Season

Every May I reset the binders.

Three of them. Red for insurance, blue for the house, green for go. Beth handles red. I handle blue and green. Nobody decided that. It's how most things go now. One of us does something and the other one sees it and lets it stand.

This was our ninth season.

June is photography. Every room, every closet, every drawer open far enough to show what's in it. I use a tripod and good light because an adjuster can't work with shadows. I learned that in 2033, when we lost the claim on Beth's mother's dining set because the photo could have been anything.

Mia used to help. Eleven, twelve years old, holding closet doors open and reading serial numbers off the backs of things while I shot. She was good at it. Careful.

This year I knocked on her door and told her I needed to photograph her room. She was on her bed with her laptop. She didn't look up.

I can do it when you're at work, she said.

She didn't do it. I checked the cloud folder a week later and her room wasn't in it. I checked again in July.

I photographed it myself on a Tuesday morning while she was at her summer job. Tripod by the door, working around the room. Closet, dresser, desk. I shot the closet in sections, left to right, hangers spaced far enough apart to see individual items.

The photo of the three of us that used to sit on her dresser was gone. I don't know when. There was a cactus there instead, in a clay pot she'd painted herself, some pattern I didn't recognize. I got a couple of angles on it. For inventory it's worth about four dollars.

The trigger ladder is mine. I built it in 2031, after our second evacuation, when we left too late and sat in contraflow for eleven hours with Mia asleep in the back and Beth not talking to me.

Named storm in the Gulf, I refill prescriptions and top off both vehicles. Tropical storm watch, I pull the shutters out and stage them along the side of the house. Hurricane watch, I put them up, shoot the exit video, load the car. Warning, we go.

We've never waited for a warning. Twice we left on a watch and the storm turned, and that was nine hundred dollars in gas and motel and food for nothing. Except it isn't nothing. The one time you wait is the time you're in traffic when the wind comes up.

Around our fifth season the neighbors started calling to ask when we were leaving. Some of them wait on us.

Beth doesn't argue with the ladder. Mia used to help me revise it.

Channel 7 came out in 2036. A producer saw something Beth posted in the neighborhood group and called to ask if they could do a segment. They sent a reporter and a cameraman on a Wednesday. The reporter was maybe twenty-five and she kept saying wow while I walked her through it. The binders. The ladder. The go-bags on the floor of the hall closet, mine and Beth's and Mia's, each one with water, first aid, medications, chargers, documents, cash, a change of clothes.

She asked how long it took to build all that and I said it mostly built itself. You learn something every season and you add it. After enough seasons you've got a system.

They called the segment The Family That's Ready. Me with the green binder explaining the ladder. Beth at the kitchen table with the insurance documents laid out. A shot of Mia's go-bag, which Mia wasn't in, because she'd gone to a friend's house when the crew pulled up.

We watched it that night. Beth laughed once, at the part where the reporter asked if we ever just wing it.

Everything in it was true. I've gone back over it since and I can't find the part that was wrong.

In August I asked Mia to check her go-bag against the laminated list in the front pocket.

She said her bag was fine.

I said the medications were probably expired.

She said she'd handle it.

Her bag hangs on the hook inside her closet door. I was in that closet in July with a tripod. I could have opened it. I didn't.

Beth renewed the flood policy in July. Forty-one hundred, up from thirty-eight. She didn't mention it and I didn't ask. She knows which deductibles are flat dollar amounts and which are a percentage of the coverage. She knows you can't add coverage once a watch goes up, so whatever you're carrying when the season turns is what you've got. She keeps the paperwork proving we repaired last year's damage, because they won't pay this year's claim without it.

Somewhere around our fourth or fifth claim she turned into a person who sits down across from an adjuster with a better file than his.

That's the first thing I'd say about her now, if somebody asked. I don't know when that happened.

The storm came September 14th. Tropical storm watch Tuesday morning. I refilled the prescriptions at lunch and topped off both vehicles after work. Beth texted me the pharmacy confirmation before I got there.

Wednesday it went to a hurricane watch. I put up the shutters. Beth staged the documents. I shot the exit video. Front door, perimeter, all four elevations, then inside, every room, every ceiling, the floors, the panel, the contents of the refrigerator, the generator, the water heater. Date and time out loud. What's shut off. Eleven minutes. I used to talk through the whole thing, condition of this, condition of that. Now I just say the date and what's off.

I knocked on Mia's door and told her we'd leave in the morning.

She said okay.

I asked if her bag was ready.

She said yes.

I stood there a second. I wanted to say something else and didn't know what.

We left Thursday at six. Beth drove, I navigated, though there's nothing to navigate. We've run the route nine times. They'd already flipped the interstate, both sides headed north, the shoulder open as an extra lane. Motel confirmation on Beth's phone, re-entry sticker on the windshield.

Beth had her window down for the first stretch, before the highway filled in. She likes the air before it turns to exhaust.

Mia sat in the back with her phone and a black backpack I'd never seen. Not the go-bag. I could see the edge of her sketchbook and something wrapped in a t-shirt that I was pretty sure was the cactus. Her go-bag was in the trunk where I put it.

I watched her in the mirror a while. She was texting. They've got a thread that comes back every season, the whole group of them. Who's going where, who's already on the road, whose family's staying, which some still do.

She looked up once and caught me. She didn't look angry. She looked like somebody waiting for a thing to be over, and I couldn't tell which thing.

The motel had our room ready. Second floor, end of the hall, same one. Six years of Septembers. The woman at the desk said welcome back and didn't ask for the card.

It came ashore Friday night. Category 3, which is about average now. Beth had the insurance apps open. I had the parish emergency page. Mia went down to the lobby for the vending machine and didn't come back for an hour. I almost went looking and Beth said leave her alone.

She came back with a Dr Pepper and her sketchbook, sat on the far bed and drew while the wind came up outside. I didn't ask what.

Monday morning we drove home.

I did the return the way I do it. Parked on the street instead of the driveway, in case of a downed line. Walked the perimeter. Checked the meter base and the mast where the service line comes into the house. Opened the front door and stood in the entry a minute, listening. No water running. No gas smell. Checked the panel, threw the main, waited. The refrigerator came on. Beth says I do the same walk at hotels. She's probably right.

She came in behind me and started hers. Ceilings, walls, floors, windows, photographing anything questionable before she touched it.

Mia went past both of us with the cactus unwrapped from its shirt. She put it back on her dresser and shut her door.

House was fine. Yard debris, a section of fence down, a gutter pulled loose on the south side. I can estimate a claim from the driveway now. I called Ruben and left a message. He calls back inside a day or two because I pay on time and don't argue about his rates.

Power came back Tuesday. Beth filed Wednesday. Mia was back in the building Thursday, the school platform switching over from remote, makeup days already on the calendar. It went the way it's supposed to go.

Friday evening I was in the garage putting the shutters back in the rack. Each one's labeled and they go in order, so the next time I pull them I'm not thinking about it. I was wiping them down and stacking when Mia came out the side door.

She stood there watching me work.

Do you remember when we used to go to Galveston, she said.

I stopped wiping. We went in the spring, before season. She was eight, nine, ten. Drive down on a Saturday, eat seafood, walk the seawall, come home sunburned. I don't remember stopping. It wasn't decided. Spring filled up with prep, and by the time the prep was done it was June, and after that the weekends belonged to something else.

I said yeah. I remember.

She picked up one of the shutters and read the label. Front bedroom. Hers.

She said, I know you photographed my room.

I said I had to. For the inventory.

She said, I know.

She set the shutter down and went inside.

I finished the rack and wiped my hands. Light coming in low through the side door. Season runs through November, so there's two more months of the apps and the forecasts and the ladder.

Mia used to run ahead of us on the sand with her shoes in her hand. Beth laughed at something. I can't remember what it was.

I closed the garage and went in. Beth was at the kitchen table with the red binder open. She looked up.

Everything good, she said.

She meant the shutters.

Yeah, I said. Everything's put away.

She went back to it. I stood there, then sat down across from her. Not to help. Not to look at anything.

She looked up again.

What, she said.

Nothing, I said. Just sitting.

She watched me a second. Then she closed the binder partway and left her hand on it and said okay.

We sat there. I could hear Mia's music through the ceiling, something I didn't know. Out front the fence section was leaning against the house waiting on Ruben. Season wasn't over.

We were sitting there. I figured that was something.