A hurricane be great for the business. Fearius know he be breaking sale records when he get back out in the morning, all the peoples lining up. They gone have to stockpile if a hurricane coming.
Muzzle smile with his eyes closed. He dreamin about hospital pussy, Fearius think. That or Muzzle just fucked up on his meds. Doctors say he might could need a cane always, but Fearius cant see Muzzle with no cane. A limp maybe. Muzzle would go an play up a limp.
Alphonse give Muzzle a sign and go out the door. “Keep hangin,” Fearius tell Muzzle and leave. Fearius happy he not in his bros place. And he happy Alphonse be his boss. Today, he just happy.
Breathing heavily, Ed stands in their living room holding his lower back, looking at his work. He’s made five piles of his family’s belongings, what he believes to be the most essential elements of their lives, one for each of them and one for the communal whole. Even at a quick glance, he can see that only some small portion of the piles will fit into either of their cars. Maybe they could evacuate with both cars. Actually, Ed realizes with a start, that’s what they need to do. Why would they leave a car to be destroyed? Or stolen. Exactly. Ariel can drive one, and he’ll man the other.
Ed thinks of the footage he’s seen before. Flopping palm trees, huge breakers on the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans has a few palm trees, some quite mature ones around the casino, a couple in neighbors’ yards. Here-and-there palms. And then there’s Lake Pontchartrain. When they debated whether or not to move here, Ed researched New Orleans. The big flat shallow lake, a pancake really, never struck him as a natural weapon, but that’s what those in the know seem to deem it.
Okay. So the piles might fit into both of the cars. But he’s not entirely sure that the portion of the communal pile comprised of groceries is supposed to come along. Don’t you buy supplies for sticking it out, rather than evacuating? They can afford to stop at restaurants. Maybe snacks for the drive. But the drive to where? Ed’s not supposed to call Ariel at work, but he did. She wasn’t available, so he left the usual: Ask her to call home, please.
For the umpteenth time, he appraises the situation. He knows, at least, that Ella and Miles aren’t back for another hour and a half. Ed decides he can celebrate his thorough preparation with a short trip to the river a few blocks away. He can go stand and stare at the water passing, some trillion gallons a second or whatever it is. He deserves the detour.
Marie walks in their hospital room door, and Cerise sighs. Here it comes again. Cerise is sure of it. Marie’s going to push her proposal a second time, now to both of them, forcing what she wants.
“Mom, Daddy,” Marie says, and Cerise knows she’s right. Her daughter’s playing to Roy’s parental sympathies. The fact that a hurricane hangs out in the Gulf like some derelict on a corner doesn’t help. The hospital’s put out word that anyone who’s able to leave, and would like to, should. Cerise would like to leave, regardless of the pain.
“Where’s Lil Thomas?” Roy asks, sitting up, happy as a clam. You’d think he’d be sitting in a restaurant waiting on his filet mignon. “Bring on that boy.”
Their daughter spreads her empty hands and scoffs. Like they should see she’s the only one there, of course. Of course they can see Marie’s by herself, but she shouldn’t give her father flack for trying to greet his one and only. Lil Thomas is the apple of the old man’s eye.
“Give your father a kiss,” Cerise directs.
“Hi, Daddy.” Marie leans in and kisses Roy by his ear.
Cerise is a third-round-to-leave hospital patient, one who’s not supposed to go just yet. She can feel why. Her head sits on her neck like a basketball full of concrete. And then there are her hands. Sometimes the right feels more frozen than it does burned. She dreams they are big and heavy as cast-iron frying pans. Just about as useful stuck on the ends of her arms. In another dream they crumble away, her fingers burnt charcoal. In real life, Cerise is due for another debridement in two hours. They’ve already sliced open all her right-hand fingers because of how they turned into sausages. It’s normal, they told her. It’s called a digital release. The skin would just burst open, all irregular, otherwise.
“Mom,” Marie says and steps to Cerise. Marie plants a kiss of gloopy lip gloss on Cerise’s forehead. “So, Mom,” Marie says again. “Have you made a decision?”
Cerise looks to Roy in the other single bed beside her. His eyes say, Don’t look at me, but then his real voice says, “Seem like a good idea, Marie. I can help out in no time anyways.”
Cerise knew she’d be outnumbered. She sighs a second time. Not like she was really gonna win this one though. “I wish …” Cerise says, “I wish I had a chance to meet this Keyshawn, Marie.”
“His reviews are excellent. Mother. Trust me for once. I know what I’m doing.”
Cerise knows she should trust her daughter, her over-forty daughter, but somehow she can’t. There’s something about Marie that’s never sat right, and the fact shames Cerise. Who doesn’t love her child more than anything in the world?
Keyshawn is a personal support worker, a PSW, a somebody to come to a house to help care for the folks with problems who live there. But Keyshawn is new to his job, still in classes even, and he’s a friend of Thomas and Marie’s, and they’ve worked it out that he’s supposed to watch after Lil Thomas in the house at the same time he’s looking after the two of them while Marie and Thomas are both away at work, all on Cerise and Roy’s dime. Their own dime. Cerise can’t figure out how it’s any kind of deal at all. Supposedly Medicare covers a portion, but her headache springs all over again at the thought of negotiating through the maze.
“Roy?” Cerise asks. She wonders how Roy will react to a man helping around the house. To a man following her into the toilet. Cerise doubts Roy’s even thought any of it through he’s so damn giddy with his almost immediate recovery. If anything, the accident seems to have awakened a younger Roy who doesn’t sleep much. Her Roy, her husband, actually wants to tell stories again.
“You already know what I have to say,” Roy tells Cerise. “I said it. Keyshawn be fine if Marie say so.”
Cerise sees what the future holds in a way that’s different than she did a month ago. Than a week ago. She’s known they’ve been loners, her and Roy, and she’s known they’ve been lucky, most ways. Marie sure isn’t a Harris child. But now comes the penance, huh? Here it comes. Keyshawn, Lil Thomas, Roy, her, the all of them, all in the house all day.
Cerise gets the skin graft when “a stable wound has been achieved.” The doctors will be taking the skin from her backside. She’s gonna have a brown palm. She’s gonna have a piece of her ass on her claw hand.
What’s she gonna do, have the Keyshawn boy follow her with a cart at Winn-Dixie to make groceries? Help her buy fiber pills at the Rite Aid with her white mitten hands? It doesn’t make an ounce of sense, best Cerise can see, but she’s at their mercy. At their mercy mercy mercy.
And who knows what the hell they’ll all be doing about the hurricane.
Prancie admires her stacks of journals in the linen closet behind the towels. The neat rows and uniform bindings. Prancie prides herself on her daring. Her ability to hide her important observations and writings should be noted by at least one breathing person. And so the person is she. Herself. Prancie knows she has done a professional job. The hired help—whatever are those people called again?—are not allowed into private areas of the home, so they would never be aware of Prancie’s work.
The daredevil neighbor has proven particularly vexing lately. Edgar Allan Flank. The stay-at-home father. He gave her his full name quite readily enough upon their meeting. Philomenia—for she was still Philomenia then—used all her life’s training not to say, at his strange label, “Excuse me?” She heard him clearly enough, of course.
Now Prancie can see that Edgar purposefully assaulted her with his name. She must note as much in the two journals that document him thus far. Edgar Allan Flank uses his name as a weapon to shock individuals into silen
ce or confusion, she thinks as she grabs for the journals. He has used this form of passive-aggressive communication for some time, if she surmises correctly.
As a child, the young Edgar surely suffered the small arrows of his classmates and peers. But unquestionably at a later stage he managed to turn the tide. Now he uses his name to his benefit. His adult approach, she thinks with acuity, is akin to walking across the avenue holding a machete: greet your neighbors and establish your undeniable presence.
Prancie carries the necessary journals into her private sanctuary of rooms. She will sit in the bay window. She takes her leisure flipping pages, perusing her work. Here. There he is. “Edgar Allan Flank,” she writes, admiring her cursive, the curl at the bottom and top of the F, “has determined that he wields power with his name. It carries …” Prancie runs her pen over the word ‘carries.’ Carries? “Impact,” she continues.
Her husband bathed once in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Joe had done nothing but read the newspaper that morning. He purchased their Danishes early. He ate, read, pruned a total of three branches on the already pruned azaleas in the side yard and then stepped into their bathroom and turned on the shower. He left their house shortly afterwards. He smelled of cologne.
Philomenia did not ask. Philomenia did not think a thing of it then. But then again. She must have thought, for the half hour it took him to get ready that afternoon has since lodged itself in a nook of her brain. A cranny, really, but she does not take kindly to the word ‘cranny.’
Prancie feels the need to tidy. Prancie would like to be rid of such memories. Cobwebs, the all of them. “Edgar Allan Flank has determined that he wields power with his name,” she reads. “It carries impact—”
Joe smelled of cigarettes upon his return. He remarked on the moistness of her redfish. She used the same recipe she always had. Her grandmother’s recipe. Philomenia began cooking full meals at eleven years of age.
“It carries impact—”
Edgar Allan Flank made such a preposterous show of himself, and yet he succeeded with the neighbors. The fiasco with the coconut cream flits across her peripheral memory.
“It carries impact—” she reads again. Her coconut cream was glorious. It sat better than a Chanel sweater draped over a—Lord, that bosom of Sharon Harris, that terrible, terrible bosom. Whatever reason would a woman have to display her assets in a less than favorable light? Stand up straight, Philomenia. Present your assets with pride.
One can easily remember when it is necessary to stand up straight.
“But the real problem,” she continues in the more ruminant of the two journals, “is that he uses his name to manipulate his trusting neighbors. Orchid Street need not be inundated by such social climbers. Where, exactly—” To where indeed did Edgar Allan Flank hope to get?
And then the moths come in, bumping their way across her vision. Prancie knows better now than to swat at her face, though no one is watching her in her lovely and well-appointed bay window. The moths leave powder the texture of cornstarch in her hair. Invisible.
Joe often smelled of cigarettes. It was not his only flaw.
The distant whir of a hurricane with the quite sophisticated name of Ivan spins slowly somewhere over the Gulf. What might Prancie do with an opportunity to present her name to the world? Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges should rise to the weather. Rise to the challenge of another Betsy.
Prancie has assets. She should present them to the world. Prancie should assert herself and gain the power on the street she so rightly deserves. Prancie should give Edgar Allan Flank a run for his money. She might not have the physical prowess to lift heavy objects, but she has lived on Orchid Street as long as the Harrises, and she could ingratiate herself in other ways. Perhaps she could do some cleaning. They would never know it.
She could start at the barnacle, she realizes. She nods. If she understands his predilections, the stay-at-home father will be there often enough.
“I, too,” she writes, careful with her penmanship, “can become an indispensable and essential element to the neighborhood.” Philomenia never enacted change, Prancie realizes, but Prancie can make things happen. Prancie can take matters into her own hands. She need not phone the police at every turn.
The idea blossoms like a morning glory. She will begin by bringing treats to her neighbor while he pickles himself at Tokyo Rose. There is terribly much one can do with baking. So many ingredients. So many possibilities. Prancie writes faster. Oh yes, so much one can do.
6
Ivan. It sounds like a medieval horseman, and it’s how Ariel pictures the thing, charging madly, cape flapping. Ariel has been told by La Belle Nouvelle’s owners in no uncertain terms that she must stay at the hotel. Stay with the hotel, her stucco third child. The owners will allow her to move her family into a room if she needs to. Making her way from one cluster of employees to the next, Ariel contemplates the possibilities as she tries to take the temperature of her workers. Nobody’s left yet. Nobody’s quit, claiming an ill relative who needs evacuating, a dog that goes berserk with the telltale drop of barometric pressure. So far, so good. Ariel seems to be the only one with knee-buckling worry.
You’re in charge, woman, Ariel tells herself. They look to you.
Warren, her executive chef, and a bevy of the housekeeping staff—actually, really, all the long-term employees, the ones born and raised in New Orleans—have begun acting as though they swallowed a bunch of ecstasy. Happy, happy. If Christmas knocked at the door, they’d be wearing Santa hats and jingle bells. Ariel doesn’t get it. They’re behaving as though some huge party sits on the horizon rather than the Grand Russian Death Czar.
“Tell him to order extra booze if you didn’t already,” Warren tells Ariel. He means her bar manager. Warren says there’ll be a run on all things alcoholic. Ariel supposes she should listen to Warren. He hasn’t steered her wrong yet.
“Anything more specific?” she asks him. She’s happy Javier’s on break.
“And you mean?” Warren sticks his finger into a pan of something rougey bubbling over a burner. The man can’t have any nerve endings left in his hands.
He knows what she means. “Whiskey?” she tries. “Vodka?”
“Beer,” Warren tells her. “All that they’ll let you take, you take. And make ’em give it to you cold.” He reaches for the olive oil. “And call Ice. Yesterday. You needed to call Ice yesterday.”
Why would she call Ice? Oh, shit. Yeah. Ice. “On it,” Ariel says and gives Warren a lame smile. He knows he’s helping her out. She’ll hit him up later again. For now, she needs to make sure her bar manager, who isn’t due in yet for another hour, is ready for the hordes. Ariel pictures a scene her nightmares are made of, piles and piles of people cramming their way into the hotel.
In her dreams, she is the only one left. All the other employees are gone, and she must serve the hordes, pour drinks, book people into the rooms, make beds, cart luggage, cook, bring ice. Serve. For some reason the hordes wait for her, wait and huff and complain and wait. The chaos is barely contained.
But Ariel decides she must have a decent moral view of the world imprinted on her brain’s hard drive; her nightmares are made of customers waiting for her service rather than customers running wild through the fields of her hotel, ravaging the pantries. They could be ravaging her in her dreams instead of tapping feet and rolling eyes.
“What’s the special tonight?” she asks Warren.
He grins, something Ariel realizes he never does. They’re all on E, she swears. Warren has braces-perfect teeth. “Everything fresh,” he answers.
Her kids aren’t back from school yet, she knows. Their house is a grand and spacious money pit. A big breath would knock down the entire block, for that matter. Do cars float? She tries to scan her disaster footage memory for why cars drive into rivers. That’s what it always looks like, she thinks. People make the entirely irrational decision to drive directly into a river. Ariel knows better than to do that. She
thinks she knows better. Maybe roads look like rivers when you’ve lost your mind. Or you forget the local landscape. Oh, now I remember, we turn left here into the rushing water then right at the next flotilla of debris.
“What?” she asks.
“Lady Ariel,” Warren says, “we need to serve a goodly portion of our fresh produce, fowl, and fish, at the very least, lest the power go poof in the coming days.”
Oh. That makes sense. “Got it,” she says. “Make it special. Break our bottom line times three.” Ariel has faith in the man. “Make it glorious.”
She leaves for her office to call Ed again. This is it, she thinks, as their house line rings and rings. This is why he needs a cell phone. Environmentalist housedad or no, she needs to get in touch with him when necessary. Now is necessary.
Somebody knocks at her open door. Her always open door, a policy she started when she first arrived. It forces her to remain calm when she wants to yell at someone. It forces her to write letters when firing employees and pass the papers calmly across her desk.
It’s Javier at her always open door.
And it forces her to keep her libido in check. “Yes?” she asks.
“Miss Ariel,” he says in his thick accent. It took Ariel a full month to decide whether or not she’d accept the Southern formality as a term of respect from her employees. A first name is a first name, after all, preceded with a title or not. And the diminutive “Miss.” Well. But it was a concession to local customs, finally, that Ed thought she should make. He convinced her that the staff would think no less of her. Ariel supposes he was right. Not that Ed could have had any idea what the words “Miss Ariel” would do to her coming out of the mouth of her sous chef.
“Hello, Javier.”
“Miss Ariel, I talk to you.”
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