What I Carried Out of Florida

I left Florida on the eve of a hurricane. I was 18, gripping the steering wheel and squinting through sheets of rain while the wind lashed my small car. My dog, Nollie, panted and shivered in the passenger seat. For weeks, the weather channel had shown the storm slamming New Orleans, but I should’ve known better. I was born and raised on the panhandle. Every summer of my childhood, the hot Gulf Waters churned any errant wind into a wild, unpredictable storm.

I’d also been planning my exit for years. I waited until my eighteenth birthday, then the end of high school, then the last few classes of an associate’s degree at the community college, believing that when I made it to each landmark, I’d finally have enough time to work enough shifts and save tips from my $2.13 per hour job as a server. I hoped to fill the small, rusted safe at the bottom of my closet, enough for a first, last and security deposit in a bigger city, enough for food and gas for the five-hour drive to Atlanta, enough to make sure that when I left, I’d actually be leaving — a true exit, no backup, nowhere else to go.

Then the hurricane turned away from New Orleans and toward my hometown, a category five over the water. I knew my old brick apartment building would collapse immediately, even if the winds downgraded it to a level-four storm. “Take my trailer,” a friend said, latching it to the back of my sedan. “Bring it back when the roads reopen.”

We knew a return was a long shot, knew the bridges would break and the streets would be flooded, sagging, sinking. Still, I loaded the trailer with a stained mattress, boxes of dishes, and trash bags filled with pillows and clothes and shoes. I stored plastic tubs filled with photographs and baby shoes, saved for three generations, on the backseat of my car. Everyone in my family had died or moved away. I was the only one left to keep them.

As we drove, Nollie ducked every time thunder cracked the sky. Rain pattered in short bursts as we passed boarded-up McDonald’s and Taco Bell and Krispy Kreme. Within an hour, the sky had gone pitch, and rain shot down like an attack. The highway was a parking lot for miles. Eventually, just after dawn, we stretched and limped up the walkway to my friends’ house, the sky finally bright and clear and the wind soft, like this giant, new city was cooled by a high end A/C.

I slept on the dirty wood floor of that house with Nollie for months, listening to bugs chitter inside the walls, circling jobs in the classified section, and riding my bike between hot skyscrapers to apply. Eventually, I landed a couple part-time gigs, enough to buy dog food and gas, but I couldn’t make rent. My makeshift roommates, four guys, pulled ugly vegetables from dumpsters, cut off the rot, and asked me to cook while they were at work or school, trading a clean kitchen and a hot meal for the corner of floor in their empty living room. I agreed.

The boys were so sweet and grateful and sloppy, a familiar routine. I’d raised my brother for years after my dad died. I’d run restaurants and kept house when I moved out on my own two years before. I’d found Nollie, bald from mange, and bathed him and fed him until his fur grew back, shining and brindle. Family and love and home had always been a transaction: Give everything, hopefully get back enough to survive.

It would take years for the boil in my throat to rise. Call it rage, sapping out of me for years. Call it fatigue. Call it a mountain of bleach and skin stinging, surface peeling, scraping and scouring the spills and the grime and the mess, years of it, not mine. Eventually, I would come to resent my automatic lean into housework and caregiving, to wish it wasn’t so easy to become a nanny and a maid, to wish I’d been able to afford the freedom that taking care had offered me without putting my whole ass into it, as my first supervising waitress told me at my first job before I escaped Florida

But in Atlanta, the repetitive wash, rinse, scrub was the only story I could control: first filthy, now soapy, then mine.