Kirby stops chasing his boys and returns to the wheelbarrow. He starts slapping the bags down in front of the kitchen door, the sound almost indecent, half-moons of sweat under his arms, a slick of moisture forming at his hairline, where just a few threads of silver are creeping into the brown. His every gesture claims competency, an all-encompassing aura of stewardship—over the sandbags and the doorstep they will shelter, over the ground he’s standing on, over the boys that flit back and forth in the yard behind him, over this house, this day, this moment. Wherever he goes, he is rooted. It’s what drew Frida to him when she saw him that first time, among the wreckage of San Juan. Even there, he exuded belonging.
She had planned only to visit Joy for ten days or so. It was the tail end of the summer before her last year of Rice’s architecture program, meant to be a quick vacation to her floating childhood home. The boat was docked in their favorite marina off the coast of Puerto Rico—just for the season. With Joy, it was always just for the season. Even after Frida left at seventeen, Joy went on sailing between her favorite islands alone, never more than a handful of months in one place. She could have chosen the Caymans just as easily. Or maybe that bay off of Taboga, the one they anchored in after Joy showed Frida the Bridge of the Americas for the first time and Frida decided that one day she wanted to build such marvels. But Joy didn’t choose either of those places. She picked San Juan.
Frida was excited to take a brief reprieve from the metallic crush of her life in Houston—two jobs, an unpaid internship, and soon a full course load, all clamoring for a finite amount of energy. She ached for the unrelenting enthusiasm of her mother, the old comfort of falling asleep wrapped in waves, the way a shimmer of salt clung to everything. It was meant to be a balm after the endless hustle of Houston, where she could never seem to break even and always felt like an outsider. Then, just after she landed at Isla Verde, they named the hurricane—out there in the Atlantic, whirling all alone. Poppy, they called it. No one who had endured Hurricane Maria took its approach lightly. Everyone was as ready as they could be; it didn’t matter.
What happened next is both vivid and incomplete. A therapist she saw a few times suggested that the missing pieces would return as the shock wore off, but Frida doesn’t want them. She remembers plenty: wading through floodwater and debris, trying to convince overrun funeral parlors to cremate Joy’s remains; the crowds in front of the airport, everyone waiting for the chance at a seat on a nonexistent flight to the mainland; sitting with a roomful of strangers in the FEMA shelter. And then there was Kirby, entering her field of vision like a beacon, like the first glimpse of land after so many days at sea. He was a man who knew what to do next when no one else did. She watched him and his crew survey the destruction and begin their work. Clearing debris, restringing electrical wires, planting new poles in the ground. Just one task at a time. The truth is, Kirby’s happiest when he’s fixing things. Sometimes she worries that this is the reason he married her.
Frida sets the potatoes on the stove to boil, the little diamond chips on her finger catching the witchy chartreuse light that is brewing beneath the bruised clouds—an unseen sunset illuminating the yard. Poppy was only a year ago, but time gulped Frida down whole. It feels as though she’s lived decades since then, and now somehow, she is here, looking at a life she barely recognizes. She’s loosely cognizant of the choices she made along the way: keeping the baby, saying yes when he offered this ring, breaking her lease and dropping out of grad school, moving to this little town on the east coast of Florida. But at the same time, she cannot shake the feeling that she’s been washed ashore on a strange beach. Did she really choose or did she just succumb? Is it a decision to hold on to a life raft, or is it something else? Tears form in the corners of her eyes. It’s the hormones, she chides herself. All of this is just hormones. She loves Kirby, she loves her unmet daughter, and in this house they will build the kind of family she has always coveted. There is even space for these two little boys who don’t belong to her. She doesn’t need sea legs anymore; this ground is firm. It can hold her. It can hold all of them. She checks the oven, where the chicken fat is spitting in the bottom of the pan but the bird is not yet done.
The boys wash their hands the third time she tells them to, and even though she can see them barely obeying—no scrubbing, no soap even—she says nothing, considering the battle won. She lays a stack of plates and a handful of silverware down on the table, and Flip, the youngest, begins to set them out without being asked. She tries not to let her surprise show at this small gesture. He’s always been her favorite of the two, and she likes to think that he is beginning to come around to her presence here. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him line up the plates so that the pattern at each setting is straight, his little brow wrinkling in concentration, measuring the width between the edge of the table and the dishes with his fingers so they’re all evenly placed—something she learned to do working in fine dining back in Houston. She has not taught him this, and Kirby certainly hasn’t. It must have been their mother, an exacting woman she finds fearsome and fascinating and has met only once. The divorce wasn’t clean. She can feel the fissures it left behind even when she doesn’t always understand them.
Her first summer with these boys that aren’t hers was unexpectedly hard. She had no idea what she was walking into until her lease in Houston had already been broken and the ring was on her finger and the baby was the size of a grapefruit. Kirby worked long hours, and when he was gone, the boys behaved badly. Lucas in particular, with Flip always a step or two behind. No one was thrilled about how things went—not Frida; not Kirby; not their mother, Chloe; and certainly not the boys themselves—but summers and occasional weekends and every other holiday with Kirby were what the hard-won custody arrangement decreed. Frida’s preferences had no place on the calendar. So she did her best. She is still just doing her best.
Behind her, Lucas opens the fridge and begins to root through the crisper. She watches him dump a thin plastic bag of apples out into the drawer and then move on to the shelf above it, the bag floating softly down to the tile floor like a silver jellyfish.
“We’re about to eat dinner, buddy,” she says. “Nothing for you in there.”
“What is it, though? For dinner?” he asks, and she knows that this exchange is futile, that he has already decided not to like whatever she has made. A sense of defeat blooms inside her. The roast chicken is evident, steaming in its pan, stuffed with lemons and parsley, rubbed with butter. It looks good, mouthwatering even, but that doesn’t matter to him.
“Chicken and mashed potatoes and greens.”
“I don’t want that.”
“I thought it was your favorite.”
“Not the way you make it.” She tries so hard not to hate this kid, but he makes it difficult. Lucas lifts the lid on the potatoes and groans. “You didn’t even peel them? Isn’t there anything else?”
“The skins are nutritious.”
From under his breath, “Yeah, right.”
“Go tell your dad it’s almost ready, please.”