Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

He laid his folder of calculations on the side table so he could set both hands parenthetically on her little center and his chin on the top of her head. Unbustled and unbonneted like this, Rose was a gravitational body that drew his front against her back, his bearded jaw against her tidy zenith. Their perfect fit sent a whiskey thrill through his veins. After six months of marriage he was still in thrall of his wife’s physical properties, and wondered whether this made him a lucky man or a doomed one. In the weeks since they’d moved to Vineland he’d settled on lucky. The town was slim on other inebriants.

He had managed to rise a little and Rose to fall, arriving accidentally on a plane that accommodated their marriage. But the weight of their separate histories held the plane in uneasy balance.

“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.

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.

How dire was the descent of a man’s life, Thatcher mused, that he should now be stricken with spider jealousy.

So much energy these girls burned through, just trying not to look like their own lovely selves.

I’m kind of gifted at imagining emergency scenarios.

So you know how men are, afraid of anyone who would expose them as fools. They protect themselves by doing it to others.”

I’m afraid I am stuck with the rear guard. Cutler is an old authority. Men like him dread new views, for fear they’ll have to set aside their hard-earned credentials and begin their climb again at the bottom rung.”

He sucked at the formula with a furrowed brow until his lunch turned from liquid to squeaky air, then howled at life’s injustices.

“Maybe because this hasn’t healed yet. You’re trying to forget things your heart still wants to remember.”

A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.

Whole phases of her children’s lives, these passions that had seemed to be their purest marrow, had faded away one after another. And character persisted.