Excerpt from Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You could argue that, but I'm sure the insurance company has a nice team of lawyers to back them up."

Willa was floored. "What are you going to do?"

He looked away from her, and in that turn of his head she saw every defeat in his life: the barely missed first-place at All-State track; that blonde girl who reneged on their prom date. The AP exam he bombed because he had a vomiting flu. His defeats were so rare she could just about count them, or at least the ones she knew about. He took them hard, for lack of practice. Zeke was very good at everything except disappointment.

"Do you have day care lined up, at least? I assume she was going back to work."

Zeke gave Willa a strange pleading look she couldn't understand. Then he stood and walked down the hallway into the kitchen. She closed up another one of the boxes, counted to ten because she could think of absolutely nothing else to do, and then followed him. He was staring into the open refrigerator.

"I know this is hard to talk about. I can stay here awhile to help. I'll go with you to the pediatrician's appointment next week. But at some point we have to make a plan."

"I'm not asking you to do this for me, Mom."

"I know. Nevertheless."

He slammed the refrigerator. "I must have said that a hundred times. To Helene. 'We have to make a plan.' I guess I sounded like you do now. So this is how she felt."

"It wasn't an outlandish request to have made. When one is having a baby."

"I suggested we go look at places. Day cares. I asked her to look into maternity leave if that's what she wanted to do. But she had to want something>."

Willa recognized the same anger she'd been harboring for days, toward Helene. They would have to take turns keeping the lid on that. The child would need to love his mother, and it was all on them, forever. "She wasn't thinking right. We know that now."

"What we know now is that she was planning this all along."

"That can't be. She loved you. Stop blaming yourself, you did everything right."

"You keep saying that, Mom. Sometimes doing everything right gets you a big fucking nothing! Did that ever occur to you?"

His raised voice caused her to lower her own. "I keep saying it because it's true. She loved you, Zeke. You were good to her. She wouldn't have plotted something like this. I mean yes, her death I guess, but not the fallout. She didn't do it to wreck your life."

"Nevertheless," he said.

The repetition of Willa's word could have been Zeke mocking her, but probably not. The two of them often opened their mouths and spoke the same words, even at the same moment. "Here's a proposal," she said. "You could come live with us for awhile so we can help out. Just until you get things figured out."

Zeke made a face. "In Jersey."

"I know, you're thinking it's some gigantic tacky suburb of Manhattan. I thought that too, I was ready to…" she stopped herself from saying "kill myself," two words now excised from the family vocabulary. "I couldn't stand the thought, when the job for Dad came up at Chancel. But Vineland isn't what I expected. It's more like Virginia, really."

"And what is that like, Mom?"

"We lived there almost eight years, the longest we've been any place since you were born. How can you not know?"

"Because, let me think, I was in college in California and grad school in Boston?"

"But you were home for summers, a couple of them. One, I guess. And holidays. You were there almost every Christmas that I recall."

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And Christmas trees, I certainly remember those. Virginia has blue ridges. It's for lovers!"

She tried to smile. "You're saying your family lived in Virginia and all you got was this lousy bumper sticker?"

Excerpted from Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Kingsolver. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.