Still, he usually waited for me in the garage when I worked late and drove us both home. He’d negotiated a five-dollar raise with Peter, never mentioning me. He wanted to save up enough for a down payment in three years, which was, he said, around when he wanted to marry Isabel. My stomach hurt at the thought. I imagined it: my friends peeling off one by one to fall in actual love, buying three-bedroom houses in far-off suburbs, growing too busy to call. While I, either alone or in some airless marriage with a paid-for man, would crawl from bed to bed in the dark like a cockroach.
