Deborah let the matter pass without comment, but the girl’s brazen attitude netted her a black mark in Deborah’s eyes. Greg took their welcome for granted, offering no explanation of why they’d come or how long they meant to stay. Deborah offered them the guest room, but he and Shelly declined. They preferred to sleep in the bus, which they parked out behind the garage.
The vehicle was little more than a shell. They’d removed all the seats and outfitted the interior with beds, a low table and chairs, and a camp stove, though Shelly never lifted a hand when it came to meals. They used a milk crate to hold canned and dried goods and had cardboard boxes for everything else. Shawn slept on a tatty futon behind the driver’s seat while Greg and Shelly occupied a double-bed mattress at the rear. An Indian-print bedspread was hung between the two beds for privacy. The bus was left close enough to the pool house that the three could use the toilet and shower out there, not that any of them ever bathed as far as Deborah could tell.
They hadn’t been in the house five minutes before the little boy had peeled off his clothes and was running around naked. Deborah knew better than to raise an objection because Shelly was already warbling on about how our bodies were so precious and nothing to be ashamed of. Deborah was appalled. Greg had gone off to college, clean-cut and polite, and here he was back again, promoting this trashy little upstart whose values were equivalent to a slap in the face.
At the first opportunity, Deborah excused herself, went up to the master bedroom, and called Patrick in Los Angeles. He was a sportswear manufacturer and he spent Tuesday morning through Friday afternoon at his plant in Downey. She didn’t dare let him come home for the weekend without telling him what was going on. He listened to her description of Shelly, patient and bemused. He made sympathetic noises, but she could tell he thought she was exaggerating.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she sang.
Patrick’s reaction to Shelly was just as swift as hers. He was more analytical than Deborah, less intuitive, but just as quick to recoil. At forty-eight, he had wiry hair, layered gray and white, cut short, wavy over his ears where the hair was slightly longer. His eyes were brown, his eyebrows a washed-out gray. He was color-blind, so Deborah selected his clothes. His everyday attire was chinos and sport coats that she kept in a range of pale browns and grays. His shirts were a crisp white, open at the collar since he refused to wear ties except on the most formal occasions. He was slim and kept fit doing five-mile runs when he was home on weekends. Deborah was four years younger, a honey-blond wash concealing the natural gray. Like Patrick, she was brown-eyed and slender. The two made a handsome pair, like an advertisement for graceful aging. They played golf together on weekends and the occasional tennis doubles match at the country club.
Patrick tolerated “the bus people,” as he referred to them, for three days, and he was on the verge of telling them they’d have to move on when Greg announced that Shelly was five months pregnant, expecting in early August, and they needed a place to stay. For one fleeting moment, Deborah wondered if he was telling the truth. Shelly was petite, so slight and bony it was hard to picture her giving birth to a full-term infant. Deborah studied her discreetly. She looked thick through the middle, but that was the sole indication that she was with child. Neither of them seemed embarrassed at her condition and there was no talk of getting married.
Shelly used the occasion to air her views about childbirth. She didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. Childbirth was a natural process and didn’t require the services of Western medicine, which was dominated by rich white men whose only goal was to undermine a woman’s trust in her body and the freedom to control what happened to it.
That night, Patrick and Deborah had the first quarrel they’d had in years.
Deborah said, “We can’t ask them to leave. You heard Greg. They don’t have anyplace else to stay.”
“I don’t give a shit. He got himself into this and he can get himself out. What the hell’s the matter with him? The girl’s an idiot and I won’t put up with her, pregnant or not. Is he out of his mind?”
Deborah gestured to him to keep his voice down even though Greg, Shelly, and the boy had retired to the bus. “You know if we kick her out, he’ll go, too.”
“Good. The sooner the better.”
“She’ll have that baby in a cornfield.”
“If that’s what she wants, let her do it. She’s in for a rude awakening. Wait ’til she goes into labor and then let’s hear about the joys of natural childbirth.”