I’d lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old town house, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don’t remember seeing him after that.

My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down, and then waiting for our landlord.

He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he’d been meaning to put down new tiles and spraysulate the walls anyway. “You go ahead and tear out the old stuff,” he told my mom. “Stack it behind the house, and I’ll have it hauled away. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . .”

“I told you, I already mailed it,” Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.

So Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the Sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the gray block walls. That was as far as the remodeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.