The things you remember later. And how something so unexpected can call up a full-fledged, living memory of the most mundane, normal thing that once happened ... it reminds you that aspects of your normal life are lost forever and that normal will never be normal again. I found this paper umbrella - the kind they put in fruity cocktail drinks like rum punches - in the bottom of my purse today and I was suddenly back in the last dinner out I had with Max.

It's just so hard reliving those ordinary days that took place just before this all happened. I get hit by this wave of sadness that what we accept as normal now should never be normal. I cannot think on the future. It scares me too much. I'm not the only one. I think most of us are that way. We want our lives back. We want the future we had in our normal pasts.

One of my friends, her first text message to me was this: "Thank God George brought the shotgun up into the attic. We would have drowned without it."

That isn't right, is it? Is that normal? It shouldn't be ... but yet, it's the new normal that you know isn't really right except it is now, I suppose.

And I knew exactly what she meant when she said it and I pictured the shotgun that kept them from drowning. I don't like guns but I've had to learn to aim one. And it has made an impression on me.

Damn, I don't know where this is even going. But that's so normal now. My brain can't focus and I just forget sometimes where I was heading in a train of thought or I think something that I don't fathom where it came from inside this mess of twisted impulses that I now know is my thought process.

Where was I again? Oh, right. The paper umbrella. Dinner out with Max. God. Will we even have those again in my city? Will we? Why does it not seem possible that we ever will again be so carefree as to just take for granted that we can go out to eat and drink and laugh and make love and enter the future we were once building?

It was an ordinary day. That's what's so unbelievable now - that we didn't understand it was an ordinary day in a time when ordinary days were numbered for us.

I got the paper umbrella two nights before everything changed. Max and I went out to dinner to celebrate that we owned a house. He looked so lovely and handsome. He was so Max. All serious and still his eyes twinkled in the candlelight of the restaurant.

He took my hand, under the table. Leaned in toward me. I can still feel his breath against the shell of my ear. I can still shiver at the way he did that. He said, "I will always be by your side. We have a life before us that I had accepted I would never find. But now, I have that life. You are the one who gives it to me, cara."

That night, we plotted the immediate future. All the paperwork for buying the place in Folsom was done. We'd spent the day signing our names to the deed and house insurance and the termite inspection and the flood insurance and the title insurance and the tax forms and the power of attorney in case one of us had to sign for both of us sometime in the future on anything to do with the legal stuff of co-owning this property.

I had told him, weeks earlier, that he should put it in his name. All of it. After all, he was the one buying it. He refused to let me contribute money other than the down payment I'd used to secure the contract. I found the way to deal with his viewpoint on this issue of who paid because some day, some mythical day sometime in some distant future, we'd be married and I'd be his wife and maybe I'd even eventually get used to the concept of what's his is mine.

But Max said this property was ours. And it would always be ours. Equally. That I had to find the way to accept that this was what he wanted - to give me a home, to make a life possible for us in a place that meant our future was all about setting down roots in this new home in Folsom.

It didn't seem quite real yet ... to think I was co-owner of a house. And land. And a stable. And three horses!

It was more real to my Mom than to me. She was all set and ready to start helping me go out and buy "things" for it. She had all these magazines and books that she had piled in a big box to start going over with me, to help me think about décor and color and style. I kept rolling my eyes at her. She'd started two weeks earlier, right when I told her we were buying the place. She was really into all this "making a nest for your family" stuff ... me? I told her to chill out. Can you even picture me going all domestic?

Max could. Or rather, I think Max just presumed I would and could take the lead when it came to that kind of making a house into a home stuff. He wasn't interested, not really, he professed. He said his only opinion was that he wanted the home to be as I would make it.

Oh. There's a scary concept.

Truth is, though, that Maximus did have ideas and concepts. He just was more into the idea this was something the woman of the house assumed as her privilege. I think to him, this was an honor. To me, it was ... something requiring some gene I'd missed out on when God made me a girl.

I tried to joke with him about it ... but I also didn't want to spoil the fun of this time for him. So I pretended more enthusiasm than I felt and I depended on the fact that I had a secret weapon in all this: I had a mother who knew what to do.

Still ... given half an opening, which I gave him in spades, he would smooth his big hands over the table and speak of colors and light and plants and which room he desired for his den and how if we but put our bed on the east wall, we could look out through open drapes and see the sun glance across the far trees.

And then it was Thursday evening and we'd left the attorney's office after signing paperwork for what seemed like hours and we were now homeowners. All we had to wait for was the legal registering of the deed transfer. In maybe a week, it'd be ours in every sense of the word. But that night, it was ours already because we had the keys. And the insurance was in our name. And they had Max's money draft deposited in the seller's bank already.

I was off work until Monday. Max had the weekend off. We were thinking that maybe on Saturday we'd sit down together and make up a list of all the things we'd have to do in order to actually move up to the house in Folsom. And then, Max insisted, on Sunday we would drive up there, just to look at it again, just to walk through some of the fields and know they were ours, just to touch the house and know it was ours, too. I said I'd bring the champagne we could open in front of our very first hearth inside this house that I was determined would really be our home forever. He said he'd bring the chemise he wanted me to wear the first night he made love to me in our home. We're both so practical, aren't we?

It was so odd, I remember telling him that Thursday at dinner, to think that in a few weeks we'd be living in our home.

Our home.

It all seemed so intimidating. And thoroughly exciting. It seems disgustingly silly now, looking back, to see all my hesitations over insecurities that a stronger person would have never had.

We toasted our future, our new roots and his dream of rural life by sipping rum punches in Palmer's Restaurant on Carrolton Avenue. This little dive of a Caribbean food joint has become one of Max's favorite places. Who would think the General of the Armies of the North would come to love island fare and jerk pork? He is always going to be a mystery to me in more ways than it seems possible.

I took the green paper umbrella from the rum punch, slid off the orange slice ... and decided to keep the umbrella as a sentimental, cheap souvenir of this night. I'm silly that way. I keep things like that. I sometimes find them in my purse or briefcase, years later, and get the chance to relive a simple moment in my life that I wanted to capture somehow by holding onto something quite inane.

On the drive back to the condo that evening, Max mentioned he had reviewed some file he'd had drawn up on Ralph, the caretaker for the previous owner of the property in Folsom. I looked at him as he drove, his face expressionless. Who does things like that as a matter of accepted routine? Who investigates a caretaker who lives in Folsom as if he might be a terrorist and therefore might be a threat to Max? But I've come to a level of acceptance about Max's need to do things like that for his own safety, and, frankly, for mine. It's not that Max really would think Ralph would be a terrorist so much as it is that he is aware that, if he were to hire someone, he has to be able to trust that he is not ever going to betray Max. At least, that is how I think of it.

We had decided to keep the lease on the condo for at least the remainder of the six months of our original agreement. It will make the transition easier for us, is what we thought. Or rather what I thought. I hated the idea of that instant jump into daily commutes of an hour or so each way ... and thought that I might stay in the condo some days when I just didn't want to drive across the lake. Especially if Max was out of town because it would be pretty lonely up there by myself. So this seemed a smart thing and at least I was contributing since I was paying part of the rent there.

But truly, as it got closer to just moving up to the country, I did begin to wonder how I'd fare. And I thought having a place in the city might save me. And I felt like I was holding onto something that mattered but that I couldn't express to Max. Perhaps I was deluding myself. Perhaps I was always going to have a sense of self intrinsically tied into the sense of the city of my birth: New Orleans.

However slowly, there was progress and we were moving ahead. We were doing life as we wanted it. We were enjoying it. We really were.

I still hated picking up his underwear after he would casually leave them lying in a bundle on the bathroom floor as if some miracle happened overnight and little fairies came in to wash them for him. And I still got irritated when he would make decisions without consulting me as if he never imagined I might actually have something constructive to add that might make a difference. Like, for instance, this whole thing about the necessity of hiring a caretaker for the property in Folsom. Which I did have an opinion about but which I kept quiet, waiting on him to ask me. Which he never did. Of course.

And sometimes Maximus could be so closed-mouthed about work or something Terry would say to him as they spoke low and serious in the pub, as if I was some spy about to blow a super secret mission. And I really did get tired of the number of times he "advised" me that I should spend more time learning my mother's way of making shrimp creole or how I should "consult" with my mother to find the right woman to come in and clean the house twice a week.

Still, all of that was ordinary stuff. And I liked it just as I liked how he could get on my last nerve and then he'd still be standing there, refusing to be anything but the man I was mad in love with. I liked how I could look across the breakfast table after coming in from work and he'd be all morning-gruff voiced and saying naughty things to me about dreams he'd had the night before in which I was the star attraction and how he was going to make his dreams come true before I left for work that night or maybe he had just enough time before he left for work ... And I liked how I would fall asleep after my night shift, dreaming away the hours tucked between sheets that were still warm from his body and fragrant with his scent.

All in all, we were working to adjust to each other. And we were enjoying that. We really were.

It was just life. How silly is all of that?

You know?

Just the ordinary.

Until that next day after our dinner out. That Friday, to be exact. And so often now, I think how much I wish I'd catalogued those ordinary days a lot better than I did. It scares me a bit that I cannot always remember details from that ordinary time. It isn't that I took it for granted. It's that it was just our life.

This is what I remember about that Friday: I slept in late after Max left for work. My night shift hours make it hard on me to always wake up when he does. Then he called me, maybe two hours after he left. He said I should turn on the news and then call him to discuss it all.

I was rubbing my eyes open as I stumbled into the living room to settle in to watch whatever breaking news had Max thinking I cared. I mean, I'm always interested in news, given my profession, but I really hoped this was worth me giving up on sleep.

"Max, Jesus," I said when I called him about 45minutes later. "It was supposed to be going in at the Florida Panhandle. This is really irritating. I don't have time for a hurricane to head this way. This is going to be so annoying. They'll want us to evacuate and then it'll veer off like they always do. And we'll have wasted days in the process when there's so much to do."

He knew I was trying to make light of it. He was definitely not doing the same thing. "I've just returned from a briefing. All models agree. This one will be bad. And it is coming here. Make your arrangements to evacuate."

"Evacuate? Are you crazy? I'm sure the paper will want me here."

"Anna. You will not stay here. You will leave."

"I can't leave. Max, this will be the biggest story maybe in my life. I want to be here. I want to do my job. I want to contribute."

"We'll discuss this tonight. I will be late. Do not hold dinner."

He hung up on me. I sat there holding the receiver and watching TV news accounts of the storm.

Katrina. Hurricane Katrina. What a wussy name. I could not believe that any hurricane with such a wussy name would come and really hurt New Orleans. And yet, there it was, as bold as you please: that solid line showing the forecast track bringing the huge monster Hurricane Katrina right in over New Orleans sometime early Monday.

I called my mother and told her about the storm. I told her that if the storm was still heading our way in the morning, I'd come over and help her with getting all the things out of the yard pulled in before she left to go stay with her best friend who lived in Baton Rouge. She said she wasn't leaving because the last evacuation had been horrible. Took her eight hours to make the normal 90-minute drive to Baton Rouge. You have to go, I told her, I need you to take Buck out of here, just in case. Okay, so sometimes my Mom can be as needful of a real excuse to cut and run as I can be.

Sometime that afternoon, I called work and talked to my boss. He said I'd better take the hurricane serious. He said we'd know more in the morning. I said if they needed me before my shift on Monday night to please call me. I wanted them to call me. I wanted to be in on this story. Imagine not wanting to be doing my job when this storm came in?

Max got home very late. He asked me why I was not packed yet. He said he wanted me on the road first thing in the morning. We had a huge fight. Huge. Actually, I did the fighting. He did the ignoring. In the morning, he left with a terse, "Be packed by the time I return."

I stuck my tongue out at his back going through the door.

And then I started packing. Well, you never know, right? I mean, even if I went into the paper, I needed to pack for the two or three days I'd be away. So I did. I called my Mom. I told her I wanted her packed and on the road by very early Sunday before traffic was so horrible. I thought I sounded a lot like Max when I told her that. It gave me pause.

By the afternoon on Saturday, I was at my Mom's house. Buck raced all over the yard, marking his property and probably feeling the anticipation of something quite exciting about to happen. I was hauling in the birdbath and the feeders and the chairs and the big round table from the patio. My mother was making potato salad and I was saying, at a time like this? Come on! But she said she didn't want the eggs or mayonnaise to go to waste if she evacuated.

"If?" I said, my hands on my hips, sweat on my brow, work gloves on my hands. "No if, Mom. You are leaving. This one is going to come close - maybe even right over us. You cannot stay here. Besides, I'll be at the paper and Max will be at the port - I really need you to take Buck because otherwise he'll be in the condo all alone for days."

"I can't go to Mary's place in Baton Rouge. Her family is coming up there. It will be too crowded."

"It's just for a few days, Mom. You can rough it. Please. Please do this for Buck if not for me."

"Well, the potato salad will be welcome wherever I end up."

"Mom, why don't you go to the store and get a bunch of ice for your coolers? We'll pack the stuff from the fridge and freezer for you to take with you."

So off she went. On the last trip for hurricane last-minute needs. We had our hurricane supplies - that was something we did at the beginning of every season. But there's this irrational impulse you get when you watch the inevitable coverage on the TV of people rushing out to get batteries and plywood and water ... you start thinking to yourself that there must be something else you need.

When she got back, she took my car to fill it up with gas because the line at the station near her was getting long. It's another one of those things we do ... fill the gas tanks up just in case you really do need to evacuate.

My boss called me while she was gone. He said I was not to come in to work before the hurricane but that after it passed, I should come in as relief for those who'd stay behind to put the paper out during the disaster. I said I could stay, that I wanted to be in there helping. He said I was on the relief list. Just before he hung up, he said people at City Hall were saying there'd likely be a mandatory evacuation. He said I should definitely find a safe place out of the city to ride this one out and then come back in as soon as I could.

I think I was taking it seriously by then. But for sure after he said that, I was.

Only problem was, where to go? Because now I figured, I needed to be thinking this through. Where would we all go? I wanted us to be together, wherever it was. So my Mom started calling around for hotel rooms for me, her, Max and Buck. Everything was already taken as far north as Nashville.

Meanwhile, I was looking at the storm track and thinking we were in real trouble here. And one of the emergency honchos we all trust said in an interview that this was the one we had always feared. Then the mayor did issue the mandatory evacuation, first one in our history.

Mom said she'd keep trying to find rooms for us. I said I was going home to get really packed. It was a very odd process. At first, I just stood in the middle of the bedroom wondering what I was supposed to do. And then something clicked ... and that part of me that deals with emergencies took over.

Hours later, Max came home. He looked so odd. Too stoic. I think that that got to me more than anything.

He glanced around at the progress I'd made. His mouth tight. We were ready to go except for whatever personal items Max wanted to bring. I had a big suitcase out on the bed and told him I'd help him pack if he wanted. He said to just put in things he'd need for about three days ... at work.

We had another huge fight.

He was staying.

I refused to leave without him.

I don't remember when the last time is I lost it quite like that. I mean, I realize now it was how I show panic when I know I don't have the right to really give in to the panic. The truth is, I couldn't go without him. How could I leave him behind and just run off to save myself? But more than that ... there was something more to it than that only at the time, I was too proud to verbalize it. Even to myself.

He said he had to stay ... he had a duty to perform. He had a job that required he be there in times of emergencies. He had staff who depended upon him to lead the effort. He could not leave. He had to help protect the port.

And it isn't that I didn't know he was telling me the truth. It's just that it was so serious by then because the city desk had told me the television stations were getting ready to bug out the next day if it didn't veer away by then. Things like this don't happen. The hurricanes ... they always veer from us ... they don't really come here ... and they don't come as a Cat 5. And if they did, if one did, then ... then I never thought I'd run. No matter how bad it might be, I thought I'd stay and cover it. But I was leaving. And where I went ... I needed him with me. I needed everyone I most cared about to be with me so I could know that whatever else happened, we were together to face whatever would happen.

Then we'd all be okay. Together ... that's how we'd make it through this.

Not too long after, my Mom called. Max talked to her. I listened from behind the bathroom door, where I had gone in a fury to be away from him and his obstinate self. His voice was so calm as he talked to her. He told her just what he'd been telling me but somehow when he told her, it was softer and more understanding of how it would make her feel. It was said in a way that you could believe him when he said it was going to be okay and that this was the best way to handle this. He said that I would come get her in the morning. That we would be on the road very early and heading to safety.

There was a momentary pause in his flow of steady instructions. And then I heard him say that he would make appropriate arrangements for a place for us to go to wait out the storm. She must have been telling him that she hadn't been able to find anyplace for us. And then he paused again and whatever she said to him, it made his voice softer. He told her that there was no need for her to worry about him. That they had a building at the port that would weather the storm with no problem. That he would call after everything was over and let us know when it was safe to return.

There was a long pause as he listened to her. And then I heard his voice become that tincture of Max when he shows a sliver of his ability to be weak like the rest of us. He told her that he could only stay and do his job if he knew we were safe. That if anything were to happen to us, he would have failed us. That if we went, if we went to a place of safety, we did it as much for him as for ourselves.

I watched him for a long time after he hung up. I don't think he knew I'd come into the hall and was just looking at him as he packed. But then I slid my arms around his waist and put my cheek against his back. His hands came over mine. He called me cara. I told him I loved him more than he'd ever know. I promised him I'd stay safe and I made him promise me he'd survive.

I never thought I'd say something like that to Max. Never.

I never thought I'd put that kind of burden on him. Never.

But then again ... I never thought I'd find it necessary. I never really thought anything like this would happen. I think even as I faced the possibility of this, I was in total denial that it really would happen. I only packed to be gone for three days. I figured we'd be back as soon as it veered away and then we'd be driving down unblemished highways, caught in a horrific traffic jam of irritated New Orleanians who'd fled a storm that once again never came near us.

In the morning, he woke me in the darkness of pre-dawn. He made love to me, consuming me, gathering me up to him, possessing me. We whispered to each other and I wish I could do anything but remember each moaned whisper because it somehow seems wrong that I cling to that aspect of the memory. I hate that I actually thought about how this might be it ... that I risked losing him. And how I was so calm with my own reaction: that if I lost him, I lost myself. There he was, buried deep within me, and I was in some way reconciling this as the last time I'd be with him.

He packed my car as I dressed. It took me long, valuable minutes to remember where I'd put my purse and keys ... and when I found them in the living room, I suddenly got lost memorizing the condo because it hit me just then that I had to accept that this might be the last time I ever saw this place. And it was just a place except for the fact that it was where Max and I had lived together.

Just before I slid into the driver's seat, I touched at the tiny gold key he still wore on his leather thong around his neck; the one I'd given him as a token of what he was to me. We never said a word. Just looked in each other's eyes.

As I drove away, I promised his ghost that was riding with me that I would be strong and I would be smart and I would stay safe. I couldn't look in the rear view mirror so I don't know if Max stayed and watched me drive away.

My mother, Buck and I were on the road just as it was getting light. Traffic was pretty intense and was only inching along once we got to the Causeway. My mother was looking out her window and I remembered how the last time I'd driven this way, it'd been me in the passenger seat and Max driving. And we'd been on our way to take my Mom to go see the Folsom property. That had only been the week before. It didn't seem possible.

But it was.

And it was to Folsom that we were heading again. Only this time, Max was not with me.

This time, he'd called ahead to confer with Ralph about sending us up there to ride out the storm. It was my idea we go to the house in Folsom. I'd suggested it the night before, as Max and I switched from fighting each other to planning. He had thought it wasn't safe enough there, not far enough from where the storm would hit. But I said, it's out of the evacuation zone so that must mean the officials think it's safe. And besides, we really had few options ... there were no hotel rooms to be had. And I needed to be close enough to drive in after the storm to go in as relief staff at the paper. Very grudgingly, he agreed ... but only after talking to Ralph.

When he hung up the phone, he said Ralph was fully prepared for the storm. That he would watch over us, help us through it.

Why did I feel such resentment at that? I don't know ... well, I didn't know then. But I buried it inside me in that moment because I knew that Max needed to feel he'd done his duty by me and my family by sending us away to be under the care of some other man. As if I would ever trust another man like I trusted in Max.

I thought about that over and over as we inched along the Causeway, over the big lake north of the city ... with water that sparkled and seemed far too mellow when a killer, monster storm was off somewhere, stalking us, about to strike. About the five mile marker on the bridge, my Mom said something like, we'll make a game of going to stay at your new home for a few days and we'll start plotting out your décor. I think I grunted in reply. She said she was sure glad she'd made potato salad. I think I rolled my eyes but she wouldn't have been able to see because I was wearing sunglasses.

All along the trip, which took us four hours and it should have only been maybe one, we listened to the news on the radio. Everything was ominous. Katrina was not backing off its Cat 5 status. The mayor had opened the Superdome as a shelter of last resort and already people were lining up. Chalmette was a ghost town. We might never see Grand Isle again if the storm kept coming the way it was. There were mandatory evacuations in Biloxi, Waveland, Bay St. Louis. I pictured the devastation of the last major hurricane ... Camille ... to hit the Mississippi coast there.

My Mom started talking about her honeymoon in Bay St. Louis. I had never known that's where they'd honeymooned. In my mind, I saw the sun on the beach just to the side of Bay St. Louis' low, wide bridge ... the beach there was a strip of soft brown sand. It was across the road from gracious homes that had weathered Hurricane Camille all those years ago.

Mom said the inn they had stayed at on their honeymoon still faced the Gulf and that it still made her smile when she drove past it on her way to go casino hopping along Biloxi's coastline with her friends. You always did like taking the long way down Hwy. 90 along the coast, I told her, smiling at the fact that she'd passed that affection for beach towns along to me.

I told her about taking Max to Biloxi the first time. We'd stayed in the Broadwater, I told my Mom.

"That old place?" she said, wrinkling her nose.

"I loved going there when I was a kid," I protested, aghast that she'd say such a thing about some treasured memory of mine. Two weeks every summer, we went to the Broadwater, as close to summer camp as any hotel ever could be and a tradition for so many families from our part of New Orleans. "I wish more of the cottages had been saved. You knew they're closing it down this fall? That's why I wanted to take Max to see it. He even played shuffleboard with me ..."

Before my eyes, rather than the bumper of the car in front of me, the one that I'd memorized every inch of because I'd been creeping along behind it for the last two hours ... I wasn't seeing the dent about six inches to the left of the bumper sticker for Eracism, ... instead, I was seeing Maximus. Silly that this would catch me out this way - that I'd get tears in my eyes at this memory. Max, standing across from me on the shuffleboard court, taking dead aim, beating the pants off me, not taking mercy on me, not letting me distract him, just telling me I shouldn't have started the game with him if I wasn't up to the competition. And when it was over, telling me this story of the rights of victors and that way he has of making being conquered by a superior force sound so sexy and ... even ... enticing to let the victor have his spoils.

The sun had been shining just like it was this day. Just an ordinary day.

"You're both so sentimental," my Mom said softly. "You try to pretend you're not, but you're quite sappy. So is he. I think it's one of my favorite things about both of you."

"He is sentimental," I said, glancing at her. Unfettered soft grins as we thought about the man who had taken both of us into his life. I hung my head for just a second before casting an eye over the rear view mirror, glancing at Buck, curled into a small ball in the little space in the back seat that we'd left for him. "He's such a good man."

"You're worried about him."

"If this thing comes in as a 5 ..."

"He said he'd be safe."

"But no one can really know."

"Max does."

I turned to glance out my window. I was glad one of the two of us believed this. "I wish more than anything he was with us. Whatever happens, if we were together ... at least we'd face it together. He's never been through a hurricane. And if it comes right in over the city, then I don't think anyone can really predict who would be safe."

"He has a job to do, Ann. You have to let him."

"Hey, I've already realized his job will always come before his family does. It's how he is. I knew that."

"I don't think that's true. I think if it was ever put to him to choose ..."

"He'd choose his duty. It's how he was raised. It's ingrained in him."

"We would be lost without men like him who are willing to put their duty first."

"Amen."

"Are you upset with him for not coming with us?"

I frowned at the dent ahead of me. "What choice did he have? I can't be upset about something where he had no choice."

The thing about a day like this is that there is a part of you that memorizes every normal, ordinary thing you see. You have it in your mind that the next time you see it, it may look so different. It may be gone. Your last memory may be precious in that respect. And yet you are so involved in fleeing that you don't always know just how lucky you are to be in a position to be consumed with action. It's later, when you're just waiting and you have no busy work to consume your body and your mind - that's when you face the fact that you are afraid.

We left the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain and entered the green, piney north shore. I glanced at the blue, dear water as we crept off the long white bridge. I scanned the shore and thought about the last time we'd had storm surge from a hurricane that had struck far to the east of this area. It had swamped this shoreline.

A photographer from the newspaper had taken a picture of a young woman standing chest deep in the water as she came to the lakefront to find out what had happened to her business, a coffee shop that I'd stopped in maybe a month before that storm. In the picture, the shock and heart-sick dismay were written in her face and in her hands reaching just above the water in some haphazard gesture of disbelief and despair. I've never forgotten how that picture made me feel her loss and pain.

And yet, on this day before we were expecting a much worse storm hitting us dead on, the lakeshore was placid. It was hard to know I was memorizing that shoreline in anticipation that it wouldn't be anything like this next time I passed this way.

Shortly after we reached the shore, we split company with the vast majority of those we'd been traveling with on this crowded highway. They were turning west, heading for Baton Rouge, Shreveport and Houston. We were continuing north, heading for just outside of Folsom.

When we got to the house, I called Max to let him know we'd made it. I searched his voice for the way to make him change his mind and come to be with me. It wasn't there. He was almost gone, the Max who surrounded me with love. Instead, the general was there and there just wasn't much room for sentiment. I wanted to follow his example. I wished I was back there, with him, doing my job, covering the biggest news story of my lifetime to hit my city.

I tucked his voice away in my memory. The last sound I had of him ... catalogued with my other snippets of what I wanted to find the same when this was all over but most feared would be vastly changed.

Ralph strolled out of the stable to greet us ... well, to greet us in his manner. He said, "When you get your things settled, missus, my brother Pete could use your help with finishing clearing out the yard. You not above a little manual labor to protect your house?"

"Of course not but ..."

"This must be your mother. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma'am."

"You're gonna be fun, aren't you, son?" my mother asked him, her hand up to shield her eyes from the ray of sun over his shoulder.

"I try my best, ma'am."

And by that I took it that while he didn't think much of me, he liked my Mom. How does she do that? 

I carted our things in while my Mom decided on the room she wanted to use for our little visit. Buck and I took the one next to her; she told me I should go settle in the master bedroom. I said I'd settle in there when the master was here. She laughed out loud at that sass. Truth is, though, it wasn't so much sass as it was sentimentality.

Ralph's brother was easy to find. I just followed the sound of him arguing with Ralph. They were heavy into not agreeing on whether it was necessary to brace the stable doors. And they followed that by disagreeing about what method was best. I left them as they wrestled over who was going to do the measuring and who was going to do the cutting of the 2x4s on the table saw. I left with curt instructions from Ralph to go toss the plastic furniture into the pool and then to drag whatever was left into the open bays of the stable.

"Fantastic. This is who Max is trusting us to for this hurricane," I muttered to Buck as I tramped from the stable to the house to the back area. "He'd have a cow if he knew these guys are so clueless."

Two hours later, I was putting the last load of planters from the front of the house in the wheel barrel. Ralph came along to help me hoist the largest one up and in. Buck and I tagged along behind him as he wheeled the load into the stable.

"Your husband's staying in the city?" he asked me at some point. His voice was soft. I wasn't sure what he was leading to.

"His job," I said curtly.

He glanced at me over his shoulder. "Did you know he told me he was keeping me on as caretaker?"

"No. I think I knew he was considering it but I didn't know he'd ..." And I heard what I was saying. My mouth snapped shut. I narrowed my eyes. This instantaneous fury overcame me. Goddamn Max. Who the fuck did he think he was making that unilateral decision? Maybe I wouldn't want this guy working here. And Max hadn't even mentioned it to me. I guess I really knew, right then and there, where I stood. And it wasn't as his partner. It was as a guest in his life.

Ralph straightened up and gave me this curious look, his head tilted to the side. "You don't want me working here, do you?"

"I don't really give a shit. It's his place, not mine," I snapped and turned to walk away.

"You're the wife, just figured we'd need to all be okay with me staying on," Ralph called to my back.

"Just worry about getting along with Max, eh? We're not married and at this rate we may never be," I tossed into the breeze that I suddenly realized had been building ever so gradually. On the return rush of that breeze, I heard Ralph chuckle. Bastard, I mouthed down to Buck who shadowed me as I strode away.

My Mom had her potato salad prominently on the side of the kitchen counter. For dinner, she'd heated up some of the frozen meals she always had stockpiled in her freezer. It was a hodgepodge. Lasagna, pot roast slices, oyster stew and gumbo. She asked me to call Ralph and Pete in for dinner; I didn't have to bother. Men have a radar for meals. Pete kidded my mother over the variety. Ralph thanked her for bringing such good food up with us. I almost pointed out that it was me who'd thought to empty her freezer and bring the stuff with us, but I kept my mouth shut.

The men bunked in the house with us that night. Pete lived in a trailer near Bogalusa; staying there was never an option in a storm like this. Ralph lived in an apartment over the stable; I got the sense he'd have been happier staying there but felt the house was the sturdier place, making it more likely to make it through. Besides, I think Ralph felt a sense of obligation for our safety; I figure Max had a hand in that.

Truth be told, having us all together under this one roof somehow made it all seem safer. The weather had been picking up by nightfall; the really bad stuff would begin sometime in the very early hours. As they moved their things in and settled in the living room where they figured they'd spend the night sitting up on the couches and waiting to handle whatever would come, my Mom and I watched the news on television. New Orleans' stations had wall-to-wall coverage on the approach of the storm, of course.

The news droned out of the television in the stiffness of a house getting ready to face what we still didn't really believe would happen.

If anything, it was more ominous. Heading right for New Orleans. Worst case scenario. The perfect storm. Kiss our city goodbye. Anyone left in the city was in danger. Last resort shelters were filling with desperate people, residents and tourists alike, unable to get out or who had waited too long to try and now the roads were unsafe to be on. Weary, worried officials giving dire predictions. It was so odd watching it all from a distance.

I stepped out onto the back deck to call Max. He sounded too busy to speak to me. I reached down into the well of my feelings for him and reminded him of our promises to each other that morning. He didn't say anything in reply but I heard him breathing.

"I love you, Maximus. More than life. More than you can ever know. Come through this for me. I cannot make it without you." My emotions were everywhere on the compass. Who knew what was true north for me? Only one person: and he was on the phone with me.

"Imagine the sun," he said quietly after the longest silence. "Imagine my embrace. It shall be so."

I thought of his speech to his men, to imagine where they'd be in the aftermath of their final battle, to head for that future they desired with their heads high and their honor intact. I could picture exactly what his face looked like as he whispered to me, too many miles between us, and him in battle-ready mode already.

"And what do you imagine for yourself in this moment, Maximus?"

"I imagine you standing at the door of our home, greeting me as I come to you."

"Then it shall be so."

May his gods watch over him with a ready sword, I told Buck when I hung up. We sat on the back deck, me and my dog, and we watched clouds moving past the moon and stars in that peculiar scudding fashion of the leading edge of major tropical storms. The first light rains had begun hours earlier, and the outer bands only grew in intensity as night clamped down. When a bout of blustering rain began, we scooted back inside the house.

The four of us watched the television reports, moving from station to station to catch each weather guru's forecast. Every forecast line still took the storm over the city. One guy said that if the storm just veered, even 50 miles to the east, from its projected landfall, then the city would be largely spared.

I sent up silent prayers for that to happen; my Mom said the storms always veered to the east; Pete said it seemed wholly unlikely that for the first time in history a storm would go in exactly where it was forecast. Ralph turned off the television.

Tomorrow will be a long day, he said. And then he told us that we'd use the downstairs interior bathroom as our place of last refuge. My hand slid into my mother's; I squeezed and she bit her lip. In the morning, Ralph said, we'll move emergency supplies in there along with anything we want to be sure has the best chance of making it. But keep it to a minimum, what you bring in, he said, because there won't be a lot of space and we may be there for a while.

I did a mental checklist: my laptop's backup sticks, my purse, my mother, my dog ... the strongbox Max had sent with me that held our important papers, including everything from banking information to the purchase of the house to personal records ... everything else I'd brought with me seemed to be easy to leave behind.

Power went off early in the morning. I slept through it. Buck slept with me, both of us snuggled together in a bed as winds picked up outside and rain began to swell out of the air. I woke with a start about 3 a.m. The first thing I thought was: Max is in trouble. And then I realized, I'd been dreaming and it had been a bad dream of Max, wading in darkness, looking for something while water rose around him and he couldn't see where it was taking him.

It wasn't a premonition, I told myself, and it wasn't a vision of what he was going through either. It was just dread and an overly stressed imagination.

I took a shower by flashlight and then took Buck downstairs so he could go out. We stood together at the front door watching the wind for just a moment before he rushed out, choosing the nearest bush and getting his business done a lot more quickly than he ever had before.

Pete was in the kitchen, watching a small battery-powered television that gave an image of a radar screen. The eye was coming ashore in the radar. It was coming in at Buras. Pete grinned at me; the storm had veered. The eye would not pass over the city. It would go east, in at the state line. The worst part of the storm would hit the eastern edge of the parish where we were and over on the Mississippi gulf coast. It would spare New Orleans in the process.

Am I guilty of a mean spirit to have found immeasurable joy at this news? I don't care. I don't. All I know is ... I felt hopeful. We would not have the worst of it in the city.

The first feeder band that did real damage came maybe two hours later. It erupted around us. The noise level surprised me. In a lull afterwards, Ralph and Pete fought the wind to get to the stable and check on the three horses still being boarded there. They made it back just as another squall hit. They came in streaming water and cursing.

We all huddled in the middle of the living room as the weather worsened. The noise grew to encompass everything. There was no more watching television; we conjectured that antennas had gone down in the city. I tried to call Max to check on him because I figured the storm had hit there maybe two hours earlier ... but there was nothing but a distant ringing.

The radio announcer we listened to read reports from officials. There were no more reporters on the street. Not in the height of this storm. So everything said now was coming virtue of officials with the weather service and emergency people giving out canned messages taken out and dusted off for something they'd planned for but probably never quite believed they'd use. There wasn't a lot to say other than ... other than that if you were out there in the city, if you had not evacuated, bring something up into the attic with you in case you needed to get out onto your roof if the water rose that high. Take your ax, take a gun ... take anything that could make a hole you may have to crawl through if the water rises into the attic. Otherwise, you'd drown if you couldn't get out.

My mother's the one who switched the radio off for a while. Denial had morphed into internal compromises we were making with the storm. Mine were these: don't hurt us too bad. Just let Max survive and everything else can disappear.

The real brunt of the storm hit us about 7 a.m. The worst of it lasted until well after noon. During most of that time, we pretended to read books by flashlight and our ears were filled with the roar of a storm outside.

But there did come a time, when we did retreat into the bathroom ... our safe haven.

And the reason is that things went downhill with an abruptness that I both was anticipating and was shocked by when it happened.

The first time we heard something hit the house. I jumped; my mother gave a little surprise shriek; my dog barked. Pete and Ralph paced and told us it was just pine cones and limbs and we ended up getting kind of used to things hitting the house. I never did get quite used to it, though, when the house seemed to shake in a strong gust.

Then something cracked loudly across the roof. We heard whatever it had hit tumble along and then bounce down the eave. A metal exhaust vent's been knocked off, Pete said, peering out a crack in the hurricane shutters.

I must admit, that moment turned into some kind of excitement and a peculiar "laugh in the face of death" gaiety that now makes me feel small and foolish. I wanted to look outside, I wanted to see. Buck was growling. My mother was telling us to get away from the windows. But I wanted to see outside. I wanted to witness the fury. I wanted to be able to brag in years to come that I'd watched a monster hurricane.

The wind was blowing so hard that the rain was horizontal. It was a full sheet of gray water, like a river, and you couldn't even see any of the trees beyond it. But you could hear them. It wasn't constant, but you did hear them when they'd give that loud crack ... and Pete would say, there goes another pine tree.

Every so often, there'd be a slight slackening in the wind's howl and then you could see ... tall loblolly pines bent, their crowns touching at the ground, bouncing in the gusts that drove them over. Jesus. Sycamores down. A live oak, lifting from the roots. It didn't scare me so much as exhilarate me.

My Mom said, "Do I see something dripping?"

We all turned around to look at her. And then followed her eyes. "The plastic," Ralph called out. Pete went into motion, plastic sheeting and a hammer in his hands. I didn't even get over to help them before there was a loud crash on the roof and a hole opened up where there'd been a vent. We found out later that the crash was the chimney, which apparently had been weakened and was wobbling a bit; a powerful gust must have been its death knell; it fell atop the vent, shoving it down into the house's interior. Well, now we had a hole in the roof ... the plastic wasn't really enough anymore.

Over the sound, now that much louder, Ralph and Pete worked as a team in the attic to nail plywood over the hole. I tacked plastic along the ceiling and my mother put buckets and towels on the floor to catch errant drips.

As he was walking back down the stairs, Pete opened his mouth to say something. But he was drowned out. Against the deafening roar of the wind, there was a solid blasting jolt that confused us. We paused. Looked at each other. Nothing happened for a moment. Maybe it's just a big limb, I thought to myself.

The next boom was unmistakable. A tree had hit the house.

"Get in the fucking bathroom!" Ralph screamed, just to be heard.

We all grabbed things ... blankets, pillows, plastic ... and raced inside where we'd already had the room set up just for this, just in case. Pete shut the door; Ralph turned on a battery-powered torch lamp. My mother and I looked at each other.

"Buck!" I finally yelled. Pete raced out, grabbed my wet dog, tossed him in at me ... and then we just all sat there. Buck's growl was hot in my ear. His little heart was beating so fast. I had my face buried in his fur.

"If it's this bad here, imagine how it must be closer in," I said. 

My mother put her arm around me. "You've got insurance, right?"

"Yeah ... but what's that got to do with anything?"

"We forgot to bring the potato salad in with us," she said after a moment.

Our eyes met. Hers were big and round. I have to admit, I've seen my Mom scared before. She closes down and goes somewhere. When I was a child, it used to frighten me in ways nothing else did. Why? Because it meant I was left on my own to deal with whatever it was that had scared her into this place she retreated.

The difference between when this happened when I was a kid and it happening now as an adult was this: I went instantly to a numb place inside me that deals with bad things. I stopped fretting over Max's life, over our new home coming down around my ears, over how it felt to be abandoned to my own devices by a man who'd taught me to trust that he'd always be around to keep me safe. This was how I came into my own. I guess I just needed someone else to need me to remind me that if there was one thing I always wanted to be in the bad times it was a strong woman who could deal with whatever came her way.

"Ralph?" I said, loud enough to be heard. He looked into my eyes. I pointed to where he perched on the bathroom counter. "I stuck the cards in the drawer under where you're sitting."

He frowned but he hopped down to get the cards. I challenged them to bourré, my Mom's favorite card game. We had nothing to bet with so we ended up using a box of Q-tips that Pete found in another drawer. And for the next two hours, we engaged my mother in a cut-throat game that ended only when we realized we were no longer yelling out our bids.

We might have heard more bumps, knocks and bangs. There was a peace in knowing you were quite allowed to simply ignore them.

It was Ralph who finally said what I think we'd all noticed but not wanted to jinx by saying out loud. "Sounds like the worst is over," he said. "I'll go first."

He opened the door. We each had a flashlight but we didn't really need them once we made our way into the living room. In the storm's wake, misty light filtered down from a sky that was now back to the feeder band clouds.

"So far so good," I said, looking around at a house that was still standing.

"The floor's wet," Pete said, pushing rivulets around on the glossy wood surface beneath us.

"Water from the vent hole?" I said hopefully but Ralph just grunted and loped up the broad stairs to the second floor. We stood there like hopeless bumpkins waiting on him to return from surveying upstairs.

"We'll need to get up on the roof. Let's get the tarps," he said to Pete. He looked at me. "Stay here until we check things out."

As if.

Buck and I stood at the open front door and watched the two men walk slowly around a large maple now blocking the driveway. The wind was still gusty; small limbs and shredded leaves flittered in it. I looked toward the stable but downed pine trees blocked my vision. I edged out the door to see better ... and kept going. I ducked under power and telephone lines that hung like limp spaghetti from where a tree had knocked them loose from the pole near the fence.

"Looks like the horses must be okay," I whispered to Buck when we saw the stable, its roof intact even if the live oak that had once provided shade had been uprooted. It had landed not on the stable, but in the open field next to it. Still, the stable looked a bit beat up from the wind ... one of the doors seemed off its hinges. We were part way to the stable to really check it out when I looked back at the house to see if maybe I should have waited for Ralph and Pete.

The house.

Oh god.

I stood there, thinking of how Max's dream of property seemed to have come crashing down. A large pine had sliced into the attic. Two others were leaning in on the garage. Maybe this was when I turned numb. I don't know.

Abandoning the stable, I walked around to the back of the house. There were so many trees down that it was hard to really see the details. I met Ralph coming around the other side. It looks worse than it is, he said. Okay, I said. Everything's repairable, he said as he put his hand on my shoulder and looked deep in my eyes. We're alive, I said, and that's the bottom line.

For the rest of the day, we were like survivors of an atomic blast who slowly came back into the light of day and wondered what should be done first. Thankfully, Ralph and Pete are what's known as handy guys. By nightfall, they had a generator set up outside the back door. We plugged in a large fan, two lamps and a small refrigerator that they carried in from Ralph's apartment because the one in the house was much too big of a power hog to make it on the generator. They'd revved up a chain saw to cut trees that had been on the house and covered all the damaged sections of the roof with olive green tarps that Ralph kept stored in the stable's tool area. My mother and I threw open all the windows in the house to catch what scant breeze was left when the storm finally left us in the overcast evening. We used all the towels and sheets we could find to wipe off any water we could find inside. Then we took stock of our food supplies and came up with a general game plan for meals.

Ralph and Buck led the horses out, tethering them to a machine that let them walk in circles, letting off the stress of the storm. My mother helped brush the horses when they were ready to be led back to their stalls. I helped Pete hammer boards over two broken windows upstairs.

I tried to call Max. Over and over. Even though I absolutely knew I couldn't get through. The landline was down. The cell towers were surely gone pecans. Dinner was quiet for us all. I think we'd all just got it ... that times were going to be rough with no power, no phones, no nothing. It's hard not to get it when you see the destruction all around us and know that we were among the lucky ones because we were not in the direct path.

But dinner was also quiet on our parts because we'd just gotten the first images of the devastation in New Orleans. We sat around the kitchen table and pushed food around ... cold sliced pork, cold shredded chicken, potato salad, carrots and tomatoes. It's what you do when your eyes had seen the images on television that your mind did not want to absorb but was doing it anyway.

I lay in my bed that night and listened to the sounds of the country through the screen in the window. 

We were alive.

But was Max?