he kisses her on the head and she calms down. “She’s probably just having a bad dream. She gets them sometimes. Steven thinks she’s reliving something from the orphanage, but I think it’s just something she ate. It’s okay, Gertie, Daddy’s here. Shh.”
“Will you look at that...”
A new serenity washes over him seeing Peter with Gertie. He’s here now, in this house, with his family. A moment ago he held his granddaughter and later he’ll get to hold her again, and then maybe in a week Peter, Stevie, and Gertie will be at his house and they’ll all enjoy the pool together. Maybe they’ll even visit Disney World together, as a family. Cheryl will be kinder to him now. They can finally put the past behind them. For the first time in three years Thaddeus can envision a happy future.
Then Gertie screams so loudly she startles him.
She transforms into a dynamo of sleeping rage. Her fists pound into Peter’s shoulder and her feet slam into his hip. She wails. Thaddeus scrambles toward her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just a dream.” Calmly, Peter rocks her. “It’ll pass. We just have to stay calm.”
The staircase rattles in the adjacent room as Cheryl comes rushing down. “Wait!” she shouts. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m coming!”
Her cries further agitate Gertie, who redoubles her tantrum, but Peter is able to wake her and as soon as he does she stops screaming. Her eyes immediately rest on Thaddeus, and at first she seems startled by this stranger and her mood threatens to spill over into anger again, but Peter kisses her cheek and tells her it’s okay. “Say hi to your grandpa, sweetie.”
Thaddeus playfully sticks out his tongue and makes a trumpet of his thumb pressed to the tip of his nose. Though she remains suspicious, she lets slip a hesitant grin that soon blossoms into a gregarious smile.
“Ha!” His granddaughter just smiled at him for the first time!
Cheryl charges into the kitchen, a stricken look on her face, but she stops short when she sees them all huddled by the breakfast bar. “Peter?” She grabs her chest and exhales. “What a relief. When I heard screaming I thought it was Steven—” She crosses Thaddeus with a withering gaze. “I thought something happened.”
“We’re fine,” Thaddeus says.
“Just a bad dream, is all,” Peter adds.
Gertie sucks her thumb, her gaze shifting back and forth between Thaddeus and Cheryl, a stranger and a friend. She’s done crying, for the moment at least, and Thaddeus decides it’s a good sign.
“What a relief,” Cheryl says. Turning to Gertie, she pouts and slips into baby talk. “Your grandma just got worked up over nothing.”
Gertie squirms, wanting out of her father’s arms. He sets her on the floor, then takes a seat at the breakfast bar. “It’s okay. We’re used to drama around here.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Thaddeus reiterates. “We’re all fine.” Then to Cheryl, he says, “Stevie isn’t here yet.”
“Wait,” Peter says. “What do you mean Steven isn’t here?”
HOW MANY MEALS WILL A CAN OF BLACK BEANS YIELD, realistically? Can two people subsist on sardines, peanuts, and sofrito bouillon for a week without killing each other? What if those people are siblings—does that make it better or worse? Laila shakes her head at the impoverished state of her pantry. “And what if one of those siblings is a selfish food hog?” she says, sifting through empty cartons of food that Alex couldn’t be bothered to throw away.
It’s bare bones. The Pop-Tarts she bought on Monday are gone (“What? I like having a midnight snack, yo!”), so are the tortilla chips (“I get hungry watching TV!”). A lonely pack of instant miso soup and a half brick of rice round out the supplies. Anything that requires cooking is safe from Alex’s ravenous maw. And it’s a good thing, too. The chicken legs and thighs in the freezer will go into the pressure cooker tonight along with a few frozen veggies. That way, at least, they’ll have one good meal before the storm knocks out the power and they have to eat like refugees.
Hurricane Natalie picked up speed overnight and the television playing in the background updates the storm’s progress every fifteen minutes. The eye is now expected to pass over Orlando sometime around midnight. Residents are advised to stock up on provisions and remain indoors. “Duh,” she says. If Alex were here he’d have something snarky to add. Could it be possible that she misses his presence around the house? The news cuts to a shot of the shore at Cocoa Beach. Tourists in clamdiggers wander through the frame. A despondent would-be surfer paddles out into the placid water. A typical day in paradise. “It’s calm now,” the meteorologist on the scene reports, calibrating the cadence of his delivery to trace the fuzzy boundary between intimating a need for panic while dispelling the same. “But later this evening we expect seas of—”
Laila switches the television off and tosses the remote onto the couch. Another moment and they’d be cutting to stock footage of a swell cresting over the breakwater while some idiot fisherman in a slicker casts a line into the surf.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute,” she says, shutting the pantry.
She rinses the coffeepot and washes her mug, then dries her hands and heads upstairs.
Pulling back the blackout curtains in her room allows the late-morning sun to fill the space like a vessel, illuminating, in the process, her secret shame. Alex embraces his messiness, but with her it’s a furtive endeavor. Clothes drape over an antique armchair in the corner. Dirty coffee mugs colonize the nightstand. Grooves in the carpet delineate a collection of favorite paths around the room, an atlas of forgotten vacuuming and too few shampoos. Her simple dresser is a layered moraine of accumulated living. Purchased (for a lot more than she cares to admit) specifically because its clean lines evoked an aspiration toward orderliness; instead, the dresser’s plain surface has become an archaeological wealth of jewelry, bills, magazines, and makeup. This is the real reason Alex is banned from her bedroom. She doesn’t want to confront the hypocrisy.
She grabs a pair of clean panties from the pile on the chair, depositing in their place the yoga pants she slept in, and slips them on. Her jeans, freshly laundered and neatly folded two days earlier, peek out from beneath a sweater she optimistically considered wearing on a recent chilly morning. Her favorite tops lie somewhere in the pile, too, though no doubt impossibly wrinkled. Rather than sort it out she pulls a fresh blouse from the closet, not a favorite but serviceable in a pinch.
A quick pass with the hairbrush and a splash of facial toner, then she’s back in the kitchen to survey the pantry again—this time with a pencil in hand.
Determining what provisions to buy is surprisingly tricky.
Ideally, hurricane supplies consist of food one typically eats, staples that won’t collect dust on the shelf between now and the next storm. But how much tuna will they realistically consume? How many lentils before she’s sick to death of soup? And who’s to say how long she needs to plan for? The power could be out for a few hours or several weeks, or not at all.
She drops the pad in her purse, then heads for the truck.
Lines at the store are long and the shelves picked over, but an encyclopedic knowledge of the aisles and aggressive shopping cart skills give her an edge. She scrounges together just about everything on her list and is back in the parking lot in record
