Chapter 1: Nineteen and Homeless
People who feel sorry for me have usually just met me. Give it ten minutes and the feeling wears off, because I do not have the decency to stand still and be pitied. I am nineteen years old, I work the line at the Starlite Diner out on Route 87, and I sleep in a rusted-out station wagon behind the truck wash in Coldwater Creek, Montana. Those are the facts. They are not a tragedy. They are a schedule.
The wagon was my mother's. It is a ninety-eight Outback the color of old dishwater, and it runs when it feels like it, which is less and less often. I pay Gord at the truck wash forty dollars a week for the corner of his gravel lot and the use of his spigot, and that forty dollars is the cheapest rent in three counties. I keep the back seat folded flat with a foam pad and two sleeping bags zipped together, and I have a system: clothes in the milk crate, shoes by the pedals, library books in a plastic tote so the damp does not get them. A person can be homeless and still have a system. A person can be homeless and still fold her laundry, which I do, at the coin laundry on Saturdays, whether it needs it or not, because order is order.
My shifts at the Starlite run six to two, five days a week, plus whatever doubles Pearl, who owns the place, lets me take. Pearl is sixty-eight and pays me in cash every Friday and pretends not to know where I live, and I pretend to believe her, and that is the most functional relationship I have. I fry eggs, I run plates, I refill coffee for truckers who call me sweetheart and tip like it costs them blood. I am saving money in an envelope I keep inside the spare-tire well, under the jack. Housing money. That is what I call it. Not savings. Housing.
Taped to the sun visor, where other people keep their registration, I keep a photograph of my brother. Micah is twelve. He is missing one front tooth in the picture because he was nine when it was taken, and he is holding up a fish like he has personally defeated the lake. Micah lives eighteen miles away with foster parents named Carol and Tom Beeman, who are decent people with a clean house and a fenced yard and no particular warmth, like a motel that does everything right. He has been there since our mother died, three years ago this winter. I was sixteen. I got the other foster home, the one with the locked refrigerator, and then I got eighteen, and then I got the parking lot.
I am not bitter about it. Bitterness is a hobby for people with evenings.
What I am is in court. Last October I filed a petition for guardianship of my brother, and the family court of this county gave me a checklist, the way you would give a dog a list of tricks. Stable housing. Steady income. Clean record. The judge — a woman named Aldana with reading glasses on a chain — looked at me over the top of the paper and said, "Miss Halloway, the court does not doubt your devotion. The court doubts your address." Steady income: ticked, Pearl signed the affidavit. Clean record: ticked, because I have never been able to afford trouble. Stable housing: that is the envelope in the tire well, growing forty and sixty dollars at a time, toward a deposit on the one-bedroom over the hardware store that rents for six hundred and comes with a landlord who wants first, last, and proof I am not going to disappear.
I have ninety days until the review hearing. I do the math every night the way other girls my age do other things. Rent, deposit, the light bill Gord says a tenant has to have in her own name. Micah's bus pass. Micah's shoes, because the Beemans buy them a size small, whether from thrift or meanness I have never decided.
People ask me — truckers, mostly, the kind ones, the ones whose eyes go soft — whether it is hard, being nineteen and living in a car. I tell them the truth, which is that hard was the locked refrigerator. Hard was the group home where a girl named Destiny stole everything that was not nailed down, including, one memorable week, my shoes. This is not hard. This is just cold, and cold can be planned for. I have planned for it the way I plan for everything: in layers, with a list, and without asking anybody for anything I cannot pay back.
What I did not plan for was the winter they were already talking about on the weather radio, the one Pearl's nephew kept calling, with the relish of a man who does not sleep in a car, historic.