Welcome To The Peeg House- -

“How much for the first month?” he heard himself ask.

Cheap was the only word that mattered. He’d spent his last seventy dollars on a bus ticket to this city, and the shelter had turned him away for the third time. So when the old woman with the milky eye and the lavender perfume had pressed the flyer into his hand at the depot, he hadn’t asked questions. He’d just followed the address. Welcome to the Peeg House-

Then he walked inside.

That’s what the faded, hand-painted sign said, nailed crookedly above a narrow door wedged between a pawnshop and a laundromat. The letters were cheerful—curly serifs, a little sunburst dotting the ‘i’—but the effect was anything but. The wood was rain-streaked. The brass handle was tarnished the color of a bad memory. “How much for the first month