The Hurricane

25

Fortunately, Anna did come over, and a shy smile in Daniel’s direction let him know their bond could survive stretching the length of their neighborhood. She and her dad arranged some vegetables on the chopping block in the kitchen. Everyone else was out back, wrestling the furniture on the rear deck into place, picking the twigs and leaves out of the webbed chairs and fussing over the smorgasbord of food scavenged from the cabinets. Daniel could see Carlton and his dad standing by the grill, the chicken hissing and smoking, two small pots on the upper rack spitting with side dishes. The sight of the two men—father and stepfather—standing together amicably seemed surreal. Daniel accepted the plate of freshly sliced tomatoes shoved into his hands and allowed Anna to steer him toward the sliding screen door.

“I think we’re almost ready,” his mom yelled at the upper floor. Daniel heard his brother shout something back through the open window. The temporary sleeping arrangements had been quickly set: Daniel was moving into Hunter’s room with his brother, and Chen and Zola were sharing his. He had tried not to grumble about it too much. His brother had looked ready to be dropped back off at Chen’s house.

“Grab a plate,” his mom said. She pointed to a stack of paper plates on the table. Daniel grabbed one for Anna and took one for himself. Carlton dropped a piece of BBQ-rubbed chicken on each of their plates. Daniel’s father added a scoop of warmed-up canned beans and instant mashed potatoes. To Daniel, the sparse fare looked like Thanksgiving.

His brother and Chen joined them on the deck, followed soon after by Zola. Edward went around forking slices of tomato onto everyone’s plates. Daniel and Anna sat on the steps leading down to the back yard while the others scrambled for room around the oval table. Their father put his food together last and ate standing, his cup balanced on the deck’s wooden rail.

While they ate, Hunter and Edward took turns telling the others about what they’d seen in town, about the gas pump, the cops at the grocery store, the beached fleet of sailboats, all the downed power lines and the wrecked roofs. Zola asked if there’d been any cell phone signal, and everyone was surprised to realize that they hadn’t even checked.

Daniel dove into his food and watched Anna enjoy hers. They exchanged smiles while they chewed, as if the two of them possessed a secret. Chainsaws hummed in the distance; everyone laughed and ate and gossiped. Chen seemed to take perverse delight in telling their mom that she’d warned Hunter to park the Taurus out in the yard. News of the car, however, was still a sore spot for their mom, who chewed her dinner and didn’t laugh with the others while they recounted their search for the insurance card and their attempts to work the radio.

As far as Daniel could tell, it was the most normal, bizarre meal he’d ever had. Looking up, he could see the limbs of the great oak from the front yard reaching over the peak of the damaged roof. One massive broken limb draped over the back and was bushy with leaves. That he could get so quickly used to such newness as the tree on his house made his infatuation with Anna almost believable. Which was stranger or more sudden? As Anna stabbed the last of his tomato off his plate and popped it into her mouth, Daniel slashed at her fork with his as if jousting, and oddly enough wished that nothing in his world would ever change—

“Holy shit, I’ve got a bar,” Zola said.

“Language, young lady,” their mother said, but everyone else stopped chewing and turned to look at her. She held her phone in the air, tilted the screen down and peered up at it. She spun in place, as if trying to divine the pocket of most reception. Hunter and Chen both began digging their phones out of their pockets.

“It’s gone,” Zola said. She walked down the steps between Daniel and Anna, waving the phone in the air. “Come back,” she called after the ephemeral bar.

“I’ve got signal,” Hunter said. He pressed some buttons.

“Who’re you calling?” Chen asked.

“You,” he said. Everyone sat breathless. He lowered the phone and looked at it. “It says the network is full.”

“Me too,” Zola said, holding the phone to her ear.

“I bet everyone is trying to use them,” Daniel pointed out.

“There might be signal but no service for quite some time,” Edward said.

“Honey, don’t just keep redialing.” Their mother snapped her fingers in Zola’s direction. “Just try once an hour. Don’t waste your battery.”

Anna seemed like she was going to say something about the batteries—maybe remind them of her charging station—but chose not to.

“Let’s not get all worked up,” their father said. “These things will come back in time, but trying to rush them won’t make it happen any faster.” He gathered plates from the table and stacked them together. Daniel watched his mom as she studied his actions. She handed her own empty plate to him, her eyes darting from him to Carlton.

“Thanks for cooking,” their father said, nodding to Carlton. “I’m going to get out of ya’lls hair for a while. Tomorrow, though, I’m gonna want to borrow that saw.” He turned and looked to Edward, who seemed to have bonded with their father during the day’s ride. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to head over and get that rope we talked about, so I’ll have it in the morning.”

“What’re you gonna do in the morning?” Daniel asked.

“We,” his father said. He glanced up. “We’re gonna get that tree off this house I built. We’re not gonna wait around for someone else to come and do it for us.”

His father gave him a most sober stare. He stepped between Daniel and Anna and strolled purposefully toward Edward’s house.

Edward thanked Carlton and his mom for their hospitality and hurried off as well. Daniel’s mom stood still, an empty plate in her hand. She looked up at the broken bough of the massive tree hanging over the top of the roof.

“I guess I’d better go,” Anna told Daniel, the lilt of her voice seeming to complain at having to do so. She stood up and brushed the back of her shorts with her hands. Daniel stood as well and took her plate, stacking it under his own.

“Maybe I should come over and help Dad carry whatever he’s borrowing.” He knew it was a transparent excuse to stay near her, but he didn’t care. If he could be so bold in the back of the Bronco, he could let someone know he’d rather not see them go.

Anna smiled. She bit her lip and nodded. Daniel threw the plates in a trash bag Hunter was using to gather dishes. He mumbled to his mom that he’d be right back, then chased Anna off the deck and around the house toward the street.

••••

“That was an amazing meal,” Daniel said, making small talk while they walked the short trip between their houses.

“Yeah.” Anna turned her head to follow the flight of a startled blue jay. “Your brother seems like a cool guy. And your sister’s sweet.”

Daniel refrained from arguing the points. “Do you miss your brother?” he asked.

Anna nodded. She kicked a small limb off the street. “A lot. It was cool for a while to have the house to myself, but now it’s just boring.”

“How do you like being home schooled? And why did your parents choose to do that?”

“They didn’t. I did.” Anna tucked her hands into her back pocket. She veered to the side and nudged Daniel with her shoulder. “After middle school, I told them I was either gonna home school or just drop out and wait until I could take my GED. I couldn’t handle it.”

“Couldn’t handle what?”

She looked away. “Just stuff. Girls. Meanness.” She tried to smile at Daniel, but her eyes were shining wet. “I was always sort of this tomgirl. I enjoyed tinkering with my dad in the garage. I liked playing whatever my brother was playing. I mean, I loved my mom and all, but she was always the one working long hours and away on business. There was a lot of role reversal in my house, and it didn’t match what my peers were going through.”

“You and I have a lot in common, then,” Daniel said. “Girls have a long history of being mean to me as well.” He laughed, hoping she’d take the admission as a joke.

“Maybe they hate us for being cooler than them,” Anna offered.

“I’m sure that’s it.”

They stopped in front of Anna’s driveway and looked up at the house. Daniel nearly asked her if she wanted to keep walking some more, maybe to Georgia and back, but her father waved from the open garage, so they trudged up toward the house.

Daniel’s dad was coiling a long length of rope when they joined them. Another neat loop of rope lay at his feet. “You don’t have any webbing by any chance, do you?” he asked Anna’s father.

“I’ve got these tow straps,” he said, digging them out of a box and holding them up.

“Perfect.”

“I came over to see if you needed help carrying this stuff back,” Daniel said.

His father flashed him a knowing smile, his eyes darting happily between him and Anna.

“Hey,” Anna said, “I never showed you how that water flows down to our sink.”

“Oh, yeah, I meant to ask you about that.”

“Hey Dad, I’m gonna take Daniel up to see our cistern.”

Edward laughed and worked to unknot lengths of flat yellow webbing. “Go right ahead,” he said.

“I’ll wait for you,” his father said, “so don’t be too long.”

Daniel waved and followed Anna into the house. She checked over her shoulder with a smile before turning a corner and padding up the stairs. Daniel hurried after her.

At the top of the stairs, she rounded a banister, her hand squeaking on the wood, and paced toward one of the bedrooms. She stood outside the door, looking in and waiting for Daniel.

“We were filling up the bathtubs before the storm,” she said. “Dad and I were trying to think of ways to store up even more.”

Daniel joined her and looked inside. There was a kiddie pool in the middle of the bedroom, sitting on top of a bed frame and box spring. The mattress was leaning on its side against a wall, out of the way.

“What in the world?” Daniel asked.

“Come look.” Anna walked around the pool to the bedroom window. She stuck a finger against the glass, pointing to a hose outside. “We set it up in a hurry, but it works great. Once we got the pool up here, Dad reached out the window and popped the downspout off the gutter. He held me while I taped that hose to where the downspout was.”

Daniel looked up through the window to see a length of garden hose duct-taped to the short drop of spout leading off the gutter. The hose came through the top part of the window, which was cracked open, and led to the pool.

“Mom would’ve killed us,” Anna said. She laughed.

“So the water flows from the gutter into the pool,” Daniel said. He looked back at the pool, which was half full. “Why didn’t it overflow? There was tons of rain with that storm.”

“It did overflow,” Anna said. She pointed to a hose trailing off the upper lip of the pool, gobs of caulk rimming a small indention that had been cut into the plastic. The hose snaked straight from the elevated lip of the pool and out the bottom of the window. “See? The pool overflowed into the sink all night, where the excess went down the drain and back outside. We let the gutters run clean first, then started collecting as much as we could.”

“This hose looks like it goes up a little.” Daniel ran his hand along the length of green hose, checking the angle.

Anna nodded. “As long as you don’t let any air in, it’ll keep siphoning off. The carpet did get a little wet from the house shaking so much when the wind blew. Water was sloshing everywhere, and we’d designed it to keep the pool full. Next time, I’d probably set the overflow hose a little lower.”

Daniel looked the contraption over. Along with the charging station outside, it was like Anna and her Father were a Rube Goldberg factory. “Do you get extra credit for any of this stuff?”

Anna laughed. “I wish. Unfortunately, it’s all standardized testing for memorized crap you could just look up if you needed to. My dad and I just do stuff like this for fun.”

Daniel felt himself beaming at the idea of doing such things for fun. “It’s pretty awesome,” he said. He turned to Anna, who was smiling at him and blushing. She tucked some hair behind her ear. “I think you’re pretty awesome,” he added.

Anna reached out and grabbed his hand. Daniel felt chill bumps rush up and down his arms and legs. His scalp tingled, and his temperature rose.

“If I find out you have a girlfriend—” Anna began, heading off somewhere Daniel hadn’t expected.

“I don’t,” he said quickly.

She took a step closer. “But if I find out you do, and this is some sorta post-hurricane game of yours, and the only reason you’re hanging out with me is because I’m within walking distance and your girlfriend is stuck somewhere without a car—”

“I swear,” Daniel said. He felt himself sweating from the surge of conflicting emotions, of arousal and fear.

“Because you see how creative I can get.” She waved a hand at the pool. “My revenge would be ingenious.”

“I’ve never really had a girlfriend in my li—”

Anna leaned forward and kissed him. It wasn’t like his kiss with Amanda Hicks, forceful and raw and probing. It was soft and tender. Her lips seemed to jolt electricity into his, and he could feel the blood rushing out of his head, leaving him dizzy. Daniel didn’t know what to do with his hands, but he wanted to do something special. He placed them on either of Anna’s cheeks and held them there. Their lips remained pressed together, trembling.

When she pulled away, Daniel felt like crying for the loss, or maybe for the pure joy of it having happened. He was grinning like a fool, could feel his cheeks cramping. Anna smiled at him, her eyes fluttering, a look of pure contentment on her face.

“That was amazing,” he whispered. He felt like such a fool for saying it. Like such a fool for starting his senior year and being so inexperienced with sex that a simple kiss could make him feel like he could fly. But he knew in that instant, as Anna nodded, silently agreeing with his assessment, that he was a lucky fool. For he had found a fellow reject, a girl too comfortable in her own skin to dress up and play like the others. He grabbed her hand and held it to his lips and kissed her fingers and fought the urge to say crazy things.

“Your dad is probably waiting on you,” Anna said with a smile.

Daniel kissed her hand again. He knew if he wanted to, that he could bend forward and kiss her lips, her cheek, her nose, her forehead. The smile on her face said it was all possible. He was now a superhero elite. Nothing could stop him. His chest was cinderblocks full of glowing steel.

“I’ll come see you tomorrow?” he asked.

“And the day after,” Anna said.

Daniel smiled. As he ran down the steps, trying not to pass out and go tumbling head over heels, he found himself looking forward to a tomorrow for the first time in forever.