Shelter in Place Read Free Page A

You’ve been too long in one place. And now it’s time to go.”
    But it was my sister who got the message.
    Me, I prefer to stay where I am.

9.
    W hen we were young, we had the fortune of a secure and constant life.
    My parents worked. Claire and I went to school. In the evenings we ate as a family around a rectangular table beneath a yellow light. If we made mistakes we were punished for them reasonably, with consideration. Those mistakes were insignificant. An occasional fight (me), a few incidents involving drugs (both of us), academic probation (me), vandalism (Claire), violations of curfew (Claire). None of it was irreversible. None of it destroyed us, or caused our parents any real worry. Both of them had grown up rough, as they often liked to remind us. Both had been poor, both just scraping by with parents of their own who had, in one way or another, abandoned them.
    My father left for Vietnam three weeks after he finished high school. His mother had died in childbirth, and when he returned from war, his father, too was dead.
    My mother left home at seventeen and never saw her parents again.
    â€œSink or swim,” she said whenever we got into trouble. “Sink or swim,” she said when she was angry or, much worse, disappointed. “Sink or swim, kid,” when our mistakes amused her.
    And sometimes, “Fight or die, buddy,” when she was in a darker frame of mind.
    This the guiding principle of her life.
    My father probably worried more than my mother did, but as we grew up both of them looked on with cheerful bemusement and maintained as their general parenting strategy a kind of benevolent ambivalence. I think they could barely believe that Claire and I were theirs, that they’d provided us such safe and steady lives.
    With all of our comforts, our regular meals and individual bedrooms, we were strange and privileged creatures who would never sink, but always swim.

10.
    M y father was a carpenter who worked out of our garage, and on-site for various contractors around Seattle. My mother, Anne-Marie March, whose name you may know, was a nurse at Harborview. Depending on the year, my father was more or less often in his workshop, but she was always at the hospital, where she’d worked since graduating nursing school. Despite so many other options, she stayed in the ER where she began, and where she felt most at home.
    What else of those very early years? After school there was the distant sound of my father working the band saw. The workshop smell of fresh-cut wood and orange oil. There he is standing in the kitchen dressing a cut index finger, bleeding calmly into the white sink, asking us about our homework, our friends, our teachers, our troubles. Our father surprising us with wooden knights and faeries, dragons and princesses beneath our pillows.
    And my mother coming backwards through the front door with a low stack of pizza boxes. The exhilaration and relief of our reunited family in the evenings after school.
    Maybe I overstate all this happiness of youth. Claire would probably say so. But I’m not so sure.
    Whatever the case, ours was never a sentimental family. However happy we were, our parents always took a brutal attitude toward time.
    â€œWhat’s gone is gone. What’s done is done. What’s dead is dead,” my father said when we came home crying after some injury, slight or failure.
    â€œAnd who,” my mother would add.
    The two of them faced us in those moments like soldiers returned from a war neither of us could fathom.
    â€œFor better or for worse,” he said dealing pizza slices onto our plates.
    â€œMostly for the better,” my mother said.
    I am nine years old. I have a black eye. My mother is walking me home through the neighborhood.
    â€œDon’t be blue, Joey Boy. It is difficult, but you are strong. It is difficult, but you are strong and next time you’ll fight harder.”
    There is golden sawdust caught