AUGUST 23, 2005
Three days later Reesie swirled in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, chanting out loud.
“All right, it’s all riiight!” she sang along with John Legend and looked over her shoulder as she spun. The hem she had pinned in her flouncy bouncy skirt was perfectly straight. She stopped for a minute and smiled, touching the hot-pink thread she’d carefully zigzag-stitched down each seam.
She had rushed right in from school, and now was almost finished taking her birthday fashion design from a crazy idea in her head to the real deal. She had sketched the skirt, saved her allowance to buy enough purple denim, and then cut a pattern out of old Times-Picayune newspapers. Ma Maw would have been proud.
Ma Maw was the only grandparent Reesie had ever known—both of her mother’s folks had died before Reesie was born, and so had her dad’s dad. She and Ma Maw used to spend every day together before Reesie had gone to school, and afternoons once she’d started first grade. They’d shared laughs and stories and a passion for clothes.
Ma Maw had shown her how to sew a doll’s dress when she was seven, and Reesie had been hooked. So when Ma Maw passed away, Reesie took over her sewing machine. The soft purring of the motor always seemed to bring Ma Maw back home, at least for a little while.
As Reesie danced to her sewing table, she tripped on the remote control, and the blast of a local newscaster’s voice jumped out from her TV. The five-o’clock news! Junior had been in her room again. Why couldn’t he watch TV in the family room?
She reached to shut it off, and suddenly heard a noise that wasn’t part of her thumping music or the news broadcast.
“Teresa!” Her mother must have been knocking for a minute. She had skipped “Reesie” already and gone on to “Teresa.” Reesie scrambled to open the door before she was called by her entire name: Teresa Arielle Boone. That would mean trouble with a capital T.
“Yes, Mama?”
Her mother was wearing her green nurse’s scrubs with an old apron tied over them. She must’ve come right in from work and started cooking. The smell of onions and garlic and chicken floating from the kitchen made Reesie’s mouth water. She realized that she’d been so focused on her sewing that she’d skipped her usual after-school apple slices dipped in peanut butter.
“I’ve got dinner going, so I’m going to take a shower. You can make the salad and—” Her mother stopped in the middle of her directions as she noticed Reesie’s skirt.
“Oooh!” Her tone changed. “You’ve finished? Turn around! Let me see!”
Reesie spun on her toes.
“She finished it?” Junior yelled from the family room. Reesie had to admit to herself that it was actually kind of cool to have a brother who was genuinely interested in her life. She smiled.
Mama folded her arms and nodded. “Ma Maw would be proud of you,” she said. “You’ll look sharp on your birthday. I’ve already called Miss Martine to order your cake.”
“Let me get a picture with my phone!” Junior crowded their mother out of the doorway.
Reesie made a face at him.
“Tell her to make nice, Mom!” he said.
“Reesie, Boo, make nice. I’m going into the shower.”
Reesie faked an attitude after her mother left the room. “Junior, do not take any pictures. I still have to hem it. Can’t you wait?” She slammed her door.
“Project Runway can’t wait!” Junior sang to her from the other side. “You’re gonna be the first designer from New Orleans to take the prize, girl!”
Reesie changed back into shorts and carefully hung up her skirt. For a minute she imagined that Ma Maw would be there next Saturday at her party. Ma Maw, alive again to see Reesie’s first design. Alive again to see her turn thirteen. Reesie flicked the light off on the sewing machine before going out to the kitchen.
From the counter she had a view of her brother draped across the sofa in the family room. He was shoving handfuls of potato chips into his mouth and watching TV.
“You eat too much junk,” she said.
Junior looked over his shoulder and mumbled, “What?”
Reesie dug into the fridge for cucumbers. “I said, ‘Don’t you miss my famous salad when you’re up at Tech?’”
“Yeah, right.” Junior laughed. Then he said, “Yo, Reesie, you know I’m leaving tomorrow to go back to school. I might not be able to come home next weekend, okay?”
Reesie pouted and ripped a head of lettuce apart.
“So you’ll miss my birthday? Oh, I see.” She sounded playful, but she was a little hurt. Junior could make a party live!
“Hold up! I have swim drills. Not my fault!” He was trying to apologize, but he’d picked the wrong way to do it.
“You’re dropping me for that swim team?” Reesie furiously tore lettuce. She absolutely hated swimming and swimming pools, because when she was five, she’d slipped and fallen into a public pool. Her mother dove in right away to get her, but Reesie had been terrified of that kind of water ever since. She took showers, not baths.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Junior threw his hands up.
Reesie changed the subject. “Okay, fine. So how come you keep going into my room, switching my TV channels?”
“Because I’m trying to see what’s up with this latest storm. As usual nobody around here is paying attention. Remember last year? When the mayor told folks to be ready to evacuate with some cash in their pockets?”
Reesie stopped slicing tomatoes, remembering the tourists’ conversation at Café Du Monde. It was hurricane season, and this was New Orleans. Every summer they had to live with the threats of these wild storms churning themselves up into monsters full of wind and rain. The weather people gave them friendly sounding names like Andrew or Betsy. What real friend would come through and destroy your home the way a hurricane did?
“Not too many people left town,” she said, thinking of how Ayanna’s family had packed their car and driven north to Shreveport for a few days while the Boone family stayed put.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Junior said. “And you know the Weather Channel is saying—”
“A bunch of malarkey is what they’re saying!” All at once their father came stomping into the kitchen, his policeman’s handcuffs clinking at his side.
Reesie rolled her eyes at Junior, and together they mouthed along with his next words.
“No storm is gonna run me out! I’m New Orleans, born and bred!” He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Y’all are laughing at your daddy?”
They both were.
“Our children have no respect for their elders, Lloyd!” their mother joked, coming to kiss their father hello.
“No respect.” Their father laughed, slipping around their mother to take a peek into one of the pots on the stove. Reesie grinned as she picked up her knife again.
“I’ve got tons of respect for you, Dad, but I kinda respect hurricanes a lot more!” Junior said. He leaned across the counter to snatch a chunk of cucumber.
“How did we get on the subject of the hurricane?” Mama asked.
“Junior’s obsessed,” Reesie said, frowning as her mother threw another handful of sprouts into the salad bowl.
“Everybody is getting worked up for nothing,” Daddy said.
“Lloyd, it’s not nothing. We still have to prepare for what might happen!”
“We’ll put plywood over the windows so they won’t get blown in, pull all the outdoor stuff inside. That’s just common sense.” Daddy nodded. “A storm is no reason to get hysterical.” He looked at Junior.
Reesie smiled, but her mother shook her head. Jean Parker had never gotten used to hurricanes. She’d come from New Jersey to go to nursing school, and she met Lloyd Boone at a football game. She always told her kids that she fell in love with him and with New Orleans in that order.
“Mama, you know you’re just freaked out because there aren’t any hurricanes in Newark!” Reesie said.
“That’s not entirely true, Reesie,” Mama said. “And, Junior, set the table!”
“Jeannie, this Katrina is still just a tropical storm,” Daddy said. “It hasn’t even been upgraded to hurricane status.” He lifted the salad bowl. “And y’all don’t forget—hurricanes change direction in a heartbeat. It could go off into the ocean somewhere.”
Junior clanked knives and forks onto the table. “So I guess no evacuation for Sarge Boone. You don’t believe in the e word, do you, Dad?”
“Right now the only place I’m going is to the dinner table.”
“Good idea,” Mama said. “Let’s let this subject rest.”
They sat down together. Reesie thought that was a great idea; she’d rather talk about getting ready for her birthday instead of some old storm.
“Daddy! I finished my skirt—”
“Reesie—” her mother interrupted. “Say grace, please.”
“Bless this food, and bless the sun so it shines hard on my birthday this weekend! And I hope that Sergeant ‘Superman’ Boone is right about this storm!”
Reesie’s father winked at her.
“Amen!” her mother said firmly. She smiled at Reesie and squeezed her hand.
Daddy nodded his approval and reached for the platter.
“You might be a teenager next week,” Junior said, “but you’ll be my little sister forever! Come on now, Reesie Girl. Pass the rice. I’m starving!”