Summary

After being bumped up to first class on a flight to Raleigh, North Carolina, David struggles to relate to his fellow passengers. Reunited with his family on the drive from Raleigh to Emerald Isle, his sister Gretchen tells him about an old boyfriend of hers who is now living in a city park. David wonders how that could happen "for we were middle-class and I'd been raised to believe that our social status inoculated us against severe misfortune [...] you could never be poor the way actual poor people were [...] Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn't your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet?" (55). Now, however, David knows that class cannot save you and that misfortune does not discriminate.

David and his siblings used to worry that something...