The morning Clara Velasquez walked into Ironcrest National Bank, she had not slept in three days.
Not the restless, interrupted sleep of a person with worries and a bed to toss in, but the kind of sleeplessness that belongs to people who have nowhere to lie down without risk, who have learned to watch the dark with one eye open and one ear trained toward the sound of footsteps. She had been keeping that kind of watch for three weeks now, ever since the landlord changed the locks on a Tuesday afternoon while she was at her second job and her daughter Sofia was at school and her son Mateo was at the neighbor’s, and she had come home to find her key turning in a cylinder that no longer recognized it and a notice taped to the door in language that was legally precise and humanly devastating.
She had not told Sofia what the notice said. She had explained it as a mix-up, a problem with paperwork, something that would be sorted out in a few days. Sofia was nine years old and smart enough to know when her mother was protecting her from something, but she was also nine years old and still young enough to choose to believe the more comfortable version when it was offered. Mateo was eighteen months and understood none of it, only the cold and the disruption to his routines and the way his mother’s arms held him differently now, tighter and more continuously, as if she were afraid of what happened to children who were set down.
They had spent the first week moving between the apartments of friends, two nights here, three nights there, wearing out welcomes with the particular guilty speed of people who know they are a burden and cannot afford to stop being one. After the first week the friends began mentioning things obliquely, a cousin visiting, a roommate with allergies, a situation at work that made things complicated right now. Clara understood. She did not blame them. She took her children and went.
