I had heard that a lot of people in Mom’s area were driving up to Baton Rouge to try to get out of the reach of the worst of the looming storm. We have family there, so I knew Mom and my developmentally disabled sister Lori who lived with her would have a place to stay.
“I don’t want to get stuck on that interstate,” Mom said. “We’re not going to flood here.”
“Probably not,” I said. “But why every time there’s a big thunderstorm do you call me to complain that a pine or an oak tree is going to fall on your house?”
“Because one did! Twice! I have two other trees I need to get checked. But those men want a thousand dollars!”
“If it’s going to fall on your house in a bad thunderstorm, why don’t you think it’s going to fall on your house now? It might be a Category five, Mom. Why don’t y’all at least drive up the street to the arena? Did they open it?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But I don’t want Lori to have to get stuck in all that traffic or get stuck all night in the arena.”
“Lori might enjoy it. It’ll be a commotion,” I said.
In Hammond, Lori walked around like she was the Strawberry Queen. New caregivers were always surprised how many people knew Lori. Thick, country black ladies and thin, white Pentecostal women would call out to Lori across the movie theater parking lot to greet her with her own sayings. “Hey sweetheart, you get that money?” they’d say. Lori would holler back, “Yeah, swee-heart, two dolluhs!”
“Maybe she’d like it,” Mom said. “For half an hour. But when she’s ready to go, you better believe she’s ready to go. Then what?”
“Bring a Valium,” I suggested.
“Sure,” she said. “No thanks.”
When I was growing up, I was in charge of Lori, and it is understood that one day I will be again. In recent years, I do very little besides get weekly debriefings, like at any moment the Cheryl-Jake regiment could be called to active duty. Consequently, I usually know whether Lori and her sheltered workshop co-workers are packing bay leaves or shredding hospital documents and which developmentally disabled person in her small town called which other developmentally disabled person a bitch that week. Although Mom still worked and did not act elderly, she had gotten her Medicare card awhile back and cruised in a boat-sized Mercury Grand Marquis. Sometimes I worried that any day I might have to step in and pry Lori from her suddenly demented fingers.
“If your trees are rotten, they’re rotten,” I said.
“If we need to go at the last minute, we will,” she said.
This seemed like a lie, and a weird one.
“You know the winds come first. Then you’ll be stuck.”
“Tell Jake his radio is working good. We’ll just pull the mattresses and sleep in the hallway like we used to for a tornado warning,” she said. “Lori likes the hallway.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” I told Mom.
Brenda glanced up wide-eyed from her cutting board. I took the phone outside so Jake’s family would not overhear any more foolishness. I wasn’t sure Florida people had to talk to their relatives like this to get them to evacuate.
“I want you to really think about this. I don’t think Lori can handle being in some six-hour storm with stuff crashing on the house. She’ll be scared.”
Silence. I couldn’t believe it. Mom was hyper-responsible. To her own detriment usually. Not in my wildest dreams did I think it would have been necessary to swing by their house on our way out of town to snatch Lori.
“If you make a bad decision for yourself that’s one thing, but I don’t think it’s fair to Lori,” I said. “You’re in charge. It’s not like she gets a choice.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she said.
“Well, you’re making me stressed.”
“Stop worrying. Go enjoy your visit. We’ll be fine.”
I stepped back inside. Clo was in the foyer waiting. Jake and Buster were sitting on the back of their necks watching Murder She Wrote. I knelt down on the floor to hug Clo.
“She won’t evacuate,” I said to Jake.
Jake sat up. “What?” he asked. “With all she bugs us about the tiniest weather crap? That’s crazy. Tell her to go to Baton Rouge. She’s going to wind up there anyway when her power goes out for a week.”
“Don’t tell me. She could just go up the street and she won’t. She said she’s going to lay on a mattress in the hallway with Lori and your radio,” I said. “We should have never given her that radio.”
Jake shook his head and laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said. “What if something happens?”
“I know it’s not funny,” Jake said. “I don’t think it is. I just keep picturing them on that mattress.”
“I’m really worried.”
Jack strode into the living room wearing his expedition pants. Its safari pockets were bulging. He smiled.
“Who wants to go mushroom hunting?”
Jake’s aunt had left some hobnail milk glass dishes and Gone with the Wind lamps in Florida for me. I e-mailed to thank her and she e-mailed back.
I’m glad y’all are safe and sound. Hope the house is almost finished so you can quit spending all your time painting. It would be terrible if something happened to your house, but it also might be a good thing. You could rebuild with insurance and everything would be new!
It would be more than a pain. We would have nowhere to live. The whole people getting an MTV-style crib after a fire or mud-slide or disaster seemed pure urban legend—perhaps one people retold to make themselves feel better about emptying their pockets to insurance companies. Injury was injury. I had never met a single person who emerged from a car accident or a house fire fundamentally better off than they were before they went in. I didn’t believe in clouds with silver linings. I believed in clouds.
After the mushroom hunt, Jake sprawled back out on the living room floor, lost in cable TV, his preferred retreat position when visiting home. I looked up from my laptop.
“Deanna thinks if we lose our house we’ll be blinging in a McMansion,” I said.
He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
We were no financial analysts. In the nineties when our landlord wanted to dump our house because it needed a new roof, gutter, and porches and he was sick of paying old men $10 to nail flattened tin over broken windows and floors, we jumped on it. Jake had signed on the dotted line when he was twenty-four so he, I, his drummer, and an artist friend could all keep cheap rent. For some reason, the fact that we both worked and jammed the rest of our time with music and writing projects and had no carpentry skills or repair money between us was no deterrent.
