In the apartment where we lived after they sold the house my mom and dad slept on a mattress on a box spring in the living room. There was a fifth of Jack Daniels and two glasses upside-down on the bedside table—actually an old door on cinder blocks that held books, the stereo, the 12-inch, black-and-white family TV. Every night they’d have a nightcap like this was a motel and they’d bought the bottle from a liquor store on the other side of the highway on-ramp. But it was home.