The alarm went off at 5:47. Not 5:45, not 5:50. Forty-seven, because the digital clock had been stuck on that number since the power outage last winter and Mary Ellen had never bothered to reset it. It didn't matter. The alarm sounded the same whether it said 5:45 or 5:47 or 7 o'clock in the afternoon. It was an alarm. That was what it did.

She reached for it with her left hand while keeping her right arm draped over the space where her son's head was buried under the blankets. Kevin was fourteen now. Heavy sleeper. Like his father — not that Frank had slept in this house in eighteen months.

The apartment smelled like last night's garlic bread and the radiator's perpetual dust-burning. She sat up, swung her feet onto the carpet that had been beige once and was now the color of something you'd find under a coffee machine if you hadn't cleaned behind it in three years.

"Mom?" Kevin mumbled without opening his eyes. "What time is it?"

"Early," she said. "Early means early."

The kitchen was where she spent most of her mornings — making instant coffee because she couldn't afford the good stuff and the cheap stuff from Wal-Mart tasted like burnt dirt, which was fine because dirt was what she was around.

Frank called at 3 AM last night. She knew it was Frank because her phone lit up with a number she had blocked twice and unblocked twice and would probably block a third time and unblock a third time before this month was over. She didn't answer. She just looked at the screen and thought about how he used to call at 3 AM when they were first married — not to fight, not to ask for money, but to tell her something ridiculous he'd seen on the news. There used to be warmth in those calls. Now there was only the flat electronic hum of someone who has used up all his dignity and is checking to see if there's any left in you.

By noon she was behind the counter at Wal-Mart, scanning items. A woman with three children and a cart full of things she couldn't afford asked her if the coupons were still good. Mary Ellen looked at the expired coupon, looked at the woman's children, looked back at the coupon, and said, "I don't know. Let me check with my manager."

Her manager was a twenty-two-year-old named Brittany who was studying something that wasn't anything. Mary Ellen knew she was saying no before Brittany even picked up the phone. But the woman needed the forty cents off the laundry detergent, and Mary Ellen needed to believe that she still had the authority to deny things.

At lunch she sat in the parking lot and ate a sandwich her neighbor Ray had made for her. Ray's husband had left two weeks ago — took the good coffee maker and left the chipped mugs. Ray was strong in the way that women like her are strong: not the strength of someone who lifts heavy things, but the strength of someone who carries heavy things every day and doesn't announce it to anyone.

"You should close the shop," Ray said, watching her eat. "The one you want. The barbershop."

"I'm forty-one," Mary Ellen said. "People my age don't start over."

"People your age are dying," Ray said. "What's the difference?"

Mary Ellen didn't have an answer to that. Because it was true. People her age were dying — not literally, though some of them were — but the version of themselves that believed in easy things was dying, and what was left was something harder and less pretty and more real than anything she had ever been.

Frank came to the house the next day while she was at work. Left a note on the kitchen counter: "Hey. Had an accident. Car hit a patch of ice. Didn't hurt bad. Call me."

She read the note, put it in the junk drawer between expired coupons and battery-dead remote controls, and went to work.

When she came home that night, she called him. He answered on the first ring.

"Hey," he said. And then, after a pause: "I'm sorry."

"For what?" she asked, though she knew.

"For everything. I guess."

She looked at the wall of her kitchen — the one with the water stain that looked like Florida if you squinted — and she thought about saying something cruel. Something that would cut. Something that would make him feel, for one brief moment, what she had felt when he drove away and took his good coffee maker and left her with chipped mugs and a daughter who asked why daddy didn't come home anymore.

But she didn't say anything cruel. She said: "Okay."

Just "okay." Not forgiveness. Not rejection. Just the flat acknowledgment of a fact that had already happened.

"I'm going to close the shop," she told Ray two days later.

Ray was sitting on her porch, drinking beer out of a can she'd already opened. "Which shop? The one you haven't opened yet?"

"The one I haven't opened yet."

Ray took a long drink. Looked at her. Looked away. Looked back. "Why?"

"Because it's a stupid idea."

"Yeah," Ray said. "It is."

They sat on the porch for a while, watching a dog walk by with nothing better to do. That was Mary Ellen's life now — not a revenge story, not a rags-to-riches story, not any of the stories she used to imagine when she was young enough to believe that stories had beginnings, middles, and endings that made sense.

Her life was a dog walking by with nothing better to do.

And somehow, watching it go, she thought — maybe that's enough.

Not enough for a story. Not enough for a dream.

But enough.