“When’s the storm getting here?” Lucas asks, clawing at his shirt. Always grabbing at some article of Kirby’s clothing, these boys. Always asking for a little more of him.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Kirby says. “But probably won’t be a direct hit. Forecast says it’ll make land farther north.”
“I saw the Robisons leaving this morning. Jimmy said they’re ’vacuating. But we’re not, are we?”
“Well,” Kirby says, and fixes his eyes on his oldest. “That depends. Are you scared of a little wind?” Lucas shakes his head before the question is done being asked. “Are you scared of a little rain?” Another shake. “Then we’re not evacuating.” He says this last bit as Lucas clambers over the sandbags stacked in the open doorway. Kirby doesn’t intend for Frida to hear him say all of this, but she does, and when he follows Lucas into the kitchen and catches the look on her face, puckered and tearful, he’s instantly ashamed of himself. He only meant to make his son feel safe. But then his guilt swells too big and it changes into something bitter, something charred. He can feel it turn—the apology he knows he should offer, the sorry on the tip of his tongue, burns.
“Wash your hands, Lucas,” Kirby says, his mouth full of ash.
“I already did.”
“So do it again.”
Lucas makes the sound of a child being forced to do hard labor and stumbles toward the sink, suddenly limp under the weight of this task. This time, he uses the soap.
Chapter 3
Dinner is eaten quietly. The boys pick at their food. The chicken is dry. The mashed potatoes are lumpy. The greens—the greens are bright and well-seasoned, but these boys don’t like greens unless they’re cooked in molasses, the way their mother makes them, and even then they are dubious.
“Eat,” Kirby commands, confused by their ravenous eyes and heaping plates. What he doesn’t fully understand is that these boys aren’t hungry for food. They’re hungry for him. His attention. His affection. Even before the divorce they were hungry, fed on scraps when he had the time and energy to play. Now they are starving. At their other house, Chloe tells them that Kirby abandoned them all. They don’t believe this, not yet, but they’re scared that it might be true. “Frida cooked you dinner and you will eat it,” Kirby adds, but this only gives them another reason not to. Over the summer, Flip and Lucas tormented Frida because she has what they want. What their mother never had. It’s the only way they know how to be loyal to Chloe without sacrificing Kirby’s attention. This weekend, as always, they can’t stop thinking about how soon these precious hours with their father will end. They are such different boys, but in this yearning for more time they are united.
“They don’t have to,” Frida says. She can see that the harder Kirby pushes them to like her, the harder they will resist.
“They do, actually,” Kirby replies, his tone sharp. So the boys eat the food they don’t want, because their father tells them to. Lucas tears into his drumstick. Flip shovels mashed potatoes into his mouth. Still they’re hungry. Frida is just an interloper, another heart for Kirby to feed, a reason the boys have less than they used to. She tries to win them over with kindness and pity, but this tastes wrong to them. Her smell is too mossy, her voice is too low, the food she cooks for them is wrong. She is an acquired taste that they don’t want to acquire. Instead, they eye her round belly and see how little they are about to matter. The love in this house is finite. Tense. Transactional. There isn’t enough for them, and soon there will be even less. They feel a storm coming, too.
Chapter 4
The rain starts as Frida scoops the cold, congealing mashed potatoes into Tupperware. There is too much food left over—Lucas and Flip were being fussy and she wasn’t thinking about how long they might have to go without power when she decided to buy a whole chicken. She wonders if she should just throw the mashed potatoes away, but at that moment it seems like more work than to save them, so she clicks the lid into place and stacks the container in the fridge with all the other Tupperwares, little cloudy boxes with their rainbow of contents. It might be beautiful if she didn’t know what was inside them all—fried plantains gone soggy; pink beans and rice; roasted carrots; overcooked chicken. But she does, and so all she sees is a constellation of food that no one wanted the first time. The recipes she knows by heart they hate, and the recipes she learns for them seem to go wrong. She always enjoyed cooking, but Kirby is useless in the kitchen and somehow the task of feeding them all has fallen to her. She likes cooking less now. She misses the grind of Houston—at least there she knew what she was working toward, and the only person she had to take care of was herself.
The boys are in bed and Kirby putters out in his tool shed. The quiet thrum of rain against the roof usually makes her feel peaceful, but tonight it sounds like a threat, soft and persistent—ready to intensify at any moment. Kirby comes in with his hand-crank radio, stepping over the sandbags in the doorway and spattering water across the floor. Rain pools at his feet. Frida doesn’t want to fight with him, but he is so calm it feels like she must. If she doesn’t remind him how vulnerable they all are, she worries he will forget. His comment to Lucas is still ringing in her ears. A little rain. A little wind. Goddammit, Kirby, she thinks.
“See?” she says, gesturing at the ceiling and the sky above it. On another day she might have held back. She might have seen the exhaustion on his face and remembered that he is also doing his best. But it’s not another day. It’s today, and today she is tired of feeling alone with the panic that lately seems like it is always whirling just beneath her skin. “It’s starting and the windows aren’t boarded up yet. Are you even listening?”
“For fuck’s sake.” Kirby slams his hands into the back of one of the chairs, pushed in neatly, and the entire table jumps forward a few inches. “I’m boarding them up first thing. I told you we’d be ready and we’ll be ready. You think I haven’t been tracking it? You think I don’t know how hurricanes work? It’ll hit farther north. And even if it doesn’t, we’ll be fine.”
“Right, because you know everything, Kirb. You have all the information. I’m the one who doesn’t know shit.”
Except they both know, firsthand, how hurricane season goes. For years, Kirby made his living taking storm-duty contracts, traveling to wherever the aftermath was worst, and for her entire childhood, Frida and Joy were ruled by weather patterns. None of that helped her in San Juan. Is it any wonder she’s so frightened now? The most significant moment of Frida’s life is wrapped in the howl of a hurricane, the dark funnel of grief and a bright pinpoint of the eye shining above—the brightness that used to be Kirby. It used to be this house, and the life they were building inside it. Now, it’s not that she doubts her husband’s expertise in these storms, but rather that she doubts his expertise in her.
“Fri,” he says, trying to de-escalate the fury he sees on her face, “we’ll be okay. I promise. I’ve been prepping for hurricanes since I was a kid. I know how to do this.”