She and Leo and the kids are living in the bookstore basement. Pearl is just fourteen and getting beautiful, swinging between the woman and her ex-husband. Pearl’s father has a respectable middle-class house, along with a new wife and new babies. The bookstore basement is dark and the air is bad and the neighborhood is criminal. The woman had hoped to find a new place before Pearl came for the summer. But there she is anyway. And Leo is indifferent, as usual. He can live anywhere when he doesn’t have to work too much.