“Daniel!” His father beamed. The smile on his face was not that of a man who hadn’t seen his son in over a year.
“I brought you something to eat,” Daniel said dryly. He set down one of the cups by his father’s bedroll and fished in his pocket for a pack of Pop-Tarts. “Here.” He held them out.
“I’ve actually been awake for a while,” his dad said, almost defensively. He accepted the food and sat back on a pillow Daniel recognized as belonging to the living room sofa. “I didn’t want to wake you guys and couldn’t really get started with the saw ’cause it was inside.”
“Carlton’s using it,” Daniel said, jabbing a thumb toward the door.
“I heard.” His dad looked away. “So, things are going well? How’s school?”
The questions made Daniel want to scream, to yell at his father, to beat his fists on something, to run to a girl down the block that he barely knew and press his face into her shirt and cry like a fool—
“Fine,” he said instead. “We’d only been back a few days before the storm hit. So I guess I’m acing all my classes so far.”
His father laughed. More than the joke warranted. He tore open his Pop-Tarts and patted the bedroll at his feet. “Sit,” he said.
Daniel remained standing. He took a sip from his own cup of water, his eyes not leaving his father. He drank a deep gulp, and then lowered the cup.
“I take it you were in the area when the storm hit?”
His dad looked away, as if the truth had scurried into one of the toolshed’s dark corners. “I’ve been living on the houseboat down in the City Marina,” he said.
“You’ve been living there?” The water sloshed out of Daniel’s cup as his hand shook. “How long? How long have you been here?”
“June?” His dad said it like it was a question, like he wondered how much Daniel’s hatred of him would grow if he tossed that out there.
“Were you gonna call? Were you—what was your plan, exactly?”
His dad took a bite of the cold Pop-Tart, crumbs sprinkling down on a nice shirt that hadn’t been worn to do nice things in quite some time. “I’ve been working through things,” he said. “I got to where I needed to be close to home to get any better. I just wasn’t there yet.”
“You needed to be close.” Daniel tasted the words and wished he had something stronger than water to wash them down.
“I’ve stopped drinking,” his dad said, almost as if he could read Daniel’s mind.
“Lemme guess—ever since the storm closed the liquor store down?”
His dad looked down at his tired boots. “It’s been since June,” he said.
Daniel stepped back toward the door. He turned a bucket over and sat on it, then dug in his pocket for the other pack of Pop-Tarts. He chewed on one dry corner and on his dad’s words.
“I really was working up the courage to see you guys. I promise.” He looked past Daniel and toward the house. “Is Hunter—?”
“At his girlfriend’s since the night of the storm.”
“Girlfriend?”
Daniel shrugged. He wasn’t about to tell his dad about his brother’s relationships.
“Zola looks good.”
They chewed their Pop-Tarts.
“Why did you come here?” Daniel asked. “I’m sure you have other places you coulda gone.”
His dad took a sip of water. “I guess I couldn’t handle not knowing if you guys were okay. If the house was okay. Before, I mean I used to cradle the phone for hours, you know? I’d dial the number and just rub the send button and think of how easy it’d be to press it and hear your voices, even if you were just yelling at me. You were always that close—hell, I was always that close to doing it, but then the storm hit. My boat—” The old man looked away, the morning sun glistening in his eye. “When the marina went, I thought I was a gonner. All of ‘B’ dock tore loose and surged into town. It was a mess. There were only a few of us dumb enough to be there, and we were lucky no one died. The boats, though—”
Daniel’s father fell silent. The chainsaw out front bit into something thick and struggled.
“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Daniel said. It was as much as he could be thankful for. “I’m gonna go help Carlton. You can—” Daniel wasn’t sure what his dad could do.
“I might work back here, just clean some stuff up around the yard. If your mom will let me, I’d like to look at the roof.”
Daniel peered at the rest of his Pop-Tart, no longer hungry. For some reason, he wanted to tell his dad about the girl down the street. He didn’t know why. He waved goodbye rather than say anything and turned out of the toolshed, breathing in the fresh and gasoline-free air outside. As he walked toward the house, he saw Zola’s face pull away from the kitchen window. The chainsaw in the front yard whined as it finished its work, buzzing through open air, the throttle taking it to dangerous places before it was released and wound itself down.
19
Daniel walked around the house, through the destruction and quiet desolation left in the hurricane’s wake, and realized how quickly he was getting used to this new environment. The limbs of old oaks, the bramble of foliage, the scattered shingles and wet clods of insulation sucked from broken homes. It was a new normal. The world had been roughed over and changed by the storm.
Rounding the garage, he found Carlton and his mom struggling with heavy logs chopped free from the torso of a fallen giant. Daniel headed for the front stoop, where a pile of work gloves lay beside two plastic cups of water, neither cup sweating with the promise of a cool, refreshing drink within.
He tugged a pair of worn leather gloves on and went to help haul more of the seemingly endless supply of firewood to the swelling debris pile that now meandered partway around the cul-de-sac.
“You okay?” his mom asked, obviously aware of where Daniel had chosen to eat breakfast.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Where’s Zola?”
“Bathroom,” his mom said. She looked over his shoulder and lifted her chin toward the door. Daniel turned and saw his sister coming out on the stoop. She padded down the brick steps and knelt to sort through all the too-large gloves. Daniel looked back to his mom.
“Is there something we should be doing to get in touch with Hunter?” he asked.
She smiled grimly, her eyes twinkling. “Like send up smoke signals?” Her voice was full of sad impotence, not humor. She wiped her brow with the back of her arm, both of which were peppered with bits of bark and fine sawdust. “All we can do is trust that he’s okay,” she said. They’ll have power or cell phones or something up before long.”
“Maybe the landlines still work,” Daniel said. He had been against them getting rid of the old house phone the year before, but since it no longer rang, and everyone in the family carried a phone in their pockets anyway, his mom had decided that the cost of the bill no longer made sense.
Carlton returned from another Sisyphean trip to the debris pile. “The landlines weren’t working as of this morning.” He nodded toward the house across the street, the one with the morning coffee drinkers that Daniel had waved to the day before. “The Morrison’s have been trying theirs hourly.”
“When did you meet them?” Daniel’s mom asked.
“They were out this morning. I checked to make sure the chainsaw wouldn’t disturb them. They understood wanting to get an early start, what with the heat and all.” Carlton picked up the saw and flicked a lever on its side. He reached into the breast pocket of his short sleeve button-up and extracted his plastic safety goggles. “They seem like good people,” Carlton added, and Daniel felt less alone and silly for not knowing anything about them. He thought about another person he’d met in the neighborhood that he’d like to get to know better. The day before, working in the yard, he’d wracked his brain wondering how to get out of debris duty and what he’d say if he went over. By the time he’d worked up the courage and memorized a few excuses, he was too hot and sweaty to want to be seen. As he carried another cut log to the growing row Carlton had started between two trees, he realized he should go over there early and get it over with. Just to keep from perseverating about it all day long or waiting until he got nasty with sweat.