dust. The pillows were moth-eaten and smelled of abandonment. Fibers were coming out of the rug we lay on in little tufts of red and black and gray. Our Huddle Hut was decomposing before our eyes.
“You think maybe we’ve outgrown it?” Trey lay on his side picking at a bag of peanuts, his head too close to the sagging sheet above us. Even the quality of our snacks had deteriorated. And when snacks deteriorated in my life, I knew an ending was beginning.
Trey’s legs extended well past the edges of the sheet and he looked scrunched up, somehow—a giraffe trying to fit into an African hut.
“Yeah. I think maybe we’ve outgrown it.”
I was lying on my side facing Trey, head propped on hand, trying to absorb all the fragments and nuances of this ritual that had grown out of our fear and need. There was nothing salutary in the dusty sheet above us, nor in the Christmas lights, nor in the filtered sun petering in from the single attic window. And yet . . . this place had nursed our wounds and buffered our resilience and bolstered our resistance. It had mothered our survival in ways I couldn’t fathom.
This was our last visit to the Huddle Hut. Mom had now had a series of ministrokes, and she needed to live in a smaller place, with emergency care nearby—just in case. So Trey and I had come over this afternoon to pack up the last of her things before the movers came tomorrow. The past weeks had been a slogging journey through mountains of accumulated life-fragments—shelf-fulls of LPs, and closet-fulls of outdated clothes, both hers and his, and drawer-fulls of everyday junk, and cabinet-fulls of china and silver and crystal and pewter. We’d finally had to send Mom to her new apartment, ostensibly to clean it, in order for us to box up and dispose of the inordinate amount of irrelevance—physical and metaphysical—she so desperately wanted to keep.
We’d even cleared out the attic, tossing a dumpster-load of garbage from which we’d rescued only a few old toys and a pair of fifty-year-old roller skates. Trey thought he might be able to get something for them on eBay.
And here we lay in an attic empty save for the Huddle Hut, contemplating the shrunkenness and fragility of the structure that once had felt so grand and safe. Trey rolled onto his back and dropped a fistful of peanuts, one by one, into his mouth. I hadn’t seen him grow up, but in this intimate refuge from our childhood trauma, he suddenly seemed old and strong and calm. My sensitive, fragile brother had deepened into a prevailer who excelled as an “apprenti-chef” in a French restaurant in St. Charles, led his own support group, helped in a homeless shelter, spent time with a handful of good friends who shared his priorities and views about life, and still, somehow, found time to be with me. I was glad to see him developing relationships with so many others, mostly because he’d devoted his entire childhood to just us. And it was good to hear him talk about seeing places and living adventures and investing in people when he’d spent so many years hiding from the outside world because of the stigmas of Davishood. But on this final afternoon on Summer Lane, it was just the two of us lying uncomfortably in our deteriorating hut and contemplating life. That much hadn’t changed.
“You think she’ll be okay?”
I pictured Mom in her new, bright apartment and had no doubt. “Once she gets over having to part with, oh, a couple tons of her most treasured junk.”
“She couldn’t take it all.”
“She couldn’t take a fraction of it, Trey. This place was a Salvation Army warehouse.”
“Speaking of the Salvation Army, you need to go to your senior formal.”
“Who told you?”
“None of your business.”
“And what does the Salvation Army have to do with my formal?”
“Uh—nothing. Just trying to make a smooth segue.”
“Yeah?”
“Old dog—new trick. So tell me about the price of fried okra in Louisiana.”
I gave him my have-you-lost-your-mind? look, but he didn’t see it; he was still dropping peanuts into his mouth.
“Just joking,” he said. “Tell me about your shindig.”
“Not much to tell. I’m not going.”
“And you’re not going because . . . ?”
“Because I’m twenty-two years old and there’s more to starting a new life than dressing up like Taffeta Barbie and spending the night being cut in half by my support hose.”
“You’re not fat and your hair is fine.”
“I