You didn’t know you loved linoleum, hard under the heel, especially the red and patterned kind—its vain attempt to be a thousand knotted Persian threads. It never gave up trying—you admire that—though the feet knew the difference and the knees, when you used it for a prayer rug. Superstitious as a child, you swore off treats so your pleading would work—chocolates, the little Avon lipstick samples, candy cigarettes. You gave them up, but it didn’t pay off; your father came home drunk, the sick dog died. You didn’t know you loved linoleum until last week, when your friend showed you the attic in the house she’d just moved into. There was no insulation, the single window didn’t open, you could hardly breathe from the heat. But hundred-year-old rafters rose from the floor to the underside of the roof, beautiful and bare, and in the centre gleamed a looks-like-new sheet of red linoleum printed with fat, straw-coloured flowers, waiting for someone from the fifties to build a room around it, waiting for a child to steal in and kneel on its amiably unforgiving surface in the dead of night.