the freeways. My arms, legs, and lower back were tired out, and my sweat had dried three times on my skin, but before I took a shower I called Legal Aid and Gary had me wait on the line almost five minutes before Connie Walsh picked it up: “I’m sorry, Kathy, but evidently the county has already sold your house.”

I stood still and took short, dry breaths. “What? How?”

“The auction date’s been set for months, Kathy; that was in the mail you’ve been throwing away.” I pictured my mother’s round face, her eyes dark and flat-looking. I heard my brother Frank, who told me and Nick the house was ours as far as he was concerned; he might want his half in twenty years, but hey K, One Day at a Time, right? Then I felt the tears come, my stomach twisting up. “Those motherfuckers.”

“Can you get that to me Monday morning, Kathy?”

“What?”

“Your copy of the tax statement. Hopefully I’ll have their paperwork by then, and we can go from there, all right?”

Connie Walsh was quiet on the other end. I wiped my nose and asked her what she was planning to do.

“Just what I said, Kathy. We’ll demand they rescind the sale or we file a lawsuit against the county.” She said not to worry too much, then reminded me to get that paperwork to her Monday morning.

I spent the first part of the night in the steel storage shed across the street looking for the signed tax statement from the county. But it was already too dark to see much, and I didn’t have a flashlight, so I drove to a convenience store on the other side of the freeway to get one. The streets were fogged in and the air was wet and too cool for shorts. Back in the shed I found one of Nick’s old sweatshirts and pulled it on. It was black-and-white with the logo of a band he used to play bass for years ago. It was clean so didn’t smell like him, but I could still picture him in it, lying on the couch while he read a paperback with the TV or radio on, sometimes both. That was always how he read.

After over an hour going through my boxes and bags, my neck stiff from holding the butt of the flashlight between my chin and chest so I could use both hands, I almost gave up when I remembered my trunk. I pulled two full trash bags off it, then lifted the heavy wooden lid. Inside were things I hadn’t even looked at since moving west: old clothes and shoes, towels and blankets, a dozen rock albums from high school—mainly the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers, but no paperwork.