the trials of ping

Ping engages in her first home improvement project.

They definitely looked like flea bites. She had them all over. We blamed them on the awful motel. But they kept coming. We threw out the pillow she had taken into the motel. We worried about the luggage. And still she kept getting bitten. The itching drove her into a frenzy. I didn't have a single bite.
  She managed to get some stubborn screws into the Ikea sofa, which was one of the items we had managed to wrestle off the truck in the rain (Did it have fleas?) and was flushed with success.
  I had gone to bed when she screamed. "Taoling! Taoling!"
  There were fleas swarming all over the bathroom floor.
   I did not want to open the hatch of the hot water heater to find the animal I was sure had died in there. Nor did I want Ping to see me find it or e ven know that I suspected its presence. Fortunately. I had some bug spray.
  Changping got on the phone to her son, to see if he could change her ticket home to soonest. It was prohibitively expensive. She was in despair. She lay on the sofa she had helped assemble and talked to her friends and listened to videos in Chinese. And scratched her legs, her arms, her neck.