Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “So what are you now, an EMT?”

  “Nope. Still turning and burning ’em down at Yari’s, same as your sister. And overhauling engines.”

  Jorge surprised Willa by sitting down on the bench opposite, knees spread wide, elbows on the table. Until this moment she’d thought of Jorge as conflict averse. He was definitely lubricated, but Willa didn’t believe in so-called Dutch courage. In her experience, cowards who drank were still cowards and nice guys mostly stayed nice, if a little stupid. These two were going to be themselves, just maybe a little more so, while she sat here hoping it would come to no one’s undoing.

  “So, but here’s the thing,” Jorge offered. “I’ve had to do the Heimlich at the restaurant, two times, and I’m going to tell you, man. A brother could shit himself.”

  Zeke seemed to be recalculating his position. “I hear that.” He poked through Dusty’s disappearing dirt pile and found another red pebble, which he ate.

  “One of the times it was a baby,” Jorge said. “Not a baby but a little kid, like around three. Ho-ly mother. Little dude turned blue, I thought we were going to lose him right out there at table six.”

  “Wow,” Willa said. “But you saved him?”

  Jorge looked off to the side, an uncomfortable hero. “Just luck. I didn’t know how to work it on a kid so I kind of had to guess. After that I asked Sondra to show me. She’s had to take all those EMT classes. To take care of her viejos.”

  “That’s who that is,” Zeke said. “Sondra. I recognized her when she said hello, but couldn’t remember how I knew her. That’s her over there talking to my dad, right? The beauty queen in the Daisy Dukes?”

  “Hey, horndog. That’s my sister.”

  “O-kay,” Willa interrupted. “So how do you do the Heimlich on a child? That’s something I should probably know.”

  Jorge turned to Willa with a solemn, slightly unfocused look. “It’s not too hard. I’ll show you sometime.”

  His protectiveness of his sister had smacked her across the heart. What she once would have dismissed as machismo now struck her as something she’d failed to teach her son. Zeke’s habitual gallantry made his treatment of Tig all the worse. Willa sat with this revelation while watching Dusty polish off his pile of cake, working around the gummy invertebrates. Some instinct must have warned him off. The ill-fated Che on Dusty’s white Tshirt was getting buried in a shallow grave of crumbs.

  “Where did this little shirt come from?” Willa asked.

  Jorge shrugged. “She gets his clothes from everywhere. Mostly for free.”

  “I know, but I never saw this one before today. I was wondering if she brought it back from Cuba.”

  “Seems like the place for el Che,” Jorge agreed, “en la ropa de bebé.”

  “But there wasn’t any Dusty at the time.”

  “He existed,” Zeke corrected.

  “Well, I mean, you were expecting him.” Willa thought about it. “She came back in February, he was born in July. But she hadn’t been in touch with any of us for almost a year. She wouldn’t have known.” Willa thought of Toto’s young children and wondered how well Tig had known them. The tangle of heartbreak that might lead a girl to buy a tiny shirt. Willa tried to brush off some of the mess, which only made matters worse. “If she did bring this from Cuba, it would have been for some theoretical baby.”

  “Putting away Che for the future family,” Zeke said, laughing. “That’s exactly the kind of batshit hope chest my sister would have.”

  “Hope chest?”

  “An ancient rite,” Willa explained. “Girls used to stash away clothes and linens in a chest, to prepare for their future as wives and mothers. If Zeke and Tig heard the term from me, I promise I was using it ironically.”

  Zeke grinned. “Tig heard it plenty. You know. That old joke, ‘You still hope you’ll grow a chest some day.’”

  Jorge narrowed his eyes at Zeke, working out the crude insult implied. “She’d be the one to have a batshit hope chest,” he finally agreed, “’cause the lady has got some serious batshit hopes.” He observed the effect of the lady on Zeke, and winked at Willa. “What can you say? She keeps it one hundred.”

  *

  “We lived in a garage,” Willa reminded Iano. “We didn’t have much more than they do. And we were deliriously happy.”

  “Your brain edits out the misery from your past.”

  “Okay, I probably don’t have perfect recall. But we weren’t miserable.”

  “We were married.”

  “So? You going all old-school on me here?” She looked at him, still in his teaching clothes but out of his shoes, holding a half-empty glass of wine. “What’s your worry, legality, permanence, what? Are you thinking Jorge’s going to run off and abandon your deflowered daughter? Because honestly, I’m not sure what more this family could have done to scare him off.”

  “He can’t run away. The garage isn’t our property, it’s his.”

  Willa felt proprietary toward the little ivy-covered carriage house, and constantly forgot it wasn’t hers. Or refused to believe it, even that first day when Pete condemned their house in a word—shambles—and assigned the stip house to the neighbors.

  “You know what? It’s Mary Treat’s. The house where she lived is gone, but that building would have been there in her backyard.”

  “Tig and Jorge are shacking up in Mary Treat’s garage. Is this significant?”

  “I don’t think Mary had a vehicle. What’s interesting is that it was constructed as a provisional dwelling. And it’s the only structure still standing.”

  Iano reached for the bottle to refill their glasses. For Willa’s birthday he’d surprised her with a bottle of wine and some excellent Thai takeout, which they were eating out of the cartons as they sat on the back steps admiring the upheavals on their property. Yesterday’s party had left no major scars, but the place was a mess in its own right. Pallets of old bricks were stacked on both sides of Tig’s garden. The double doors of the carriage house stood open to ventilate a newly installed and refinished floor. Tig and Jorge had gone out somewhere with Dusty while the fumes dissipated, leaving the elders there to speculate on the nature of their attachment.

  Willa thought she and Iano had been happy in their garage life because it felt impermanent; they’d expected their poverty not to last. Now, as Jorge and Tig set up their own tiny home, she wondered if their sentiments might be the opposite: they were happy for a circumstance that had a good shot at enduring. Tig’s batshit hopes notwithstanding, she believed material desires were toxic. She aimed to be immune to the ambitions and disappointments that had maimed her parents’ existence and now were stirring up a national tidal wave of self-interest that Willa found terrifying. It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light. Iano persistently didn’t get Tig’s view of the world, thinking she refused to invest in the future, but Willa knew that was untrue. The girl had drawn out a detailed plan for the garden she wanted to make on the property, just for instance, including an arbor with grapevines. She’d made a convincing case that she could provide for a child. They were eating from the small garden she’d already planted there, and a bigger one that belonged to whatever they called their commune at the training institute. These kids were well connected.

  For Willa’s birthday Tig had given her a handmade card. Zeke had eaten breakfast in sunglasses and then spirited himself to someplace with good Wi-Fi for the day, so he’d probably forgotten it. With the celebration budget thoroughly blown the day before, Willa expected no more. A year ago, in the excitement of a grandchild’s birth, she hadn’t registered the future cost of this near collision of his birthday with her own. But she’d never liked being the center of attention. This was the party she would have preferred all along. She watched Iano wave mosquitoes away
from their ankles, thinking only very briefly of the encroaching Zika virus, and decided that if sexier feet than her husband’s had ever met the earth she didn’t want to know about it.

  “I think it’s because of what happened with Zeke and Helene,” he said, and Willa had to row backward through several tributaries of thought to get to his meaning.

  “Oh, your worry about Tig and Jorge? I can see that. He seems about as emotionally resilient as they come, but tragedy can strike, there’s no doubt. Some things would have been easier for Zeke if they’d been married. But he also would have assumed her debts. I don’t think he would have come out ahead financially.”

  Iano didn’t respond. She studied his face for clues. “You don’t mean financially. You’re scared of her getting hurt that much. But honey, that’s just life. Love is the big risk.” She set her glass on the step and put both arms around Iano. “Look at this. Me, telling Zorba not to be afraid of living boldly.”

  “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf, moro.”

  “Oh, dear God. Don’t do that.”

  Iano had taken a contract to teach summer classes for almost as much money as he made the rest of the year. The university had to incentivize, since few faculty members wanted to hang around Philly in summer. Willa and Iano were very much hanging around. They’d taken a lease on an apartment that was walking distance from campus in an old building with loads of antique charm, which was real-estate lingo for no elevator, window air conditioners, and a minuscule kitchen. Its principal attraction was that it would allow Willa and Iano to live within their means. But she was starting to see advantages beyond decent shelter: a world of close neighbors, greengrocers, a movie theater, a Macedonian bakery that made bougatsa. Also a vintage tiled bathroom with a giant claw-foot tub. When Tig had looked at her pictures of the apartment she’d kept scrolling back to that tub, betraying a hint of material envy. She mentioned she might try to find one online, from the salvage yards.

  Willa and Iano had a week to wait before they could move in, but already the house was coming down around them. They’d struck a deal with Pete to do demolition and dismantling, taking most of the materials in exchange for his labor. Architectural salvage was a new big thing in the East Coast housing market, and this old house was a mine of stuff Pete could use or sell. Hardwood flooring, fixtures, most of the interior moldings, even the big warbly panes of antique glass were in demand. Tig thought this was dreamy, a whole house getting recycled. She looked forward to the extra space they’d have for her garden when the house was gone, and a nice view of the streetscape. Plus, very much more sun. The house had been casting a lot of shade.

  Initially Tig had insisted the carriage house was fine as it was, but gradually allowed a few improvements, such as plumbing. With expert help they were putting in a sink, shower, and toilet and hooking it into the sewer main. In the words of Pete Petrofaccio, who remained mystified by the Tavoularis specifics, “With a baby, you need your plumbing.” Tig and Jorge also pulled up some hardwood flooring, laid it down on joists, and had refinished it this morning, when by all rights at least one of them should have been hungover. A big improvement over the previous dirt, this floor was expected to help with the ant problem. Willa worried about termites under a wood floor, but Tig explained the ants would keep away termites. These ants, she said, are here to stay.

  Mr. Petrofaccio planned to have the whole house taken apart and hauled off by summer’s end and foresaw no problem selling all the salvageable materials, right down to the doorknobs. He was keeping a ledger and would reimburse them for everything he netted beyond his fees. He’d found a motivated buyer for the famous Dunwiddie bricks. The unexpected windfall still felt surreal to Willa. When a house no longer provided shelter, it turned out to be worth exactly the sum of its parts.

  *

  With so many folders and papers spread out on the table between them, it could have been a board meeting. Dusty at the head of the table would be the CEO in the high chair. Tig had cut up chicken and vegetables into tiny bits and was putting these onto his tray a handful at a time, which he shoved into his mouth open handed.

  One of the last moving chores was to sort through the boxes rescued from upstairs. It had to be done today, before Zeke went back to Boston, so Willa corralled the kids and sat them down. Few other obstacles remained standing between herself and the exodus. They’d sold nearly all the furniture. Tig’s wizardry on Craigslist made it a snap. Willa was finding it easier every day to let go of things she’d considered family treasures, including this dining table that had served them for years. It was too big for any of their future homes. The Knox family crib was one of the few things that would stay in the family, along with its current resident, location TBD.

  The departure no one could talk about was Dixie’s. She would not rise again. Every few hours Willa carried her outside to urinate and have a look at the sky, and when food was placed in front of her she managed to eat, a little. Willa knew this wasn’t a life. Soon they would put her down and bury her under the tree. The one where she peed. Willa could see that for most thoughtful creatures, this was a positive choice.

  Now they were sorting through the boxes she’d kept for the kids since they’d first put crayon to paper to articulate their souls. Only the more exceptional works were supposed to have made the cut: drawings, poems, various certificates of excellence. The kids had made the choices themselves, and named these archives their Forever Boxes. If Willa once had a notion of holding them to one large cardboard box apiece, that philosophy of restraint had gone the way of Prohibition.

  Willa had a raft of her own boxes too, containing among other things a print copy of nearly every article she’d written or edited over the decades, clipped from the original publication. After she started working full time for a magazine it got simpler, she just saved every issue. Of course she knew every word was archived electronically somewhere, and she could find it online if she really wanted to read an article about sailboat building she’d written twenty years ago, which she definitely did not. But giving up the physical record of all that work felt like a kind of death. Online wasn’t enough. She wanted it to weigh something.

  She’d set up each of them with a small “keep” box and trash bags for the rest, and now she watched her offspring dispassionately stuffing their entire past into garbage bags. Almost nothing was getting kept. “You’re not even looking,” she accused. “What is that right there you’re throwing away?”

  Tig held up a drawing, essentially a stick figure with arms and legs growing directly out of the egg-shaped head. The mouth leered a half-circle smile; the eyes bore pupils, whopping curved lashes, and astonished eyebrows.

  “Ohhh,” Willa lamented. “Your Humpty Dumpty phase. I loved those drawings. This child psychologist friend of ours said they were way ahead of normal development for your age. They count IQ by the number of body parts a three-year-old includes in a drawing, and you put in everything.”

  Tig aimed the drawing at her brother. “Hey Harvard, looka here. Genius.” Then she stuffed it in the bag.

  “You’re not even saving one?”

  “No, I don’t have room for crap like this. What are you going to do with all that stuff you’re keeping, Mom?”

  “Just … don’t worry about it. I’m archiving it.”

  Willa carried on with her hoarding. She still had boxes she’d brought from her mother’s house when they emptied it out, and never took time to look through before now. She was finding the predictable yellowed clippings: recipes, advice columns with tips on stain removal. Also many files of family trees, results of a genealogy hobby Darcie and Dreama shared, which had kept the twin sisters connected and internet savvy into their seventies. Willa had never taken much interest. Now she saw they’d found relatives in the region, not in Vineland but nearby. She vaguely recalled they had family in Pennsylvania, drawn north from West Virginia via the so-called hillbilly highway into the steel belt after the war. That family history suddenly seemed li
ke something she ought to hold on to. This craving was not letting up. Anything in her mother’s handwriting she saved. Willa wanted her also to go on weighing something in the world.

  The kids were ruthless. “Another one for the archive,” they began to taunt in unison, while throwing their own things away faster than they could look at them. Zeke had a head start, since most of his latter-years cache had been lost to water damage back last winter. He’d been angry at the time, but now seemed more than ready to let it all go. The balm of the new life, Willa thought. Priya sounded like it might be Sanskrit for “Darling, forget about your messed-up family.”

  Once he had lunch down the hatch, Dusty needed more entertainment to keep him from climbing out of his chair, and Tig had a basket of toys at the ready. He examined each article she handed him for an unpredictable number of seconds before throwing it on the floor. The toys were mostly combinations of household things: a wooden spoon and spatula connected with a big rubber band; two potholders pinched together with a hair clip. Dusty went straight to the connectors and tried to work out how to pull the things apart, just as he was drawn to cabinet latches. Now that he was crawling and cruising, he expressed a powerful bent to get at the world and deconstruct.

  The potholders hit the floor and Tig gave him a big plastic vitamin bottle, emptied of vitamins and partly filled with pea gravel. Dusty shook it, widened his eyes at the large noise, and looked around to make sure everyone was clear about authorship.

  “Nice,” Zeke observed. “A redneck rattle.”

  “Excuse me. It’s not an oxycontin bottle.”

  “Okay, stop,” Willa said, not at their argument but the artifact Tig was about to throw away: a child-manufactured book with a red construction paper binding held together by acorn brads. “What is that?”