In the photo Andrew had texted, the little brick house looked out of another time. Just call me June Cleaver, I’d captioned the shot when I’d sent it to my oldest friend, Reina. In person, though, the 1940s home looked more like it had been forgotten entirely, the front lawn patchy, no shrubs or flowers bordering the foundation, not even a small porch to sit on. I hadn’t realized that I’d hoped for these things, but I’d lost an apartment next to a reliable subway line in the only city I had ever loved. A porch swing would have softened the blow.

“Maybe we should have gone with base housing?” I asked Andrew, who was standing next to me on our new driveway in the dusk. I didn’t have a driver’s license, had never had a need for one in New York City, so he’d driven all one thousand miles here. Over the course of two days, we’d had six hours of sleep and lukewarm showers at a Motel 6 in southern Virginia, but he looked untouched by exhaustion, his dark hair combed perfectly into place.

“Trust me, at my rank, it would’ve been worse,” he said, rolling up the back door of our U-Haul. “Plus, this place is $700 a month. We get to pocket a little bit of that BAH.” He looked at me with a mischievous grin, the evening light catching the flecks of gold in his green eyes, and I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to live in a house. We had never lived in a house before.

The Army issued you a “basic allowance for housing” to cover rent and utilities, calculating the amount allotted by looking at the cost of living in your area, your rank, and whether you had any dependents. Ours was $1,100 a month. After utilities, we probably wouldn’t be pocketing much. Still, I could not get over this number. $700. That had been my rent for a basement bedroom in Brooklyn when I was twenty-one. My view had been a brick wall.