CHAPTER 17
Home was not a person. Home was not a place. Having dug up their roots so many times, Taylor and Aria were beginning to wonder if people like themselves were homeless less because no home existed and more because neither of them even knew what home was. Other people seemed to know. They’d found it somewhere. Those people lacked the anxious searching that polluted Taylor and Aria’s lives. The pair debated the concept of home on their way to the church where Luke had taken them the day after they had met him so many months ago, hoping to find the doors open for lunch once again. Aria was conscious of how good it felt to walk down the street in new socks.
Something that Aria had come to find out is that when you are homeless, suddenly wealth is determined by a pair of new socks. They keep you warm, they keep you clean, they prevent a whole host of different ailments that occur when it seems like all you are doing with your life is walking. And as she had found out the hard way, when push comes to shove, they can serve many other functions than that which they were originally intended for.
The $10 that Aria had gathered on Christmas Day had run out. When Taylor had gone out to the city looking for jobs, which he had done every day the previous week, Aria had waited for him to leave before setting out on her own. First she spent some of the money at a grocery store on a packet of cigarettes. Then she bought a bus fare so she could save herself from walking. She spent the rest of the money on a carton of plain rice from a Chinese fast-food restaurant. Part of her felt guilty for having spent money that she could have saved for emergency situations. Contrary to what people often say about people on the streets, it was not in her nature to spend money all at once. But having nice things and having money on the street is more dangerous than spending it. It would have made Aria a target. And she already knew what it felt like to save money only to have it stolen. So she decided it would be better to spend it on herself than to potentially lose it all.
On their way to the church, Taylor and Aria paused at a stoplight near a shopping center, waiting for it to turn green. Aria felt her heart jump a little at the familiar sight of Darren, who was standing across the intersection from them, panhandling. When the light turned green, Aria held Taylor back so they could spy on him without him noticing. He was sitting on a bench with his battered crutches laid out in plain view. A sign propped up in front of him read “Homeless Vet Support Your Troops.” His prosthetic leg was intentionally displayed.
In the months they had spent at the camp, Aria had come to understand Darren. His entire presentation was meant to guilt people. He was angry. The lack of opportunities that he’d had in life were opportunities that the army had promised to give him. He had enlisted with a sense of national honor and pride. Back then, he felt like he belonged to something bigger than himself. But that honor and that pride were now timeworn. They had frayed out from underneath him, exposing instead a void of terminal aloneness.
Darren now felt as if the very country he served had turned its back on him. And he was determined to make the country and its ungrateful, idiot civilians remember him. He displayed the sacrifices he had made for them in plain view as if to say, “Shame on you, look what I sacrificed for you, now give something back to me for it.”
Aria felt conflicted watching him. On the one hand, his sense of entitlement and the shame he used as a tool of extortion were enough to make you hate him. Many of the citizens he was now guilting, including herself, had never wanted him to go to war in the first place. It’s hard to feel grateful for a sacrifice you never wanted or asked someone to make. But on the other hand, he was right. Aria imagined that in his position, she would be angry too if she had offered up her life for someone or something else and in return had ended up losing everything; reduced to constant pain both emotionally and physically. The country had turned its back on him, especially the very institutions that had promised him belonging in the first place. Like a broken Springfield Model civil war rifle, he was now a forgotten symbol of war. Patched together and gathering dust, he was no longer a tool the government could use for the violence of their foreign policy.
Like that broken gun, Darren was less devastated to be on the shelf than he was to be considered worthless now, his dignity abolished by every passerby that ignored him.
Taylor and Aria decided to cross the street perpendicular to where he was sitting. They did so without him ever noticing that they were there. When they reached the church, the line was shorter than it had been the last time they had come there. The big black woman, Imani, was manning the table once again, her rich, welcoming smile pulling people down the line. She seemed happy to see Aria again, which took Aria by surprise. “How you two doin’?” she asked, ladling chili into two
