Unsheltered

How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where.

But two minimum wages weren’t noticeably better than one. She’d probably written lines like that in her better-paid journalist days, believing herself savvy to working-class woes. In some sheltered life she could barely see from this one. Ticking down the list, her father-in-law was a liability, not an asset. Stunningly, her Harvard-educated son fell into the same category. It made no sense but there it was. Zeke had mind-blowing debts and an infant in his care. If forced to leave this rent-free house, they would disperse to various refuges she could not make herself think about. And yet. How were they not just a normal family?

It felt surreal, watching her family bicker about abstract catastrophe under an actual collapsing roof, but it was a relief to see her son animated again. Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects. A house built on youth’s easy courage. And Tig in her way was also brave, dissecting the world as she saw it, believing her strategies mattered. In a world of people who either let things happen or made them happen, these kids were instigators. Willa felt obsolete. The need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, but in practical terms she was useful to no one there but the dog and the baby.

“Damn Hurricane Sandy and the damn Park Service budget cuts. We can’t afford to stop doing the shit that’s screwing up the weather, and can’t afford to pick up the pieces after we do our shit.”

[…]

“What if Tig is right?” she asked.

“When is Tig ever right? About what.”

“That the problem is actually the world running out of the stuff we need. That capitalism can only survive on permanent expansion but the well eventually runs dry.”

“Nothing is ever that simple, moro. First of all, well in the sense you’re using it is just a metaphor.”

“There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared.”

[…]

“Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?”

They both looked at Nick, who was sleeping quietly with his mouth open.

“So I can be nice to Papu. He’s basically over.”

“Grow or die, that’s just the law of our economy, Tiggo. You can’t get around it. It’s like Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest.”

“Except your law is invented and natural laws aren’t. What you can’t get around is there’s no more room to grow.”

“I’m saying you prepped for the wrong future. It’s not just you. Everybody your age is, like, crouching inside this box made out of what they already believe. You think it’s a fallout shelter or something but it’s a piece of shit box, Mom. It’s cardboard, drowning in the rain, going all floppy. And you’re saying, ‘This is all there is, it will hold up fine. This box will keep me safe!’”

“[Tig] says today’s problems can’t be solved by today’s people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven’t failed.”

“She thinks she could do better?”

Willa blew out some air. “She thinks we’re overdrawn at the bank, at the level of our species, but we don’t want to hear it. So if it’s not this exact prophet of self-indulgence we’re looking to for reassurance, it will be some other liar who’s good at distracting us from the truth. Because of the times we’re in.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“You made such a big deal about security that you sacrificed giving us any long-term community.”

[…]

“I guess your plan would be to live somewhere perfect and give Dusty roots.”

“No place is perfect. Don’t be so touchy.”

“Well, it’s been kind of a week, Tig. I just found out our house is slated for demolition.”

“Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it.”

Willa tried to see the connection. “And I’m just worried about my house. That’s your point?”

Tig shook her head. “It’s so, so scary. It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in place anymore when there isn’t a place.”

Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe these things.

“The hard thing with Zeke,” Tig finally said, “is he has to always win.”

“You’re right. And also to be sure he’s doing the right thing. For Dusty, in this case. I’ll call him later. You’ll have to trust me to handle this. I can walk him through it.”

Tig shook her head. “He would have to figure out how to see it as his win.”

“I think he will. Because it is.”

Willa studied the wide-eyed face of this child who expected nothing and mostly got it. She’d had no use for anything Willa ever tried to give her, it seemed. But maybe this. “Sometimes the right thing isn’t a thing but a person.”

“And that’s me?”

“And that’s you.”