Unsheltered

The chapter is set during the novel’s present-day timeline. Willa Knox is a middle-aged magazine editor who has lost her job because the publication has gone out of business. She has a grown son, Zeke, who has just had a new baby, a boy named Aldus. Willa has also just inherited a rundown house in Vineland, New Jersey, from her maternal aunt, who recently died along with Willa’s mother, her twin sister. The house was rented to tenants while Willa’s aunt lived in a nursing home. Willa and her husband, Iano, lived in Virginia and consequently didn’t see the house much, but Iano, a professor, received a temporary job offer at a university in Philadelphia, just a short drive from Vineland. The couple moved themselves and their family—their 26-year-old daughter, Tig, and Iano’s father, Nick, who is ill and disabled, both live with them—to New Jersey to live in the house for the duration of Iano’s job. Willa knows that the house is run down, but the family manages to get settled nonetheless. This type of new start is familiar to the family, which has moved often over the course of Iano’s career—he finally earned tenure at a university in Virginia that recently closed.