After all, as landlord's go, he had been sympathetic enough to appreciate her dour situation since Sandor was killed in the construction accident down south of Market Street. Then, too, her poverty was only a temporary inconvenience; the union lawyers were working overtime trying to get a court date to settle the lawsuit involving Sandor Sorenson's needless death in the explosion that rocketed him twenty feet in the air to crash on the steel beams still loaded on the flat-bed truck below. When the case was finally settled, the union lawyers anticipated a $500,000 settlement for his death, plus another $100,000 for her trauma and personal loss; that didn't include either of Sandor's two life insurance policies that would come due in two months.

When her ship came in, she'd pack up her modest belongings and buy a ticket back to Sweden where her relatives were crying for her. But that was in the future and the thirty-eight year old husbandless blonde realized she must cope with the squalor of her existence until she could free herself. She would put up with the wheezing hydraulic brakes of the city's busses that roared beneath her bedroom window, and the cockroaches that infested every openly seeping draining in the soon-to-be condemned apartment house where a conglomerate of centurians, widows, taxi drivers, hippies left over from the flower days of Haight Street, and single-parented children hovelled in the ruins of what was once an elegant place to call home. It had its amenities, too. The rent was extraordinarily cheap for San Francisco, and transportation was readily available for people like Margaret who couldn't afford a car. Then, too, the landlord would accept excuses when the rent was late, like now; or better, still, he would accept what humble labor she could offer in exchange for a place to call home.