affordable rental stock has been allowed to deteriorate and eventually disappear, low-income families have rushed to occupy cheap units. Nationwide, vacancy rates for low-cost units have fallen to single digits.4 Lenny’s office phone rang daily with people inquiring about availability. The phone rang before the newspeople came, and it rang after they left. The month the story aired, the trailer park had zero vacancies. “The park is filled up,” Lenny said with a chuckle. “And we still got people calling.” The rent rolls that Lenny kept for Tobin showed that in an average month only five trailers sat vacant, which would put Tobin’s vacancy rate below 4 percent.5 The high demand for the cheapest housing told landlords that for every family in a unit there were scores behind them ready to take their place. In such an environment, the incentive to lower the rent, forgive a late payment, or spruce up your property was extremely low.
—
“Figures,” Ned had mumbled past a dangling cigarette when he found out Pam was pregnant with another daughter. He had made a son once, when he was sixteen, with a Mexican girl he’d met at a ZZ Top concert. But the girl’s family blotted him out, and Ned hardly thought about that boy anymore unless “La Grange” came on the radio. “After that, maybe I got punished,” he once mused. “No more boys.” The new one would make five daughters if you counted Pam’s two black girls, which Ned sometimes did.
Pam and Ned had met in Green Bay, after Pam’s father asked Ned to tune up his Harley. Ned was ten years older than Pam, with grease under his fingernails, brown stubble, and long hair, balding in the front. He was the kind of man who took satisfaction in leaving the bathroom door open and scratching himself in public.
Pam already had two daughters: Bliss, born when Pam was twenty-three, and Sandra two years after that. Their father, a black man, was a drug dealer whom Pam had met when she was nineteen. Pam later learned that she was one of several girlfriends.
“Tell about the time that Dad hit you with a bottle and blood was coming out of your head,” Sandra once asked her mother as they drove to a food pantry. She was six when she said this.
Pam forced a sad smile. “You weren’t old enough to remember that.”
“Yes, I was,” replied Sandra. Sandra was the one who would squash a cockroach with a loose shoe while the other girls shuddered and clung to one another. She and Bliss were the only black children in the trailer park. Once, one of their neighbors hung a Nazi flag in his front window. Lenny didn’t permit that, but he was okay with the Confederate flag as long as it was displayed underneath Old Glory.
“No, you were just a baby. Now, Bliss, she was. She got so used to it. She always saw blood just pour out of me.”
Pam found a way to leave him. She began working as a certified nursing assistant, emptying bedpans, mopping up puke, and rotating the invalids to prevent bedsores. She learned how to cook pots of spaghetti and macaroni salad. Her mother had died in a car accident when Pam was in high school and had never got around to teaching her. Her father hadn’t either; he spent a lot of time in prison on drug and drunk-driving charges. Pam’s brother was doing better too. He was taking methadone and said he didn’t miss heroin.
It was a time of promise and rebirth, a time of putting one foot steadily in front of the other. Then the ground shifted beneath. One day Pam answered the phone. A voice was saying that her brother was dead. Pam asked how. The voice said overdose. He was twenty-nine. Pam screamed into the phone. Then she hung up and dialed another number to ask for something to keep her from drowning.
The words to describe the drug—“crack,” “rock”—gave off the impression that it was a gnarled, craggy thing. But when you held it in your hand, it could be smooth and elegant. It could look like a piece of Chiclets gum, the kind that slides into a child’s cupped hand out of the quarter-turn machine. All those years with the drug dealer, Pam had stayed away from it. She saw how it turned people, saw what they would do for it. But she also saw the way it helped people forget. “There was not a day that