A picture book: pages and pages of photos that turn heavily, squeaking the rings of the plastic binder. Condos, apartments, farms, restaurants, retail spaces, office spaces, free-standing shops, mountain cabins, and houses. 

Lots of houses. 

Ranch houses, faux-Tudor houses, town houses, clapboard houses, faux-French provincial houses, Victorian gingerbread houses, track houses, 1950s one-family houses, farm houses.

Old houses. New houses. Even newer houses.

The binders sit on the table waiting to be picked up and flipped through by the unsatisfied, the curious, the bored. People who harbor notions that don't square with their current reality – and may never.

The Daughter punches holes in the crisp, white paper of a new information page. The photos of a one-family house, a featureless box no different than dozens already in the binder, are waiting to be slipped into the photo sleeve. She knows the house will sit on the market for two years until the sellers, a young family impatient to fly south to a life in more vibrant, more tropical colors, will lose patience and drop the asking price. Or perhaps the market will do it for them; forcing them to set up their new life with far, far less than they'd planned. She decides to hold off adding the pages to the binder. Just until tomorrow.

It's almost the end of the day at the agency. There's nothing left to do but empty ashtrays and rattle pens, but Beverley is prowling around like a circus bear dolled up in mascara and rouge, making sure no one sneaks out before the slim hands of the repro grandfather clock stretch themselves into an exclamation mark between the XII and VI on its brass face.

Tomorrow, the Daughter's calendar tells her, she had two photo shoots to do. She sighs and underlines the entries in red, adds a rose and a sleeping cat, simply to look busy. 

She's not only the agency's Girl Friday, she's also its sole photographer. The one sent out to make properties appear sizzlingly attractive to potential buyers who are easily reeled in by a pretty picture. 

She tries to find good angles. Tries her best. But sometimes there simply are none. "You're the one with the art degree," says Beverley when the Daughter mentions this. "Be artistic."

One of the Daughter's canvases hangs in the real estate agency: a winter seascape. The ripped-out bellies of low-hanging storm clouds take up half of the image, storm-tossed seagulls the only spots of color in the violent turmoil of gray tones. Below: boarded-up kiosks, wind-blown trash, one lone car in vivid summer green abandoned in the empty, freezing parking lot. 

Harsh, glacial, true.

It was a mistake to hang it there.

"Makes me feel like I'm coming down with a cold," said Martha, last year's winner of the company Hawaiian vacation, and shivered the first time she saw it.

"Don't you have any of covered bridges or farm houses? What about fishing boats? No?" asked Katie, a tall blond with the sharpest chin the Daughter has ever seen on a human being. "A cute fishing boat would be nice." 

"Got any with horses?" piped in Diana from across the room, the rhinestone bracelet glittering around her wrist calling contrived attention to her newly-conquered 24-carat engagement ring.

The Daughter looks around the office carefully arranged to counterfeit a home-like atmosphere. She doesn't see herself in the cork boards tacked full of available properties, the uniform green of the potted plants, the uniform blue of the company jackets, the ceiling to floor glass windows, the cheery personalized coffee mugs, the bouquets of plastic flowers on each desk, the grim determination etching itself into the soft folds of the other women's faces. That hungered striving for better, for more, which predetermines their every gesture and charts the course of their lives with a cartographic precision that would terrify them if they were conscious of it.

She sees in them the echoes, shadows, of the Mother and the mothers of her childhood, and feels her stomach turn.

This isn't the life she wanted.

She remembers the other art students. How they argued and drank, smoked and bed-hopped, laughed and painted, sculpted and drew and shot their photos. How they hated everything – and yet loved it all, too. How they didn't care and yet did. How she was so much one of them and still didn't fit in no matter how hard she tried. How they were far more like her than she was like them. How much she misses them and how they don't bother to answer her letters.

Not anymore.