How wonderful it would be, she had thought, to bring the trash out to the front sidewalk on Wednesdays for someone else to pick up and carry away. Even better, to dig up the crumbled blacktop parking lot, put in some topsoil, and plant tulips and bleeding hearts and old-fashioned varieties of roses, the kind whose scent lay heavy on the air in summer. And at the back, a row of benches under trellises covered alternately with honeysuckle and morning glories, to draw butterflies and hummingbirds. She’d stood beside the homely Dumpster for a minute, inhaling imaginary sweet-smelling air.

But her tenants’ leases promised each a parking space and a container to put their refuse in any day of the week. She had been dismayed to discover how expensive it was to rent the Dumpster, and to have it emptied weekly. And by the estimate for resurfacing the parking lot. Being a landlord wasn’t solely about collecting rents.

Now, the next morning, she sighed over her abysmal willingness to leap into things without first learning the consequences. She should have let Joe keep this moldy old building with its leaky roof, potholed parking lot, and rusty Dumpster. It was enough trouble keeping her small needlework shop from bankruptcy.

Her cat interrupted her musings by asking “A-row?” from a place between Betsy and the door. Was it time to go to work? the cat wanted to know. Sophie liked the needlework shop and yearned to spend even more hours in it. Up here, she got a little scoop of Iams Less Active twice a day. Down in the shop, ah, in the shop were potato chips and fragments of chocolate bars and who knew what other treats. Only this last Saturday, she’d garnered a paw-size hunk of bagel spread with strawberry cream cheese, which she’d sneaked into the back room and eaten to the last crumb-a pleasant victory, since her mistress had a distressing habit of snatching delicacies away before the cat got more than one tooth into them. Sophie weighed twenty-two pounds and was as determined to hang on to every ounce as her mistress was to make her svelte.