When I was little, me and Mom went on vacation to a bunch of theme parks in Florida. One of the coolest rides was called “Back to the Future” and I liked it even though I hadn’t seen the movie yet, which I did as soon as we got home. It’s about this kid that goes back in time before he was born and tries to stop bad stuff from happening to his parents. A totally cool idea, even if it can’t happen in real life.

Anyhow, that’s what it’s like at Miss Trissy’s house, like the airplane that took me to New Orleans went back in time, and everything is from fifty years ago. Her little kitchen is clean and shiny, but the appliances could be out of a museum, if they had a museum about old kitchens. The telephone is this big black thing with a rotary dial instead of buttons, and a receiver so heavy she has to lift it with both hands. The old tube-model TV only gets one blurry channel because Miss Trissy doesn’t have cable. Mostly she listens to gospel songs on an old table radio and sings along, which sounds kinda stupid but is actually sort of beautiful, once you get used to it.

The other thing that’s like going back in time is that she doesn’t have AC. Air-conditioning might as well never have been invented, as far as Miss Trissy is concerned. She doesn’t believe in it, says air-conditioning will give you wetness of the lungs.

“That’s what made me a widow,” she says. “Wet lungs took my poor husband Henry.”

I almost say it was probably the heat killed her husband, but I don’t have the energy to smart-mouth. That’s how hot it is. And that’s mostly what I remember about the first three days in Smellyville. The heat that never stopped. How it was too hot to go outside in the daytime because the sun would hit you like a hot fist. I took Bandy out for his walks, of course, but we never went much farther than the empty lot at the end of the street because he’d whimper from the heat and want me to carry him back into the shade. Mostly he wanted to lie on his belly on the linoleum in the kitchen and pant and give me looks like the weather was all my fault.

“Nothing I can do about the temperature, you silly dog. Want a treat? Does that help?”

It usually does.

In the evening, when it was a little cooler, we’d sit out on the wooden porch they call a “gallery” and drink sweet iced tea and Miss Trissy would tell stories from the old days, about when my father and his brother were little and they played Superman in this very yard.

“That was they favorite—Superman, because he could fly. Don’t matter he was a white man, them two wanted to be Superman just the same. They tie towels around their necks for capes and stand on the gallery rail and make whooshing noises like they was flying. Gave me fits! What if they fell off and broke they heads? Couldn’t stop ’em, though. They was determined to be Superman, and when Henry, he my husband at that time, when Henry say there only one Superman, how can you both be Superman, they say Superman can be anything he wants, even two people. They was that close, them two. Peas in a pod.”

I keep waiting for her to tell me what happened, how my uncle James got killed and why my father ran away, but she never quite gets to that part.

“Bye and bye,” she says, “bye and bye.”

That’s mostly all we do, really, is sit around and talk, because Miss Trissy is so old she doesn’t like to leave the house except to go to church. The true fact is, even though she turns out to be nice and all, it’s really pretty boring with no games and no TV, and I’m thinking only a few more days and this will be over and then school starts, which I’m sort of looking forward to, even though I’d never admit it to anyone.

Saturday morning the old phone rings. Bandy starts barking and I’m shushing him when Miss Trissy hands me the receiver and says, “Oh my Lawdy. Yo momma, child.”

Mom calls my cell phone every day, usually in the morning, and for the past couple of days she’s been concerned about this hurricane out in the Atlantic somewhere, which was supposed to be over once it hit Florida, but the weather channel has got her all riled up. Something about a bull’s-eye.

“I tried your cell but it won’t go through! Too many calls, I guess, which is no surprise. The storm track changed! The storm didn’t die out like they thought. It came back to life when it crossed over Florida and hit that warm water in the Gulf. It got big—really big and now it’s a huge big storm, aiming straight for New Orleans. They say the storm surge might be twenty feet high! High enough to flood the whole city! You got to leave, Zaney. You and Miss Trissy, you’ve got to get out of there!”

I explain that Miss Trissy doesn’t have a car, but of course Mom already knows. She has a plan, which is totally typical because my mom always has a plan.

“You’re coming home,” she tells me. “You and Miss Trissy both. All you have to do is get to the airport. Can you do that?”