Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She watched him stir salt, sugar, and butter into the water as it came to a boil. “It’s just how it goes,” he said finally. “I used to have another brother, the oldest one of us? He got messed up real bad, brain dead but not exactly. Man, you talk about mean, he was like …” Jorge shook his head, throwing a couple of wild punches at the air. “You don’t realize how hard a dude can hang on without really having the lights on.”

  Willa recalled mention of a disabled relative in the Vineland Training School, but that was a cousin, still living, she was sure. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know about your brother. A car wreck?”

  “Something like that. Semivegetative state.”

  “Sorry.” She regretted asking. Something like that might be an OD or a suicide attempt, some shameful violence. She made herself look at the barbed-wire tattoo circling his arm. A crown of thorns. “That must have been really hard on your family.”

  “On my mom, mostly. She and my sisters did all of it. I guess me and José Luis were finding something better to do.”

  “It must have been a while ago. You and José Luis would have been little kids.”

  “Sure.”

  “Tig says your mother knew my aunt. When she lived here.”

  “Yeah, I think so. Nice lady. Dreama, right?”

  Willa nodded. His history in this neighborhood had taken no previous shape in her thoughts. He’d grown up, lost a brother there. “Where’s she now? Your mother.”

  “San Juan. She went back for the cure I guess, after my brother died.”

  “Sounds like it worked out.”

  “She likes it, she hates it, you know. There’s all these viejos, the aunts and uncles. We used to go every summer, for the whole three months by God. Mami’s gonna be sure her kids are Boricuas. She’s still on us all the time to come visit, but you know. It’s harder when you get older. Maybe this year.”

  Tig appeared. “All quiet. Everybody’s asleep.”

  “Even Dad?”

  “Almost. He looks worn out. What did you guys do?”

  “Just walked. A lot, maybe ten miles.”

  “Mmm, sorrullos,” Tig said happily. She tied an apron around Jorge’s middle to keep his shirttail out of the fire and then stood next to him watching the saucepan boil, leaning on him slightly like a friendly dog. Willa executed her assignment, grating a pile of yellow cheese onto a blue plate.

  “So Tig,” she said after a bit.

  “So Mom.” Tig turned to face her.

  “I’m just going to say this. We can’t afford a cemetery plot. Dad has talked with his sisters. They’ve all agreed on a different plan.”

  Tig nodded. “We’ll have him cremated, right?”

  “It seems like the best thing.”

  “I figured.”

  She figured? “Aunt Athena wants us to send his ashes back to Phoenix. They’ll organize some kind of memorial service there.”

  Tig mulled this over. “Can you send human remains through the regular mail?”

  “I hadn’t really got that far,” Willa confessed.

  “Well, that all makes sense. Most of the family is back there. Some guys that worked with him in the plant might still be around, people that remember him in his glory days. That would be nice.”

  “So you’re not upset?”

  “I’m upset because you were going to tell him.” Tig and Jorge exchanged the briefest of glances, letting Willa know this had been discussed. She had been discussed.

  “Tell him what, we can’t buy him a grave?” Willa stared, flabbergasted. “After twenty-six years you’ve decided to get on board with the little white lie?”

  Tig didn’t look at her. “There’s times.”

  “Seriously. This is the occasion. And you think being honest would make me the bad guy?”

  “Being honest? Like you’ve ever mentioned how he owes his life to Obamacare? But now you have to tell him he gets no say in what happens after he dies. That’s cruel.”

  Jorge kept out of it. He was stirring cornmeal into the boiling water in a meditative way, thickening it into a yellow batter. Tig lit the other camp stove burner and heated oil in a skillet. Jorge took Willa’s plate of cheese and stirred it into his batter.

  “So you vote for lying,” Willa said.

  “I vote for letting Papu be happy. He won’t know what we do after. Obvi.”

  The thought of sugarcoating things for Nick left Willa feeling marooned in a sea of resentment. Tig scooted deftly around her to reach into the fridge to extract the plantains. Willa watched her peel and slice them, and tried for the thousandth time to understand the lay of her daughter’s moral land. “You’re right,” she said finally. “We can lie to Nick and let him be happy. Even if he’s determined to make us all miserable.”

  “I don’t think that’s his goal. He just thinks he’s right and we’re wrong about basically everything. And the clock’s running out on getting his point across.”

  Jorge rubbed oil into his hands and began rolling the steaming batter between his palms into fat little cigars. From her own restaurant days Willa remembered the asbestos hands of a practiced chef. If you built up a tolerance gradually, you could trick your brain into ignoring the signals of danger. Tig, meanwhile, dropped her plantain slices into the hot oil and fished them out with a fork as soon as they softened. When she completed the batch, Jorge used the same skillet to fry his cornmeal cigars. Willa felt like a voyeur. The efficient camaraderie of their restaurant life seemed as intimate as a marriage.

  “You’re both really kind to Nick, even when he says disgusting things. I honestly can’t do it. I guess I don’t see why we should let him off easy.”

  “You think he’s getting off easy?” Tig spoke without turning around. She was standing on tiptoe, leaning onto a plate to press it down on the softened plantain slices. When she lifted it they were all squashed into little flower shapes. Willa’s fascination was distracting her from the Nick question.

  “No. You’re right. He’s smoked and eaten and sworn himself into a living hell. But still. Doesn’t the meanness kill you? The ‘spic boyfriend’ and all that? I’m sorry, Jorge. I feel like I need to apologize for every minute you spend in our house.”

  He shrugged. “It’s not you saying it. You have to hear it too.” He held out a plate of golden corn fritters. “Careful, they’re hot.”

  Willa took a bite and held it between her front teeth until it cooled enough to taste: crisp on the outside, sweet and melty in the middle. She made an appreciative noise with her mouth full.

  “Yummy, right?” Tig said. “You’re supposed to dip them in garlicky mayo.”

  Willa obediently got out the mayonnaise, found some garlic to peel and dice, and wondered what other miracles these kids would pull out of an empty larder. For the first time in Jorge’s presence Willa thought of Toto, her daughter’s first big love, wondering if she still missed him. Whether Jorge was living in his shadow, or slowly outshining it. Evidently he’d been some kind of genius, this Aristotle: engineering, chemistry, auto mechanics. Maybe it wasn’t such a big leap from there to auto mechanic, gifted cook, and agreeable changer of diapers. Willa herself had a soft spot for poets and dreamers, but her daughter clearly liked men who were good with their hands.

  Jorge finished the fritters and began to refry Tig’s squashed plantains, dipping them in water before they hit the hot oil. They spat violently. Willa worried for his eyes, but Jorge was fearless. And tall.

  “I appreciate what you’re saying about Nick, but it’s hard to reconcile that with the way you always correct your dad and me.” Willa knew she should let this go. “And Zeke, my God. You two haven’t stopped fighting since the day you learned to talk.”

  “Papu’s not in charge of anything anymore. He won’t even live long enough to vote again. But Zeke’s probably around for as long as I am. He’s a very big problem.”

  “Okay, but I guess my rule of arguing is the same as my rule of housecleaning. You start with the worst mess, and
move on from there to less offensive clutter. You can’t deny, Nick is the worst mess.”

  “You’re a journalist, Mom. You feel this god-given duty to set people straight.”

  “Don’t you? As a scientist?”

  “I’m not a scientist. I’m a line cook.”

  “Then I’m not a journalist. I’m a nothing.”

  Willa watched Jorge put one of the twice-fried plantains into Tig’s mouth as she tipped up her face like a baby bird. She held the morsel between her teeth and blew to cool it, exactly as Willa had done a minute before. Iano always found it amazing that she and Tig could put things in their mouth that were too hot to hold in their hands. He noticed these little things that made them birds of a feather, or something like that. He had some Greek expression about daughters never escaping their mothers.

  “You think like a scientist,” Willa persisted, holding out the cup of garlicky mayo.

  Tig shook her head, chewing and swallowing as she pointed at the corn fritters. “The mayo is for the sorullos. These are tostones, you eat them with salt.” She vigorously shook a salt shaker over the plate of plantains before offering it to Willa. Tostones were a miracle. Like sweet, hot potato chips, only better.

  “In the department of setting people straight,” Willa said, “I don’t think you and I are all that different. Just saying.” Willa caught a hint of a smile from Jorge, and she adored him for it.

  “Thinking like a scientist,” Tig insisted, “just means trying to figure out what ‘straight’ really is.”

  “And getting it on the record.”

  “Maybe. But people have to come around in their own ways, Mom. Only when they’re ready. Most people will die first.”

  “That’s cheerful,” Willa said.

  Jorge turned off the burner and conversation ended as they stood in the kitchen feasting on something from nothing. It dawned on Willa that Tig might think it was cheerful, about the deluded masses dying off with delusions intact. From Tig’s point of view, this would be a happy prognosis.

  *

  For weeks it was touch and go as Nick’s organs vied for last place in the martyrdom of an overspent body: heart, lungs, kidneys, blood vessels, brain, pancreas. Any treatment to boost one of them would rob from another, was how Jane explained it. The meds that eased the strain on his enlarged heart, for example, would play havoc with his kidneys, and vice versa. Drained by this internal conflict, Nick drifted into a long twilight sleep with a permanent bluish cast to his lips as if he’d nodded off while eating blueberries. Talk in the sickroom grew quiet as the family learned about things like the death rattle (Willa had thought this was an invention of gothic novels) and the phone calls they would need to make immediately after Nick passed. Ironically, a trip to the cemetery was the last thing on anyone’s mind. But in early March the patient rallied back to consciousness for a last hurrah. They’d been warned to expect this, the evolutionary gift of one final surge of adrenaline to a beleaguered body to fuel an escape from danger. In Nick’s case, “escape” translated into a demand to have his radio on at all hours, and a quest for cemetery real estate.

  On the cool, clear, windless day when the outing seemed possible, Iano had a full day of classes and Jorge was working on an emergency transmission overhaul, so they rolled out as a party of four: Tig and Willa, Dusty and Nick. For the hour it took to get Nick dressed, properly oxygenated, and tucked into his wheelchair, the swollen legs lifted for him one at a time, Willa aimed for the same mind-set that gave her patience with Dusty. Nick was just another helpless, diapered human being in a stroller, surely worthy of her sympathy. Today there would be no arguments. Her vow lasted the length of the front walk.

  Even through his layers of fog Nick had gathered that his political hero was on the rise, winning primaries like a house afire. Nick liked to explain how right he was, on a subject Willa could no longer avoid by rolling her eyes.

  “Look, Nick, I’m just going to say this one thing. The guy doesn’t do anything, he just brags about how great he is. He brags about shooting people on Main Street, for God’s sake.”

  “Mom,” Tig said.

  “Probably should. Plenty a bastards out there need it.”

  “Really. Except he’d get his hands dirty. He’s never spent a day of his life doing anything you would call work. I don’t understand why you respect him.”

  “Respect him … he respects me,” Nick said woozily. “Eat what I want, drive a big damn car and say what I want to … niggers and faggots … wear a biggest fucking gold watch. No dick-ass liberal telling me … ashamed a getting what’s mine.”

  For thirty years she’d believed her father-in-law had no filters. Turns out, he could have been worse. “Not quite with you on the gold watch. But never mind.”

  “Pansy ass … don’t want us a have it good. Keep a working man down whiney welfare scum … Mexicans everybody but the guy that did the work. Okay?”

  Willa understood there was no fair fight to be had here. She was quiet for a full minute or so. Until Nick burst forth again. “Goddamn … born in Africa too lazy…. Go making a good deal for our side.”

  “You can’t be discussing the president.”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t want a guy like me … good life.”

  “Why would he want to hold you back, Nick?”

  “Reasons … Eenie-meenie-minie-moe … favors for his kind. Special interests.”

  Tig must have noticed the steam coming from Willa’s ears. “Mom, let’s switch. You take Dusty’s stroller. I’ll push Papu.”

  Willa gladly obliged. She wasn’t sure Tig could manage four times her own weight, but she did. Tig the mighty. She needed Willa’s help only getting him up and down the curbs, her eyes flashing warnings throughout. Willa obediently kept quiet. Tig looked like a traffic beacon in a bright orange secondhand parka and a red wool scarf tying up her locks. Dusty was solemn as he gazed out from his swaddle of blankets at the cold, vivid day. Willa had often taken this route when she walked Dixie, but that had been a while. Today the giant, leafless trees lining Park Avenue seemed alive in some way they hadn’t been for months, perhaps feeling some movement of the sap in their hearts.

  Traffic in the cemetery was nil. They bypassed the gothic double stone arch and pedestrian entry, sticking to the paved roadway. This was Nick’s first visit and he seemed alert to possibilities, pointing at areas he perceived as vacant, where the more demure markers lay flat in the winter-killed grass. This graveyard was Vineland’s original, with ornate nineteenth-century monuments and some of the biggest trees Willa had ever seen. Landis himself was supposed to be in there somewhere. She assumed the ground had long since filled up, necessitating the newer cemeteries that had opened on the outskirts along with the shopping malls.

  Even here, Nick was not going to go gentle. The cemetery turned out to be as ethnically segregated as the rest of the world, and some powerful racial radar was still operative behind Nick’s deteriorated retinas. He had no interest in the ghettos of Italian or Hispanic headstones. Willa noticed Dusty’s somber expression growing more distressed, and she worried she’d underestimated the cold. Tig was getting ahead of her, trailing an exhaust stream of Nick’s incomprehensible ramble. When Dusty started to cry, Willa yelled to get her attention. “Hey, Tig? He’s getting cold. Think I should head back?”

  Tig pointed at a little chapel in the center of the grounds. “You could take him in there. It’s usually open during the day.”

  Willa was relieved to find the door unlocked. She gathered up the bundle of Dusty, left the stroller outside, and hurried into a small, dim space of simple pews and stained-glass windows mostly covered with duct tape and cardboard. The plaster walls were water stained. A sign near the door pled for donations to help repair damage from Hurricane Sandy. Willa accepted her usual front-row seat on the crumble of civilization.

  But Dusty’s spirits improved the minute they sat down in a pew. At seven months he was getting more upright. He wanted to
pull himself up holding on to her fingers, stand on her lap, and have himself a look around. She thought of Helene’s funeral, the last time they had been in a church, and felt guilty for how far his mother had slipped from all their thoughts. Zeke was the only one who could keep her present for her son by recognizing bits of Helene in his looks and habits as he grew. Zeke might never be up to it. Motherless was in these little bones along with the calcium, and all the months he’d cried before they figured out a human needed to cry in someone’s arms. Willa pondered the immensity of Dusty’s loss while checking the temperature of his hands, which seemed fine, and holding her cheek to his cold face, crooning as she warmed him up. “You’re okay,” she said again and again, the wishful abracadabra of motherhood.

  *

  “Scam. Goddamn global … hoaxers.” She could hear Nick grunting out the verbal turds of his argument as she approached. She had stayed in the chapel longer than really necessary, hoping the final resting place would be nailed and they could call it a day. She studied Tig’s face for clues as she wheeled toward them.

  “Did you find a good spot, Nick?” Willa asked brightly. “Show me where, so I know what to ask for when I go to the front office.”

  Tig widened her eyes at Willa, suggesting she might be overdoing it.

  “Under them big trees…. gotta Metaxes … Christopoulos, Papadopoulos, whole damn neighborhood. Drink me some ouzo with them guys.”

  “That’s great. A Greek section.” Willa could just see the party, a nagging-free afterlife where husbands could eat, drink, and smoke without moderation.

  “I been telling your … Aunt Jemima here it’s cold. She didn’t … jackasses say it’s warming up. Chinese and them full of shit hoax.”

  “Let’s switch,” Willa said, handing off the stroller and pointing Nick toward the exit. “My daughter,” she said loudly, “has studied atmospheric science. Actual physics. Did you know that?”

  He grunted.

  “Scientists measure the temperatures all over the world. With thermometers. I’m no expert but I know that much, the temperatures keep going up. We’re having hurricanes where they’ve never been, stronger than ever before. Like the one that blew out the windows in the chapel over there. Seems pretty real to me.”