“We’re going,” Sharkey said as the man started to walk toward him and the woman in the baseball hat pressed against him. He said, “Joe Sharkey.” He said it distinctly, as though uttering a formula for protection, but it had no effect.

“Give me something,” the woman said.

At the picnic table the four children had slipped off their backpacks. They seated themselves, two on each side, and were sorting books and papers as though preparing to do homework. It was hard for Olive to tell through their dirt and their gaunt faces if the adults were haole, but these children being young, in clean T-shirts and shorts, were certainly haole, and the tallest of them, a boy with a splash of ink on his arm, had a thatch of light hair, streaked blond by the sun.

“They go to school?” Olive asked.

“Yah. Elementary—by the old cane fields, pass Ali‘i Beach,” the fat man said. “Give me some money—buy books, buy stuffs for them.”

And now Olive considered the schoolchildren seated and scribbling, and the two small children in the car playing again, reciting in singsong voices, and the first woman back stirring the blackened pot, raising her ladle, lifting white bones and black meat and slimy greens.

“Is that soup?” Olive asked.

“Is not,” the woman said in an indignant tone, chucking her chin upward in a gesture of superiority and twisting her lips. “Is adobo.”

In that moment, with that word, Olive saw it anew, as a whole coherent settlement. The place had come into focus. What had seemed random, makeshift, a thrown-together huddle of shelters and junk, cast-off people and their broken things, now seemed unified, something fixed and whole. It had a purpose, and a sense of permanence. Was it the neatly dressed children that completed it? Tarp shelters side by side, beach chairs, the car-seat sofa, the inhabited cars, the cooking fire and the pot of adobo, especially that—a meal with a name.

It was primitive but it served them, and in the trailing smoke and the trampled earth, the bypass road out of sight, the camp existed in a parallel world, a dirty improvised version of the other one, self-sufficient. And the trash pile—old bottles and plastic bags—like an anchor, in the shape of a great scab of indestructible squalor.

Frightful, Olive was thinking, impossible to clean up, and also, We don’t belong here.

Glancing back, she saw the fat man leaning against the big tree, cradling something in his arms, a creature that came awake and raised its head: a small dog, but with the pinched face and the flaring ears of a bat.

Sharkey seemed to be loitering, looking around, as though at any moment he would be recognized and admired. He then passed a barrel and looked in, seeing empty bottles and cans. Someone had collected them to redeem at the supermarket.

“This is all money here,” he said, praising them.