I'm Stacy. I'm 31. In May I left my husband and our house in Texas with my two kids, three trash bags of clothes and a car that needed tires. We stayed six weeks at a shelter, and since July we've lived in a transitional housing apartment here in Albuquerque. I call the day I left Mile Zero. Everything since then I count from there.

I want to write down last night before it goes.

The kids were asleep by 8:15. Both of them, on the first try, which never happens. I made a cup of tea with honey and sat out on our step with the door open behind me. September here smells like green chile. Every grocery store has a big wire drum out front turning over a propane fire, and the chiles pop and blacken, and the smell gets in your hair and your car and the whole city. We bought a sack yesterday morning and I peeled them at the sink while T-Rex narrated like a nature show.

From the step I watched the mountains go pink the way they do here. Sandia means watermelon, a lady at work told me, and now I can't unsee it. Somebody down the row was playing Selena, low. I drank my tea.

About halfway through the cup I noticed something. I wasn't listening for a car. For ten years I listened for a car, for what kind of mood the door would close in. I didn't notice I'd stopped until last night.

That's all. That's the whole entry. I sat on a step and nobody needed anything and I wasn't waiting for anything. I'd like more nights like that. I think I get to have them.

The hearing was yesterday. I'm going to write it the way it happened, because beforehand I'd have given anything to read what it's really like.

My advocate from the program, D., picked me up at 7:30. I wore the navy skirt from the church clothes closet and the shoes that pinch. We went through the metal detector and sat on a bench in a long hallway with a lot of other people who were also having the worst day of their month.

He didn't come. I'd practiced looking at the wall if he did. When they called our case, the chair on the other side was empty, and I didn't know if I felt relieved or robbed.

The judge read the papers. She asked me two questions and I answered both without my voice going. She granted it: an order of protection, which is what they call a restraining order here. It has my name on it, and the kids', and his. It's a piece of paper.

D. says it's a piece of paper and it also isn't. The police can act on it. It's on file. It's a line.

I cried in the car, not in the courtroom. Then we got breakfast burritos, because it was 10:30 and I hadn't eaten, and when the girl asked red or green I said "Christmas," which means both. I learned that last month and I'd been waiting to say it.

I drove to Gallup and back by myself today. About 280 miles. I'm putting that first because I'm proud of it.

For ten years, he drove. Every trip. I had a license, but I was "a nervous driver," which is a thing you become if somebody tells you often enough. I drove in May, but that was different. That was fear driving, not me.

My sister came from Flagstaff and I came from here and we met in the middle, at a diner on the old Route 66 through Gallup. She brought winter coats for the kids from a thrift store up there, because it gets cold here, which nobody had told me. Birdie and T-Rex stayed with a family from the program, which is another story, a good one.

West on I-40 alone: the road climbs out of the valley past Laguna, and then it's nothing for a long time but sky, and that big blue mountain near Grants, Mount Taylor, sitting there like it's waiting on you. I turned the radio up. "Smooth" came on twice and I sang it twice. Big trucks passed me and I let them.

Coming home at dusk, with the sun behind me and my sister's lipstick on my cheek, I thought: I can go anywhere. I'm not going to. I have a job and a lease and two kids in school. But I could. That's new.

Group tonight. Tuesdays at the women's center, 6:30, childcare in the next room and too much coffee.

Somebody had the TV on in the lobby before we started: the hurricane back east, and all those cars on the interstate, bumper to bumper, packed to the windows. The man on the news said it was one of the biggest evacuations ever.

One of the women in group (I'll call her R.) watched it a while and said, "That's what it looks like. Everybody tells you to get out before it hits, and nobody tells you how long the line is." Nobody said anything for a minute. Then we went in and sat down.

What I said in group, for the record: that I'm tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. That I miss things I shouldn't miss. That some mornings I'm so proud of myself I can't stand it, and by lunch I've talked myself into it all being my fault somehow. The facilitator said that's a thing, the swinging back and forth, and it gets slower. I'm holding her to that.

Labor Day, which in retail means you labor. Register, 9 to 6, holiday pay. My feet feel like somebody else's feet. Sold about a hundred bags of charcoal and one pair of reading glasses to a sweet old man who tried on every pair on the rack and asked my opinion of each.

Kids are fed. Too tired. More later.

One hundred days.

The kids don't know I'm counting. At the shelter, the counselor had me write the date on a card and keep it in my pocket that first week, so I'd know it was real. Now I keep the count in the back of my checkbook. (I have a checkbook. That was day 71. My own account, my own name.)

Things that have happened in a hundred days, in no order: A job. An apartment with a door that locks and a key only I have. Two kids in a school where the office knows our situation and keeps it to themselves. Library cards. A bus pass. A dentist for T-Rex. A church where we liked the music. A support group. A lawyer who works for free on Thursdays. Birdie laughing so hard at supper that milk came out her nose.

Things that haven't happened: sleeping through the night.

A hundred days ago I was at Mile Zero with a car that needed tires. We got the tires, by the way. The program helped. When I drove away from the tire place it felt like floating.

First day at the new school. Birdie's in fourth, T-Rex in first. Last night Birdie laid out her clothes on the chair, took them off the chair and laid out different ones. T-Rex slept in his.

The office already had our paperwork from the program. There's a note in their file, the secretary told me quietly, about who can and can't pick them up. It's short. It has one name on it. I had to sit in the car a minute after.

T-Rex's teacher keeps a real dinosaur tooth in a jar on her desk. He came home and said it's "probably from an allosaurus." He is six and he says "probably" like a scientist.

Birdie said her school was "fine." Then at bedtime she said a girl named Marisa showed her where the good swings are. Then she said, "Are we staying here?" I said that's the plan, baby. She said, "Good, because I'm not doing this again."

One week at the pharmacy. I'm a cashier, front and back. The back register is at the pharmacy counter, so I ring up prescriptions and learn the insurance cards and say "Any questions for the pharmacist?" about a hundred times a day. Mr. G., the pharmacist, is about sixty and whistles. He says if I stick it out he'll help me study to be a tech, which pays better. For now it's $5.85 an hour. Not much. It's mine.

Every time the bell on the door rings, I look up. I know I'll stop doing that eventually.

Best part of the job: old ladies. They tell you everything. One told me today she left her first husband in 1952 "with a baby on my hip and eleven dollars" and never regretted one day. She didn't know anything about me. She just said it while I rang up her blood pressure pills. I wanted to hug her across the counter.

My case manager showed me how to make this page. She said writing helps some women and some women hate it. I don't know which I am yet.

We're in a two-bedroom apartment in a program for families starting over. We can stay up to two years if I keep working on my goals. There are rules: visitors signed in, nobody after 9, a meeting with my case manager every week. Some women hate the rules. I don't. For a long time the rules were whatever somebody else's mood was. These are typed on a sheet of paper taped to the refrigerator, and they're the same every day.

I start work tomorrow. School starts in two weeks. I bought two backpacks at the thrift store and a box of crayons, the big one with the sharpener in the back, because T-Rex has wanted one his whole life.

I'm going to write here once or twice a week if I can. Mostly I want to look back in a year and see how far it was.

Want to know when I write? E-mail me and say "add me." I keep the list myself and I will never share it. And thank you to the woman in Kansas who wrote to say she left in 1994 and it gets quieter. It does. I can hear it.