But by then I hated the house in Sound Ridge, too, hated that I was hiding in my own house, not wanting to see any of the neighbors, all the time feeling that they were watching us, talking about us, waiting for us to leave. Goodbye to all of you, I thought when we'd finally finished loading the last box and were driving through the gates for the last time. It took one full afternoon to unload our Ryder truck. Even though we'd gotten rid of three-fourths of the stuff we had, the new place still couldn't hold everything we'd kept. We ended up taking ten boxes to the basement and leaving them in the area reserved for us. "Somebody could steal this," I said to Mom. She laughed sardonically. "I wish somebody would." Daytime wasn't so bad. I kept busy painting the entire unit, top to bottom, closets to windows. But at night it was different. Sleep wouldn't come, my mind would start racing, and pretty soon I'd be seething. City housing. Why had Mom brought us here? I saw everything—the cramped rooms, the cracked bathroom tiles, the water-stained ceilings, the weedfilled lawn—through Dad's eyes.
