My lips spread into a wild grin. She misses me. And then an attachment comes through—a blurry, watery picture of her street in the midst of a downpour taken from what I assume is her bedroom window. The street is almost steaming with humidity.
I hold the phone to my chest and pretend that her view is my view and that instead of my sister’s, it’s Grace’s head in my lap. I imagine different versions of us leading a life I can barely recognize.
“Ramona, Ramona.” A rough hand grips my forearm. “Wake up, littlebebette,” says my dad, using old Cajun slang passed down from Grandma Cookie. Bebette, his little monster. “Gonna be late for your route.”
I open my eyes to find the television turned off and my father hovering inches above my head. “I’m going back to bed before I gotta get back to the hotel,” he says.
Dad looks exhausted, but that’s nothing new. In the last few years the lines on his face have transformed from creases to wrinkles, revealing his every worry. Whenever I find myself bitter over how tall I am, I tell myself that it’s a gift from my father. A constant reminder that I’m his girl. And my boxy jaw. That one is his fault, too.
He kisses my forehead before shuffling back to bed. “Take a banana with you.”
Carefully, I lift Hattie’s head and place a pillow beneath it as I get up.
“Don’t forget Tyler’s birthday party tomorrow,” she says, her voice thick with sleep. “You ordered the cake like you said you would, right?”
Oh shit.Hattie wanted a cake from Stella’s Bakery, and I completely forgot to call the order in yesterday. Stella requires forty-eight hours’ notice and the woman doesn’t budge for anything. My best bet is groveling in person after my route.
“It’s all taken care of,” I lie.
Quickly, I run to my room and pull on a pair of frayed denim shorts and the black combat boots Grace picked out for me at the Salvation Army. When I wore them the next night to show her how much I loved them, I paired them with a short sundress.Nineties heroin chic, Grace called it.
The dress didn’t end up staying on for very long. I try pushing back the memory, but that doesn’t stop the goose bumps on my legs.
I check my phone as I run out the door, wheeling my bike along. There was a time when the streets of our trailerpark were paved, but now all that’s left are cracked chunks of cement peppered with deep craters. Blame it on weather or horrible drivers or the shitty management company. Either way it’s impossible to bike through, and the only way a car manages is by tiptoeing over each hole and crack. Most people have taken to parking on the street.
We had a house when I was a baby, back when my mom was still around. Hattie remembers it better than I do. But when Hurricane Katrina hit, the house flooded beyond repair and we lost everything below the waterline, including my dad’s po’boy truck.
We were no different from anyone else, though. Everybody lost something or someone or a little bit of both. The three of us spent a few months surfing couches and holing up in motels, living off FEMA cards, waiting for the insurance money to come in while my mom went to stay with her sister in Arkansas. When she didn’t come back, I asked my dad every night when she would come home to us, until eventually I stopped asking.
When the insurance check finally arrived, it wasn’t nearly enough to replace all that we had lost, so Dad bought the FEMA trailer we’d called home for a few months by then and took a job as a cook/maintenance guy at Le Manoir, the oldest hotel in Eulogy and one of the few buildings that survived unscathed.
Mom never came home. Maybe it was the trailer. Maybe it was us. Sometimes catastrophes split you in half, and even if all the pieces are there, they might not ever fit back together.
When I was about nine or ten, we traded that trailer for a slightly larger one so that Dad wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch forever, but this one is no more structurally sound than the last. The floors creak and in some places are deteriorating altogether. There’s mold without a doubt, but it’s easy to ignore anything we can’t see. The roof sags with water damage, the walls are peeling from moisture, and I’d be lying if I said we haven’t had a roach problem more than once. It’s time for us all to move on, but none of us has any sense of where. Or how. And still, there’s something comforting about this place.
As I coast through my route, I try to think of all the ways I can possibly convince Stella to make this cake. I concoct a handful of sob stories in my head, but Stella’s as sympathetic as a gator.
If Grace were here, I’d ask her to make the cake. She may have craved things like SpaghettiOs and Pizza Pockets, but Grace loved to bake. One night we stayed up late making homemade doughnuts and ate every last one before her family woke up in the morning while we watched all the random Olympic games they play overnight, like handball and trampoline.
I wonder what she’s doing today and if she does things like make late-night doughnuts even when she’s not on vacation. It hits me that I don’t know much about her life at home except that she quit soccer last year and has a best friend named Veronica who just moved to Texas.
When I finish my route, I find Freddie sitting in the grass beside a black trash bag full of weeds. He hasn’tnoticed me and is mid-yawn when a fat raindrop splashes him right on the tip of his nose.
“I didn’t take you for the gardening type.”
He eyes me over his shoulder. “Christ. It’s early. I just had one of those moments where you’re so exhausted you can’t even tell if you’re awake.”
“Oh, these are my witching hours,” I say proudly. “There’s something about early mornings that makes me feel like I’ve got the whole damn planet to myself.”
“Well, you can have it,” he says.
The sky cracks with thunder, and the downpour is instantaneous.
“Y’all two get in here!” shouts Agnes from the front porch. She wears rubber sandals like they sell at the dollar store and a white terry-cloth zip-up robe.
Freddie grabs my bike by the crossbar and throws his trash bag full of weeds over his shoulder.
“Y’all can leave those both on the porch,” says Agnes as she waves us inside.
