Julie Rowden picks up her child, Timmer, from school last March.
Chapter One
She looks around her apartment, with its television and sagging couch and small kitchen table. The apartment is the same as most others at the Block: cramped kitchen, cramped living room, and two bedrooms (a handful of the apartments have three). She makes a point of keeping it clean — Julie habitually apologizes to company for the disarray, even when things are neat — but between her job training as a nursing assistant at Hanover Terrace Healthcare and the demands of her 5-year-old child, Timothy, whom she calls Timmer, it can be hard to keep the place as clean as she would like.
Julie is a matronly, 45-year-old woman with brown eyes and long hair dyed jet-black. She speaks with the mountain twang of the places she has lived: Montana, Arizona, northeastern California. While she's not from around here, Julie is the sort of tenant one meets often at the Block: a single mother, struggling to navigate the challenges of childrearing and poverty. Most of the time, Julie meets those challenges with a no-nonsense stoicism. Even on the bad days, she is patient, even-tempered, quick to joke or to smile.
But Julie does like to sing sad songs.
She sits before her desktop computer and opens a karaoke Web site. She chooses her song: Crying in the Chapel. As the desperate, yearning melody strikes up, Julie croons along, her intonation as husky and powerful as a country roadhouse singer's.
You'll search and you'll search/ but you'll never find
No way on earth/ To gain peace of mind...
Julie's sister, Cheryl Goodman, stands over her right shoulder. Cheryl sings along in a softer voice. Timmer, who has been sitting on the floor watching television, begins to squirm on the carpet, smiling, momentarily caught up in the rapture of the women's song.
After a while, Cheryl wants something more upbeat.
"What she likes in country I don't like," Cheryl explains. "She likes all that s--- about the girl going to school all battered and bruised."
"Hey," Julie says. "It reminds me of growin' up."
Outside, daylight is slanting sideways, mellowing to a golden sheen. Below Julie's balcony, in the Block's parking lot, a woman stands with her arms spread out, screaming at someone on an upper floor. A man stomps to the edge of his back porch, pointing and screaming back. The substance of the argument is hard to make out, but it seems to be something about a dog.
The disembodied voice of an unseen commentator, amused and resigned, drifts up from the balcony below Julie's: "Just another day at the Block."