For three years I slid a rent check under my landlord’s back door on the first of every month, and for three years not one of them ever cleared. I asked twice. Both times he said the same two words and shut the door. When I finally showed up angry enough to demand a real answer, he handed me a shoebox — and everything I thought I understood about that quiet old man came apart at his kitchen table.
When my marriage ended, I had a four-year-old, eleven hundred dollars, and a Corolla that would only turn over if you cycled the key twice and waited.
That was the complete inventory of things I could still call mine.
My name is Poppy. I was thirty-one.
I’d spent about six years believing my life was stable. Then, in under a month, my husband moved out, every bill in that house became mine alone, and every plan I’d made past the following Tuesday evaporated.
Trixie was too little to follow most of it.
What she understood was that her dad didn’t sleep at our house anymore and that her clothes were going into cardboard boxes.
“Are we going somewhere fun?” she asked, holding up a purple sweater with a unicorn on the front.
I made myself smile.
“We’re going somewhere new.”
“Will Daddy come?”
That one caught me square across the chest.
“Not today, sweetheart.”
She took that the way children sometimes do — completely, without follow-up questions — and folded that sweater into a shape that had nothing to do with folding, and set it in the box.
I turned around before she could see my face.
What Apartment Hunting Is Actually Like When You Have Nothing
I had no savings. I had a part-time front desk job at a dental office in a strip mall on Route 9. My paycheck covered groceries and gas and almost nothing else.
For about two weeks I searched for apartments after Trixie went to bed, sitting on my sister’s couch with a laptop on my knees at eleven at night.
Everything wanted first month, last month, a security deposit, proof of income at three times the rent, and a credit score I no longer had, because when a marriage comes apart the credit tends to come apart with it.
Some landlords stopped answering the second I mentioned a child.
One man asked me, in writing, whether the father was “in the picture,” and when I said no, he stopped responding entirely.