“You sure you have enough money for all this?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Cash isn’t a problem.”
Mama and Lobo had left a lot of it buried in the yard.
“You listening to the president’s speech tomorrow?” the cashier asked us, scanning our items. We had waited half an hour in line to reach her. “It’s something bad, I bet. Chemical weapons or terrorists. You know what I think?”
“What?” Grayson said.
The cashier leaned forward, her name badge clanging against the stand with the card reader. Her name was April. “I think you should all get the hell outta town.” She started scanning again, the beeps from the register punching under her words. “I tell you what, I ain’t sticking around to give my notice. Not worth it. I’m leaving tomorrow. Mama and me. We’re going to Florida.”
I tried not to feel anything at the word Mama. My own was fine, she was fine. She had gotten out. It was normal for the two of us to go awhile without talking. We hadn’t been close like that for a long time.
“Florida’s packed,” Grayson said. “Besides, even Florida gets snow sometimes.”
“That church left. They just picked up and left, you know? All of them, cleared out in the night.”
“It wasn’t in the night.”
“Maybe those wackos were onto something.”
“Thanks,” I said. I grabbed the receipt, as if we were ever coming back.
* * *
Grayson told me he lived in the rolling ridges on the other side of the county. I knew the place. We had lived there ourselves for a few years right before and after my daddy left. The houses were brown and forgettable. A lot of duplexes. Ours had smelled of mildew. On some nights, when the wind blew a certain way, it seemed like the house had a sharpness, a bitterness I could breathe.
Maybe it was my parents’ fights. Even after my daddy had gone, anger had a way of hanging around: sulking past the corners, down the drab carpeted hall. Disappointment lingered in the doorways, like smoke or a ghost.
“Do you like living here?” I asked Grayson. I didn’t tell him about my old house. I hoped we didn’t pass it. I didn’t want to see it again.
“It’s okay. My allergies are bad around here. The Church was trying to help with that.”
“The Church?” I looked over at him.
Grayson pointed. “It’s right there.”
I pulled into a driveway before a house, indistinguishable from all the other houses. The lawn looked neglected, the grass matted and pale where it showed through snow. When we got out of the truck, I noticed most of the houses had patchy lawns. The cold had killed them, or the homeowners had given up. Newspapers piled on the porch of the neighbor’s place. I thought of Lisbeth’s house. Had they sold it, rented it? Was their porch filling up with snow?
On the farm, we didn’t pretend that we lived anywhere nice. Lobo barely mowed the grass, just a strip by the vegetable patch that he let get thick and high before he wrestled with it, and he only bothered so we could access the tomatoes. Most of the land had grown up into jewelweed, poverty grass, and thorns, gone its own wild way. The farmhouses looked like toys out in the country, dotted on the landscape, tiny pieces on a complex board game. Sometimes I used to comfort myself with the fact that if we let it go, left it all behind, nature would just take it back, bust weeds through the windows, shoot Virginia creeper down the halls. That was back when we had a summer.
We had reached the front door of Grayson’s place. I had helped him up the walk. He removed his arm from around my shoulders and said: “Thanks. This is good. Thanks for your help.”
“Are you sure you want me to go? You should at least take some of those vitamins with you.”
“That’s okay. Thanks. I feel like an idiot.”
“Well, do you still need wood?” Then I stopped, because Grayson had gotten the door open, and it had opened wider than he had intended, unveiling a dim and claustrophobic living room.
There were pizza boxes on the floor, more gray newspapers and stacks of mail, a smell of sour milk and dust. Clothes were slung over the back of the couch, the cushions rumpled with sheets. Someone had been sleeping there, in front of the dark fireplace.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Grayson tried to close the door. “Thanks again for your help. I can take it from here.”
“You live alone?”
He didn’t look at me. “The Church.”
“The Church?”
“My folks couldn’t find a renter for the house so...when they left with The Church, I gave up my place and moved in here.” He sighed, launching into something I could feel he didn’t want to tell me. “The plan was I would stay here and work until The Church got settled. But business at the restaurant hasn’t been great. My shifts keep getting cut, and you can’t walk anywhere from here. It’s not like there’s a bus. The plan was...” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“I guess I’m not doing so great here on my own.”
“Why were you chopping wood?”
“The bills were too high. They shut off the gas. I still have the microwave, for cooking.”
“But you don’t have any heat.”
That was the other thing I felt, standing in the doorway of Grayson’s house: a cold so sharp it cut me. A chest-hurting cold, cold that made it hard to breathe. That meant the heat hadn’t been on for a long time. Cold had crept into the folds of the drapes, into the cracks in the floor. I tried to imagine sleeping in that kind of cold, how it crawled under the skin.
I had been calling Lisbeth since the vans pulled away. Her daddy’s cell rang and rang. Her parents wouldn’t let her have her own phone—a worldly distraction, they said. Both Lisbeth and my mama, the two most important women in the world to me, were cut off from me. By men. Had Grayson been able to reach his folks?
I looked again at the clothes, the sheets and pillows on the couch beside the black and still fireplace, littered with ash. The sheets were flowered, which somehow made them sadder. The quiet of the house pressed down on me. I thought of my own house, empty, the farm growing quieter and quieter with each cold day. Grayson and I had both lost people.
“Get your stuff,” I said to him.
* * *
He protested but not for long. He apologized, as if he had done something wrong. Only fallen behind, that was all he had done. An empty milk carton could turn into a trash pile in days, I knew. Rust could take a tool left out overnight. Just for a little while, I told him. Till his foot began to heal. I had the space. And I had heat.