Thursday's high was 3:47, which meant Heards Lane would start pooling by 3:20 and sit under four inches by 3:40, which meant if Cass wanted the grocery run she had to leave by three and come back on Seawall, which meant she needed to text Mom by 2:45, before Mom decided to go herself and take the Honda.
She texted at 2:43.
I can grab the stuff on the list if you want. I'll go before it gets wet out.
Mom replied in nine seconds. Nine seconds was fast for Mom. Nine seconds meant she'd been sitting there not wanting to do the errand.
Can you get the chicken thighs too? Bone in.
Yeah.
Drive careful on 61st.
Cass wasn't taking 61st. Sixty-first was fine right now, but by the time she came back, the storm drain by the Walgreens would be backing up and the detour around it cost seven minutes she didn't have to spend. Broadway out, Seawall back, into the Kroger lot from the Stewart Road entrance where the grade ran six inches higher than the main one. They'd re-poured that apron three years ago after the old one started holding water every cycle. The new concrete was still lighter than the rest of the lot. You could see the seam.
Home by 4:15 with the chicken thighs and a clean record of handling the car on a rising tide. Step one of three. By Saturday she'd have the Honda for the whole evening, and Jonah Herrera would either show up at Adrienne's or he wouldn't, and either way Cass would be there with her own keys and her own ride home, which meant she got to not care.
She drove Broadway with the windows down, past the Sandpiper apartments where the first-floor units had been storage since the third straight year of monthly soakings, past the empty lot on 57th where the Nguyens' house used to be. Just a slab now, with PVC stubs where the plumbing had been cut off. A couple inches of standing water on the concrete caught the afternoon light. Cass registered it the way she registered a speed limit sign.
At Kroger she parked on the Stewart Road side, high and dry, got the chicken thighs and everything on the list, and was back on Seawall by 3:55. Below the wall the beach was narrow and brown and the water sat past the second line of riprap, which was about right for 3.4, which was what the gauge was probably reading. She didn't check. The smell told her, and the width of wet sand, and the gulls bunched up on the high part of the beach instead of spread across it. The gulls were better than the app, which wasn't saying much.
Home at 4:12. Three minutes ahead.
Thursday was groundwork for Saturday.
Adrienne lived in League City. Forty minutes on a dry day, over an hour if the I-45 interchange was doing its thing, which it did about half the time now because the drainage under the southbound ramp had been under repair since Cass was in eighth grade. Four years of orange cones around a hole that filled on every high tide and drained on every low, like the island was breathing through it. Party started at seven. Dad was on his two-week rotation at the refinery in Texas City, so the Honda was in the driveway, so the only variable was Mom.
Cass needed the car by six, needed it until at least eleven, and needed Mom to feel fine about both numbers before she had time to feel otherwise.
Saturday's high was a 3.2 at 9:14 p.m. Modest. But the forecast had the wind swinging southeast Friday night, and southeast wind stacked on a 3.2 would put the gauge closer to 3.8, which meant the low blocks between 53rd and 57th would be wet by 8:30, which meant Mom would start picturing her daughter driving home late on flooded streets. Cass needed that already solved by the time Mom thought of it.
Friday after school she picked up her brother from his friend Darius's house in Midtown. Nobody asked her to. Mateo was twelve and could ride his bike, but the route home crossed 53rd at Avenue O, where the city had put in check valves last year to stop bay water from pushing back up through the storm drains. The valves worked about sixty percent of the time. Cass had sat through the public meeting where a city engineer called that a significant improvement over baseline. When they didn't work, the intersection sat under a skin of water that smelled like sulfur and parking lot. Mateo's tires were bald. Mom knew about the tires.
She pulled up at Darius's and honked.
"I could've ridden," Mateo said, getting in.
"Fifty-third is wet."
"It's like two inches."
"Your tires are bald. You come home bleeding, nobody's driving anywhere this weekend."
He looked at her. He was twelve, but he could do arithmetic when it involved somebody else's motives. "What do you want the car for?"
"Adrienne's."
"On the mainland?"
"Yeah."
"Can I come?"
"No."
"Darius says Adrienne's brother has a half-pipe."
"Darius has never met Adrienne's brother. And no."
He put his seatbelt on, which was how he accepted terms he couldn't negotiate, and went through the radio until he found something with too much bass. Cass let him have it. She was running Saturday anyway, half-listening: whether Adrienne's street would be dry enough to park on the curb or whether she'd want the high spot at the top of the cul-de-sac, whether Jonah would actually come this time or send some excuse at 6:45 the way he had before the thing at Priya's. She'd told Adrienne she didn't care either way. That was almost true and would be all the way true once she had the car, because the car was the difference between waiting for something to happen and deciding when to leave.
She took Broadway home. Sixty-first was already going under at the Walgreens drain, right on time, a thin sheet of water creeping across the westbound lane. Two cars were up on the sidewalk in front of the laundromat where the curb bought them another three inches. Standard Friday positioning. She didn't slow down to look.
Saturday morning Mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop and a mug of coffee that had gone cold. Cold coffee meant bills, or the insurance portal, or one of the other screens that made her quiet in a way that was bad timing for requests. Cass made a second pot and brought her a fresh cup without being asked, then sat down with her own and waited.
By ten the laptop was closed and Mom was scrolling her phone.
"I could do the Costco run today," Cass said. "We're almost out of rice."
"We don't need Costco."
"We're out of the big bag. And Mateo went through the Gatorade again."
Mom looked at her over the top of the phone. She was not unaware of the campaign. She'd been seventeen on this island herself, back when the water came up a few times a year instead of a few times a month, and she'd known which streets to stay off of too.
"You want the car tonight," Mom said.
"Adrienne's having people over. League City."
"What time."
"Leave at six. Home by ten forty-five."
"The tide's at nine something."
"Nine fourteen. It's a 3.2 but the wind's been southeast since last night, so figure 3.7, 3.8 at the gauge. Low blocks go wet around 8:30 and I won't be anywhere near the low blocks. Seawall to 61st, and 61st is still clear at six. Causeway north, 45 up to League City. Coming back I stay on Seawall the whole way."
Mom drank her coffee. Took her time with it. "What about the causeway?"
"Causeway's fine up to 4.5. We're not getting 4.5 without a named storm."
"And coming home at eleven?"
"Tide's falling by ten thirty. Dry roads."
Mom was quiet. Cass could see her running the other calculation, the one that had nothing to do with the water. That one was about a seventeen-year-old driving forty minutes to the mainland on a Saturday night, and no route solved it.
"Home by ten forty-five," Mom said. "Not leaving League City at ten forty-five. Home."
"That means I leave by ten."
"Then leave by ten."
"Ten fifteen. The interchange clears out after nine thirty."
Mom's mouth did the thing it did when she wanted to smile and was holding her position. "Ten fifteen. And you text me when you get there and when you leave."
"Yeah."
"And if the wind picks up—"
"I check the gauge before I leave Adrienne's. Anything over 4.0 I skip the causeway and come back through Texas City over the bridge."
Mom studied her. Cass held still. This was the part where you didn't add anything. Thursday's grocery run, Friday's pickup, the numbers, the backup route: it was all sitting there already. You let it sit.
"Take the Costco list," Mom said. "And get the big rice."
She came back with the rice, the Gatorade, and a rotisserie chicken because they were $5.99 and it would make Mom happy, which by now was habit more than strategy, the line between the two having gone soft sometime around sophomore year. Home by noon. Groceries away. Lunch. She tried on the blue top, then the other blue top, then the first one again, and sent Adrienne a mirror photo. Adrienne sent back three fire emojis and Jonah confirmed btw, which Cass read twice before she put the phone face down and started on her hair, which took forty-five minutes and was the time her hair required.
At 5:50 she took the keys off the hook by the door.
"Ten fifteen," Mom said from the couch.
"Ten fifteen."
"Text me."
Outside the air was salt-heavy the way it got when the wind came off the bay, warm and green and organic, the smell of water having more room than it used to. Down the block Mrs. Ramos was moving her Civic off the street and into the driveway, same as she did every time the gauge was going to push past 3.5. Mrs. Ramos checked the app. Cass had been reading the drains and the wind and how the gutters filled since she was old enough to want to be somewhere, and the tide was just part of how she read a day now, along with traffic and her mother's mood and whether Mateo was about to do something that would complicate her weekend.
She backed out. Seawall west to 61st, which was dry, then north toward the causeway. The bay was flat and brown on both sides of the bridge, water sitting a few inches over the east-side riprap, which was where it sat most evenings. A brown pelican stood on one of the old channel markers that used to be farther from the road, and the concrete under it was dark up to a line.
She crossed to the mainland and merged onto 45 with the sun going down behind her and she had the keys and the whole evening and the right top on and Jonah confirmed, and she knew where to park because League City had its own low blocks and Adrienne's street held water if you didn't know about the cul-de-sac. Cass knew about the cul-de-sac. She turned the music up and drove north into the dry part of the evening she'd spent three days arranging.
- Galveston's drainage engineering: The city's South Shore drainage project documents how adjacent streets at slightly different elevations create an uneven flooding hierarchy where one road's crown traps water on its neighbor.
- High-tide flood frequency projections: The Fifth National Climate Assessment projects that high-tide flooding in the Southeast may become five to ten times as frequent by 2050, shifting it from an event to a calendar feature.
- Tide predictions vs. actual water: NOAA's tide tables predict the astronomical component, but wind, pressure, and rainfall move observed levels away from the prediction — a gap visible in the Coastal Inundation Dashboard that separates forecasts from what residents actually see at their storm drains.
- Residents already adapting by tide: The Washington Post reported that Galveston residents in the 59th Street area experience roughly 50 tidal flooding events per year, including sunny-day floods that can strand cars and cut access to homes for hours.