Now leo says that of course we will get together again. He calls me on the telephone from seven-eleven parking lots long-distance and says that he loves me and he sends me a hundred dollars a month to keep his name on the mailbox, he in fact spends great parts of his poet-in-the-schools money to drive from galveston to dallas for weekends of love-making and whispered reassurances and barbequed chicken crowded around the little kitchen table with me and the three kids like he is simply a commuting husband and this family is really his. And at first he comes almost every weekend and his hundred-dollar share of the rent comes on the first of the month. But as the fall wears into winter he doesn’t come so much, and the money still comes but it’s coming later and later, too late to cover the rent, so that by spring I realize that I have got to stop counting on it, the rent is going to have to come from me. Me the sometimes writer. Me the new-born bookstore clerk. And me the mother with the asset of morgani the working son, he does pay his part of the rent, too. And so the household lurches along paying its bills on minimum wage and money that sometimes appears in the mail — homage to love from leo and occasional checks from newspaper accounting offices rewarding me for using my time to write commercially viable articles on choosing melons in the supermarket and growing indoor palms instead of wasting my skills on stories and poems which do not sell.
