The money ran out in August.
I had sold everything I could sell. My clothes, my jewelry, the car. I had moved out of the Beacon Street apartment and into a studio in a neighborhood I had never been to before, on the other side of the harbor, where the rent was cheap and the walls were thin and the neighbors played music at night.
I got a job at a bookstore.
It was not a job anyone in my family would have understood. I shelved books and rang up customers and made coffee in the back room, and I learned the names of the regulars, and I learned how to tell when a book was going to sell and when it was not.
I was terrible at it at first. I had never worked. I had never had a boss. I had never had to be somewhere at nine and stay there until five. My body hurt. My feet hurt. I came home ever
