So that you might better understand the shame—

We’d invited a large family I’d met in class, Congolese. For the man and woman, seventeen years in a refugee camp, the babies adding up. You and I think we’d never do such a thing in circumstances so dire—bring children into the world. But what do we know?

Inside, the girls trooped around looking. Upstairs and down. I even threw open the door of my pantry, stuffed to the gills. I have a terrible problem with showing off.

One of the girls asked, “Where’s your family?” She knew we have children and grandchildren.

“It’s just us,” I said.

We wanted it this way? Just us?

Well, yes.

Hot dogs out by the fire. Ketchup and mustard on the picnic table, and relish deemed sickeningly sweet, probably, or just foreign. Potato salad, too, as I recall. Later we grownups lolled in our rickety, haphazardly parked lawn chairs, looking across the stretch of field to where it edged up against the woods.

“It’s like Congo,” marveled the man, joy in his words.

Congo? Savanna, here? The scrubby grass, maybe. The sky. The chickens scampering through the pasture. The dottings of trees not felled when we cleared to make the land habitable. The buzzing winged bugs and silent, many-legged creepers. All the green green, blue blue, not the brown of a camp.

Night came down. Time for the family to go back home. No car yet, so we’d driven the 25 minutes to get them from the apartment CWS had managed to find in Harrisonburg. Part of a modern complex, it sat near railroad tracks and one of those high-voltage substations maybe frying all the renters’ brains and constant traffic. So now everybody piled in, the man with Paulson in our little red Hyundai, the woman with me in the extra vehicle we’d borrowed for the evening, and as I swung the van around in our driveway, the headlights caught on Paulson’s shop—the mass of lumber, the windowed garage door, the roof rising into the sky.

And in the quiet dark, from over in the passenger’s seat came the woman’s voice. “Is that your house, too?” she asked.