From chapter one:

She's old enough, at thirty-six, to remember flashes of other places, other lives, but her son is only eight years old, which means he was born right here in the Blinds. She was four months pregnant one the day she arrived, her secret just starting to show. If the intake officer noticed, he didn't say anything about it as he sat her down at a folding table in the intake trailer and explained to her the rules of her new home. No visitors. No contact. No return. The he taught her how to properly pronounce the town's official name--Caesura, rhymes with tempura, he said--before telling her not to worry too much about it since everyone just calls it the Blinds.

Caesura.

A bad name, she thought then and thinks now with too many vowels and in all the wrong places. A bad name for a bad place, but then what real choice did she have?

Reclining now at two a.m. on the wooden steps of her front porch, she pulls out a fresh pack of cigarettes. The night is so quiet that unwrapping the cellophane sounds like a faraway bonfire. As she strips the pack, she looks over the surrounding blocks of homes with their rows of identical cinder block bungalows, each with the same slightly elevated wooden porch, the same scrubby patch of modest yard. Some people here maintain the pretense of giving a shit, planting flowers, mowing grass, keeping their porches swept clean, while others let it all grow wild and just wait for whatever's coming next. She glances down the street and counts the lights still on at this hour: two, maybe three households. Most everyone else is sleeping. Which she should be, too. She definitely shouldn't be smoking.

Well, she doesn't smoke, she tells herself, as she pulls a cigarette free from the pack