"Mo-om," he protested. "You could leave the car running. Nobody's going to steal it."

Wasn't that the truth. She opened her mouth. Transformed I've been smelling something since we left Ohio, and I'm afraid we have another exhaust leak into, "Fresh air will do her good."

"Fresh air," Hudson said, with all the scorn a nine-year-old could muster. "We've had two windows wide open since we got into New York."

"They're an inch open. Stop complaining." She leaned over the seat and shook Geneva gently. "Wake up, baby girl." Considered, as she wrestled her groggy daughter into her sweater, how much time and effort she took, every day, to avoid saying We can't afford that. The bag of toys and books from Goodwill. The Styrofoam box of sandwich fixings and no-name sodas. The tote filled with books on CD-which she had to mail back to the Glendale Public Library. All so that when she heard Can we go to Toys 'R' Us? Can I get a book? Can we stop at McDonalds? Can we rent a DVD player? she had a plausible answer. Something that wasn't we can't afford it.

For a moment, the outside didn't feel too cold. Then, as she waited for Hudson to finish saving his game, she could feel it against her bare skin and her hair, seeping in through her jeans and her sweater. She wondered if the frog-boiling analogy worked the other way. If you started out at normal temperature and it gradually got colder and colder, would you even notice when you froze to death? She shivered. This was where she had brought her children to, this cold place her own mother had abandoned at eighteen, never to return. Now she was doing the opposite, turning her back on the world and everyone who knew her.