In the small inadequate car, I leave her. The door shuts before I can peek inside, and I chitchat with a mother like me, one from across town. Dented version of my car, parked on the wrong side of the street. The flakes barely fallen, we talk about cancelled plans, rushed grocery trips, piano lessons that neither of us can really afford.

Three hours pass in my tiny house, new orchid stretching for the blocked sun as the storm blows in. My two remaining girls curl up reading and bicker and settle for Wii stress relief while I attempt, and fail (motherhood steals this from you) to take a nap.

We gather our bags and respond to my mother’s text: Yes, we’re still bringing them. We have to get Riona anyway and Bruce wants to try out the new four-wheel-drive car in this crazy snow.

A man hovers on the porch as we arrive, my outfit transformed to fit the sleek style of the neighborhood. Silver lining, heated leather seats, I open the iron gate and walk up the concrete steps. He peers at me, cell phone in hand, sheepish, as if he’d heard me mutter to my husband, “Is that some kid’s dad waiting for the exact moment of the party ending before he rings the bell?”

Beside him, leaning against a column on this masterpiece of a house, is a bag full of knives small enough to fit in eight-year-olds’ hands. “I was the chef for the party,” he explains, as if I’d asked him. “I’m just waiting for my ride.”

“Yes, I understand,” I want to reply. “This three-thousand-foot home certainly isn’t large enough to accommodate your wait time.”

Instead I ring the doorbell and smile as if I make conversations like this every day.

“Thank you so much for allowing your daughter to come to Emily’s half birthday!” Her mother coos as I enter. She begins to gather homemade cupcakes, rice noodles, Rio’s coat. I peek. An entryway. Hardwood until there’s no forest left. A wingback chair at the head of the twelve-person dining table. A parlor, just like back in good old Victorian England. A stairway to heaven with a hand-carve handrail. And these beautiful cupcakes with multicolored frosting and a mother who can’t take the time to bake, handed over with a hand-colored chef’s hat and goody bag full of Nerds that will spill all over our new car.

“Are you moving?” I ask, having noticed the For Sale sign propped up in front. “Well, we’re thinking about it. We found our dream house! And you know, the market is great right now for sellers, so we’re seeing what will happen.” I have no response for this. If this is the shit-hole, I wonder what the dream house looks like?

We make our way across town. He speeds up because we’ve been driving a 1998 Hyundai Accent for far too long. I have the leather baking my thighs, and the girls are all spread out in three rows of candy-induced lethargy. On the city streets that take us from the south side to the north side, we see a bus angled into an intersection, having tried to brake on a hill, failed, and run over the curb. Its hazard blinkers allow cars like us to pass, and as we move through, evaluating the damage and probability of escape for the bus, I see the three passengers standing without shelter under the storm, not ten feet from where the bus is unable to reach them. Two without hoods, one with barely a coat at all, thinking this morning that the weatherman was wrong, as the winds and flakes now swirl about them and collect on their shoulders, hair… souls.

“Oh, the bus…” he moans, and me, “Oh, those people…” And I want to reach over and say, “We have three extra seats. Stop.” But I don’t, because I’m not seventeen, and he isn’t that boy, and I have three little girls. And my car is so warm and the world is so cold and I have just extracted my youngest from a HALF birthday party with a chef who can’t wait for his ride inside the house, and all I can think is, I am one of them. I am sitting in this luxury car bought with the blood sweat and tears of fourteen years, staring out into the snow that will not ruin my day. I am one of the privileged ones, whether I want to deny it because I can’t buy this house or hire this chef or host a half birthday party, I am still one of them.

We drop the girls at the grandparents and venture out to a mediocre dinner in a highly-rated bar in the posh neighborhood that we could never afford to live in. “What should we do now?” he asks, “Do you want another beer, should we go to another place?” It is 7:32 on a Saturday night. Our children are occupied until late tomorrow afternoon. The snow has let up and we have boots on anyway. “Let’s go home. Have the wine. Watch Friends.” (It’s on Netflix now).

We enter the tiny, entry-less house. Curl up on the 17% bonded leather sectional. Flip on the broken/borrowed/fixed entertainment system that sits atop the plywood desk, our first furniture purchase eighteen years back, in the small corner between the door and the insulation-less wall. I clap when The Rembrandts ask me to clap, we watch four episodes, Chandler proposes, Monica cries, and it is just like the old days, in the apartment with ants that bit our toes if we walked across the carpet, with cockroaches and heat that went crazy and borrowed furniture and everything that was then that is now.

I am not one of them. I am just lucky enough to not be one of them, to know the value of what lies beneath my thighs, to make my own damn cupcakes and have a real birthday party, not a HALF one.

These are the things I tell myself as he falls asleep beside me, wine gone. As I make my way into the next decade that stretches between when I bought the first car that I still have and the new car that makes me look at our lives in a different light, a different snowstorm, a different drive across town.

It’s a Saturday night. And we are just like we always were, curled up in a love that’s just good enough to make any house a home.