How to Buy a Used Car During a Wildfire

I am staying at my mother’s house. California is on fire. My children and I live in a tent in the woods. There is no way to keep the smoke from the wildfires at bay, no matter how much we stretch the canvas door, the buckles snapping shut, threatening to pinch little fingers. The tipi is worse. The door just hangs in front of a round gaping hole like a dead leaf on a broken branch. The top of it is open to the stars.

At my mother’s house in the city, there are walls. There are windows we can shut, even though the glass is so old the sunlight shines through the slowly falling glass unevenly, the thicker parts of the window pane holding tightly onto the light. The front door is always locked.

At times, my daughter, the 10-year-old who has lived outside during wildfires, clamps her hands over her ears and complains of high-pitched sounds hurting her head, which I can not hear. My husband says it’s the sound of electricity or wifi, something that she’s unaccustomed to living with. She coughs. Her chest hurts.

We have lived outdoors in a tent or tipi for over seven years. Off-grid, without even solar electricity or running water. Just heat from the wood of the trees, a canopy of brown and green cools us, heats us, drips water that we collect at the base of wide trunks. We save our money. Take turns holding part time jobs, while the other one home schools the four kids, coaches soccer, culls the dead trees for firewood.

My mother’s boyfriend shuffles into the kitchen. I can hear him coming before he enters the room, while I stand at a too-high counter chopping the last root vegetables we brought with us from the land. The kids call these chopped carrots “candy” because they’re so good.

He says, “My sister’s in-laws just lost their house. They just got out