To my eye the lease agreement floated on water instead of sitting on a desk. I sat in an old railroad house turned rental agency office in Bozeman, Montana, and the night before, Mariah and I had gone to a bluegrass concert and I’d drank too much warm rye whisky. I’d run away from her on the walk back to the car and staggered into a stranger’s garage. When she finally spotted me, I swayed slackjawed in the dark doorway. I’m lucky I didn’t get shot.
We rented a house for just the two of us. A manufactured home, fabricated in Livingston and hauled over the pass in the 70s. Really just an extra wide extra-long trailer. Ours wasn’t the only trailer on the block, but it looked the worst, with aluminum siding worn bare, aluminum window frames on cracked single pane windows, and aluminum rafters up above the warped ceiling tiles. But it had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and cost $700 a month. I reveled in living in the most run-down place in the neighborhood, in spite of or because of the Montessori preschool a block away and the golf course over the fence from our backyard. On some level I knew that I didn’t need nice stuff to be happy. But I didn’t feel happy. And I didn’t know where to start.
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