Unsheltered Read online

  When she got up and looked out the window again, Tig and friends had migrated from the car graveyard over to the deep shade between their two giant trees—beech and oak, according to Tig—that flanked the view from the kitchen window and elbowed the gutters on their reach for the sky. Willa rested her forehead on the glass for a better look at things down there. In exaggerated slow motion the three of them were moving through some kind of tai chi exercise. Tig led, circling an arm back, lifting a crane-like leg. The boys replicated her every move.

  “What is it, Willa? Birdwatching?”

  Willa jumped, feeling Iano’s hands around her waist.

  “Something like that.” She rolled her head back against his chest, blushing. When the kids were little she’d sometimes spied on them and their friends for the normal sentimental reasons, and even then she’d hated getting caught. Iano had no such reservations. Greek parenting seemed to involve walking into a kid’s life and doing whatever—crashing the tea party, superintending the love life, doing the homework instead of tediously coaching it—and expecting gratitude for the all of it.

  Willa could feel the shift in his body when he spotted Tig down below with the two fellows. He sighed quietly. “Ela, Antigonaki mou. What is she doing?”

  Despite his red-blooded American life, Iano sustained a charming first-generation exoticism. Maybe deliberately, though Willa thought not. He’d grown up speaking Greek at home, among sisters and cousins named after gods.

  “I think it’s tai chi,” she offered.

  “No, I mean …”

  “I know. With those boys.”

  “Those boys, those clothes, that hairdo. She looks like a Charlie Chaplin movie.”

  The Little Tramp, did he mean? No, probably one of the homeless waifs with the dark circles under the eyes. Iano took Tig’s tiny stature as a permanent rebuke. He shared his family’s view that all children should eat more, period.

  Iano folded his arms across Willa’s waist and settled his chin on the top of her head, enclosing her like an envelope. His beard bristled deliciously against her scalp. They could stand all day like this. Maybe should have tried that, in lieu of procreation.

  “Want to know what she was doing ten minutes ago?”

  He made a noise, technically indecipherable, somewhere on the pain register.

  “It’s probably not what you think. She was under one of those cars over there. I swear to God. Helping the guys out with a lube job or something.”

  “She can fix cars now? Jesus, can we rent her out?”

  “Let me remind you she can also knit socks.” Could and did, thanks to her grandma Knox, who’d long ago tried to teach Willa and failed; her nascent feminist consciousness had required Willa to scorn the domestic arts. But that equation had flipped in a generation: modern girls reared by working moms were all over Etsy and Pinterest now, clanning together in knitting groups named like revolutionary brigades.

  Willa let herself be still with Iano in a beautiful silence: the roof pounders had gone home to their wives, and the baby, unaccountably mute. They watched Tig and the two boys slowly push some invisible substance away from their bodies, then pull it back.

  “I came up to tell you Zeke texted.”

  “Texted?” From what room, she wondered. In nearly two weeks there, Zeke hadn’t left the house. He’d been a blank-faced ghost in pajama pants warming bottles in the microwave and eating things from containers while standing before the open fridge. Suicide is murder, Willa could not stop herself thinking as she watched him. A life had been brutally stolen from their family. A mother, a beloved.

  “Listen,” Iano interrupted himself, “those back stairs. Are we going to use them or just lock the door? Because just now I almost fell through one of the—what do you call it?—the tread. The wood is completely rotten.”

  “I think that’s what we call a servants’ staircase. Shall we acquire some?”

  “Maybe the kind that can grade exams?”

  “Please. That’s what graduate students are for. They’re cheaper than servants.”

  They stood watching Tig, this girl they’d somehow made. In slow motion she lunged to one side while lifting one hand, lowering the other, shifting her weight and turning as though being held in the arms of an invisible, slothful dance partner. The two boys likewise turned, lovingly taking the air into their embrace. Tears welled in Willa’s eyes. These beautiful children seemed capable of generating contentment out of thin air.

  “We have to stay in this house,” she said. “You understand that, right?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying this house is our only sure thing. Even if parts of it are caving in. If it comes to it, we’ll put up yellow caution tape and avoid the collapsed areas. We’ll huddle in whatever is left. Sorry if I sound crazy. But we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “There is always someplace to go.” He tightened his arms around her, and Willa pretended to believe him. His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn’t want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she’d explained many times. Today was different. She needed to be wrong.

  “Zeke texted?” she asked.

  “He found a Greek restaurant over in Millville.”

  “Millville, outside of this house? Did he go out in his car?” Her heart lurched. “Iano, you’re here, I’m here. Tig is there. Who’s got the baby?”

  “Zeke has him, I guess. He wanted to know if he should pick up dinner.”

  Iano had not been stuck in this house watching every appalling minute of Zeke’s zombie dance with a baby crying on endless loop. Greek takeout would strike Iano as normal.

  “We should cook,” she said. “This family is eating money.”

  “You write, moro. Make us rich with your article for the AARP magazine.”

  Iano detached from her and vanished. Willa held her vigil over Tig, the child she’d lately forgotten to worry about. For all the years her daughter had been bouncing like a molecule through an unstable universe, anxiety was Willa’s steady state. Iano loved her too, of course, but fatherhood apparently subscribed to different bylaws. A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child. Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit. Whatever was holding Tig here with her family, even in a falling house, might actually be the safest bet for now.

  Willa knew she spent too much worry on Tig, as people did. Physicians ran tests, parents of normal-size children offered patronizing advice, the in-laws produced evil-eye amulets, teachers scheduled conferences. Tiny stature provoked protectiveness. Willa was slightly built too, but Tig at eightysome pounds was a true featherweight. She’d stopped growing in fourth grade and no pediatrician could find anything really wrong. Standing at four feet ten, smack on the bottom line of normal, Tig was callously declared a midget by her big brother but unqualified for treatment by the medical establishment. Small was her destiny. And despite that, or because of it, she’d grown up with the furies in her sails, honing her confidence in verbal and physical combat with a brother who quickly doubled her in size. She had the temperament of the fire-eyed little shih tzu at the dog park that takes on the rottweilers with zero sense of disadvantage.

  Willa forgot this scrappiness when Tig was far away, then wore out on it fast when she was around. But their new household arrangement was working out in some ways. Tig, who generally took no prisoners, had an inexplicable tolerance for her grandfather. She took his barked commands with a smile, let him cheat at backgammon, and helped with his insulin shots while ignoring his effluent of foul language. Willa was relieved of her hardest familial duties and had finally begun sleeping better, with no idea she was gathering strength for the next collapse: a new unhappiest child.

  *

  “Keep stirring,” Tig ordered when Willa complained the white sauce wasn’t thickening up. “Béchamel doesn�
�t get done just because you want it done.”

  Willa kept stirring. She watched Tig select a knife, inspect the blade, give it a few zinging rasps with the sharpening steel, then slice into an eggplant with harrowing speed. The ovals fanned out on the cutting board in a manner that struck Willa as magical.

  “Did you already add the cinnamon and pepper?” Tig asked without looking up.

  Willa added cinnamon and pepper. Tig’s restaurant-acquired kitchen skills were undeniably useful at home, where Willa had never earned more than passing grades as a cook. But the condescension grated. Throwing Wall Street to the dogs was one thing, but demoting your mother to sous chef went against the natural order.

  “Those are some gorgeous eggplants. Are they from the grocery?”

  “Nope.”

  Earlier, when Willa overruled Greek takeout, Tig had come upstairs to propose the undertaking of moussaka, a labor-intensive family favorite that frankly daunted Willa. She’d argued they didn’t have the ingredients, but Tig proved her wrong. Eggs and eggplant had appeared in the kitchen without Willa’s knowledge. Tig often came home from her restaurant shifts with loaded grocery bags.

  “You brought them from work, then.”

  “Yep.”

  “And I have to assume your employers know about this.”

  The knife stopped midair. “You’re asking, do I steal from Yari and Leonardo?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s normal restaurant procedure to give workers food at the end of a shift.”

  “Maybe leftover meals that would be thrown away. I can understand not wanting to be wasteful.”

  “Really. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  Willa sighed, wondering what she’d thrown away lately that invoked this censure. This guessing game she never won. “If you’d let me finish a sentence, I was saying I can see why a restaurant would give away food that’s been cooked. But not fresh produce and whole cartons of eggs. Those seem like assets the business could still use.”

  “And this comes from your expertise in the field of restaurant management.”

  Willa let it go. Tig’s employers seemed to treat her like family, and it was unimaginable she would rip off their struggling little business. Willa’s offspring had strict honor codes, applied in opposite directions: Zeke strived to be Man of the Hour, while Tig devoted herself to Sticking It to the Man, if that phrase still signified. With that thought it dawned on Willa that she’d probably arranged to be paid in barter, keeping herself off their tax ledgers. Jeopardizing her future retirement, possibly putting all of them at legal risk, that would be consistent with what she knew of her daughter’s nature. Not wanting to be complicit, Willa wouldn’t ask, because Tig would just tell her. The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa’s every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as “tact” would get shot down with “Mom, that’s lying!” And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, “Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don’t really like it.”

  They heard Zeke come in. Willa defiantly abandoned her béchamel post to go greet the one of her children less likely to bait her into a knife fight.

  She was happy to see Zeke looking fairly human, and the baby comatose. This child seemed to have the opposite of conventional colic, screaming all day and going out like a light at six. His little head flopped sideways in the fancy car seat, which they could detach from its base and carry around by the handle like a bucket.

  Zeke had gone out with him for a four-hour drive, hence the sudden quiet that had alarmed Willa. “Did it get him to stop crying?” she asked.

  “No. But I blasted Nicki Minaj and felt like I was pulling off an escape.”

  Aldus was still out cold in his baby bucket a half-hour later when dinner was on, so Willa set him on a chair at the head of the table where his grateful family could admire the performance. They were all weary of this mind-shattering child, even if they shared some version of the love that clanged in Willa’s chest. But they pitied Zeke too much to complain. The exception would be Nick, who was not a man to let compassion stand in his way. But Nick had the advantage of deafness.

  The escape had been a tonic; Zeke was nearly conversant. Willa wouldn’t mention the cost of the gas or ask him about a job search. She’d offered to help with babysitting if Zeke wanted to look for work, but so far he seemed unable to look beyond the next hour. This was a mother’s torture, watching bruise-colored shadows spread beneath his beautiful eyes. Watching him stare at space while life chirped around him.

  “What did you find out there?” She was aiming hard for non-chalance.

  “Farms. Pine trees. Little one-horse towns, strip malls.” Zeke filled his plate as he spoke, showing signs of a former appetite. “On the edge of Vineland there’s this huge hospital or something. It looks like an asylum, these long yellow buildings with little barred windows. Something from another era.”

  “Training School for the Developmentally Disabled,” Tig said. “It’s like over a hundred years old. It used to be called Vineland School for the Feebleminded. They did experiments on the kids.”

  “How did you come to know about that?” Iano asked.

  Tig shrugged, talking with her mouth full. “Jorge and José Luis told me. They have a cousin that went there. Obviously not a hundred years ago. He’s still there, in fact.”

  “We’d like to hear more about your new friends,” Iano said.

  “Sounds like you really wouldn’t.”

  “What friends are we not talking about?” Zeke asked.

  “Our next-door neighbors,” Tig said. “Jorge works at the restaurant. Line cook. He invited me to hang out after work.”

  Nick stopped eating and turned to stare at Tig, pivoting his bulk. “You running around with the Puerto Rican hoods next door?”

  “They’re Vinelanders, Papu. Born here. The house is their mother’s. She doesn’t live here now but they said she used to be friends with Aunt Dreama.”

  “What, she was Dreama’s maid?”

  “Friends is what they said, Papu.”

  “How many people live in that house anyways? Ten, twelve?”

  “Maybe you should go ask them yourself.”

  The old man turned back to his food. Willa had wondered the same. They all seemed roughly the same generation, the brothers and two slightly older women in their twenties or early thirties, with babies and young kids among them.

  “And I assume everything going on over there is aboveboard?” Iano asked.

  “As I said,” Tig pronounced the words with equal weight, “Jorge and José Luis were born in the US. Their sisters live over there too, and their kids. The sisters were born in San Juan but they’re all citizens because Puerto Rico is some kind of US minion state where they pay Social Security but don’t get to vote. Are we done with the inquisition?”

  The table went quiet except for the thrumming hiss of Nick’s oxygen, while everyone devoured the remarkable moussaka.

  “Antigone,” Iano continued, undaunted. He never took her quite seriously enough to be cowed as Willa was. “Where did you learn tai chi?”

  “Occupy. A bunch of us did it every morning. It helped keep the energy focused.”

  Willa saw Zeke rouse, his lip tighten into a smirk. In a heart where little else could be stirred to life, sibling scorn survived. Willa steered the conversation away from Wall Street. “You’ve been hiding your talents, Tig. If I’d known you were an auto mechanic you could have saved us some money this summer.”

  “Auto mechanic,” Zeke repeated.

  “Your sister spent her afternoon under a car.”

  “Oh yeah? Doing what?”

  Tig spoke without glancing up, as if Zeke were the younger sibling unworthy of much bother. “Resealing one of the U-joints on the driveshaft of a Ford Fairlane. And fighting off ants. There’s like an ant invasion going down over there.”

  “Since when are you a grease monkey?”
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br />   “Since I lived in a country that’s kept the same fleet of Fords and Chevys running since 1959 without any replacement parts.”

  “Oh right, Cuba. World capital of obsolete cars.”

  “That’s one way to put it. Or, half a century of the blockade has made Cubans the smartest recyclers in the world. It’s not just cars. Agriculture, manufacturing, name it.”

  “Right,” Zeke said. “Ask Raúl if he’d like the embargo lifted tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean by ‘ant invasion’?” Willa asked, considering new categories of assault on their household. One if by land, two if by sea.

  But Tig and Zeke were locked in. “I’m not saying they wanted the blockade. I’m saying in the last fifty years we had the most massive global consumption and waste in human history, and Cubans got through it without cheap gas or throwaway crap from China.” She aimed the tines of her fork at her brother. “You don’t know what resourceful means till you’ve been to Cuba.”

  “Poor me,” Zeke said, appearing devoid of self-pity for the first time in weeks. Willa was stunned to see him restored, at least to some truculent version of himself.

  “Do kids your age resent the blockade more than their parents? Don’t they want the newest tech toys?” Iano leaned on his forearms, easing into his classroom persona.

  “And pass up the chance to be so crafty?” Zeke said. “Look, they’ve even figured out how to manufacture dreadlocks out of Caucasian hair.”

  “Who knew our ancestors came from the Caucasus Mountains? Is it true, Papu?”