THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 69
D
ivorced, fired from adjunct teach-
ing after a botched attempt to
unionize, and her only child lost
to college, Bev had, for the first time in
decades, more freedom than she knew
what to do with. The empty house, hers
alone, disgusted her: she sold it, against
her daughter’s wishes, and moved to a
two-bedroom apartment in a new build-
ing downtown. Between the house money
and the monthly support payments from
her ex—he was fucking his assistant and
had signed these things away with the
heedless joy of a rabbit sprung from a
trap—she’d been given the opportunity
to think carefully about what to do with
the rest of her life. This quickly came to
seem like torture. So she volunteered for
Movin’ On Up.
This was the charity she’d donated
her ex-husband’s study desk to—a non-
profit whose volunteers drove a big yel-
low truck around town, collecting the
castoffs of the well-to-do and delivering
them to people in need. After her move,
settled into her newly purposeless life,
she realized that she actually missed the
moving—she was good at it, enjoyed the
physical effort, the strategic Tetrising of
bureaus and bookshelves and chairs and
lamps, the packing and unpacking. She
recalled the energetic good cheer of the
Movin’ On Up crew, understood that she
envied them, and gave the organization
a call. Turned out they needed a driver.
Could she do it?
Yes, she could. She reported for duty
in the parking lot of a storage facility on
the edge of town, where the Movers (as
they called themselves) stored mattresses,
bed frames, sofas, and dining tables in
donated lockers the size of rest-stop bath-
room stalls. She was assigned a couple of
big strong kids—teen-agers from the
high school, looking for something be-
sides football to put on their college
applications—and given a clipboard of
addresses to visit. Every other Saturday
she drove a rotating duo of student ath-
letes around town, and supervised as they
hauled heavy objects out of the basements
and attics of the rich and up narrow stair-
cases into the third-floor walkups of the
poor. The donors were generally cheer-
ful, embracing the opportunity to feel
magnanimous while being relieved, by
strangers, of a burdensome chore. They
occasionally tried to tip the teens, who
had been trained to refuse but proba -
bly did not when Bev was out of earshot.
The recipients of the donated furni-
ture were sometimes angry or paranoid,
the result of mental illness or metham-
phetamine addiction. But most of them
were delighted. They were people in
transition, often fresh out of unemploy-
ment or the hospital or rehab, with just
enough money to rent a cheap place to
live and not a penny more to furnish it.
The deliveries made them feel as though
they were that much closer to having
their shit together. Almost all of them
were women.
The only time Bev felt that she had
her own shit together was every other
Saturday. The rest of the time she spent
catching up on the recreational reading
she’d failed to do for the past twenty years
and idly perusing the Web sites of vari-
ous professional and technical schools—
welding, computer science, nursing. She
took long walks with her sweatshirt hood
up and her hands deep in her pockets,
listening to political podcasts and trying
to gin up the fury that she used to be ca-
pable of, and which had made her feel
so alive. But the ex-husband had ruined
it—she was tired even of rage. She took
a cooking class and bought a video-game
console. She called her daughter every
day, and felt lucky when the girl picked
up on the fourth or fifth attempt. She
counted the days until Saturday.
T
his Saturday began as they all did.
She drove her car to Kim’s house to
collect the truck keys. Kim was the ad-
ministrator; she spent her working hours
padding around her living room in wool
socks, arranging pickups and drop-offs
with her phone in one hand and a placid
toy poodle cradled in the crook of the
other arm. As always, Bev idled her car
at the curb, jogged up the porch steps,
accepted the keys through the half-opened
door, and saluted her farewell. Back in
the car, she executed a slow U-turn in
the cul-de-sac at the end of Kim’s street.
It would not have occurred to her to
remember this experience, the deliberate
and careful arc around this bulb of pave-
ment—but it was something she would
later be forced to give a lot of thought
to. The cul-de-sac was separated from a
busy county highway by a chain-link
fence and a drainage ditch; highway traffic
massed there behind a red light—on this
day, a garbage truck, an old brown sedan,
a pickup flying a tattered Confederate
flag. To the right stood a porta-john,
attendant to a nearby construction site:
Kim’s neighbor was erecting a barn that
Bev suspected would actually serve as a
stealth rental cottage. Between the two
houses, a cluster of traffic cones was scat-
tered, one lying on its side; behind them,
a pile of muddy gravel assumed a Vesu-
vian shape. On the left, the brutalist con-
crete walls of the university’s ag-school
coöperative extension shone dully in the
diffuse sunshine; somebody in a Buffalo
Bills jacket was carrying a ragged-look-
ing, buff-colored hen through its door.
A pickup truck was parked out front; it
probably belonged to the chicken’s keeper.
The cul-de-sac was cracked and pitted,
and filthy water pooled in the potholes.
The wheels of Bev’s car communicated
every flaw in the pavement. She consid-
ered having the suspension checked.
At the storage lockers, Bev was to
meet this week’s Movers, a boy and a
girl. But the boy was a no-show. Bev had
his cell number on her clipboard; she
texted him and then, a few minutes later,
called. Someone answered with a groan
and immediately hung up.
She and the girl stood, blinking at
each other in the autumn air. Did they
have the muscle to go it alone? “Wiry”
is what Bev’s ex-husband once called
her, pushing her unfinished bowl of ice
cream closer. The girl, Emily, looked half
asleep, resentful, so it surprised Bev when
she agreed to work without the hung-
over defensive lineman.
“You sure?” Bev said. “There’s two
love seats, some beds. A bookcase.”
“I need this,” the girl replied. “For
my A in Government.”
“Keep your back straight, use your
hips and knees.”
Emily nodded.
“All right. Let’s go.”
Movin’ On Up liked to minimize the
amount of furniture kept in storage—
the lockers were infested with bugs and
mice and flooded easily—so Kim had
scheduled this morning’s donations to
be distributed in the afternoon, along
with a few items that were already packed
into the truck. First stop was at the
northern edge of town, up on the lake:
a greened and groomed strip of mini-
mansions, each paired with a matching
boathouse and dock. Small yachts bobbed
on the wind-raised chop. A woman was
