She’d come for plywood as the radio advised. “Ma’am, can you swipe your card again?” Mysterious forces had erased the magnetic strip on her Visa. A manager is called over. Ada keels onto one hip while the people in line behind her rot and glare, their arms loaded with jugs of water, rolls of plastic. The air-conditioning raises gooseflesh on Ada’s arms. She waits for the manager’s approval.
It isn’t until she wheels her purchases out to her car that the geometry of the situation strikes her. Her small sedan is no place for four sheets of plywood. Sweat makes dark circles on her tank top. She looks at the wood. She looks at her car. She tightens her ponytail, and rather than asking someone for help or going to get a refund, she drags her teeth across her top lip.
In a few hours this parking lot will steam as the first raindrops strike. The light fixtures will ping as the wind picks up. The orange H in the Home Depot sign might loosen from its moorings, taking flight across the state of Florida, a glorious end to a bright career.
She’s done what they asked. She’s bought plywood. She’s just not going to take it home with her. Ada leaves the wood nosed into the island between car grilles, an offering. She starts her engine and Neil Young sings, “I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire.” Signaling a right turn with her left hand crooked at the elbow, Ada pulls out of the parking lot.
*
When she moved here from Rhode Island, it took her three days to make the drive. She stopped at the halfway point to tell someone where she was headed. “Florida.” She smiled.
The Virginia rest area worker, positioned behind the Visitor’s Information desk, sneered. “Florida’s an old coral reef. Geologically it’s brand-new.” He passed her a brochure for Colonial Williamsburg.
Brand-new and improved. Ada left the brochure behind.
When Ada arrived she bought a tiny one-story rectangle. A square house from the seventies with tall glass windows floor to ceiling, dark wood, and the occasional odor of mold that comes with basement-free homes. The neighborhood is nothing much, some mobile houses and a family who races ATVs down the street. But Ada eats breakfast on the lanai. She sleeps with the windows open, the sound of dry vegetation brushing against the stucco. Kingbirds spear bugs and dead flowers in her yard. Lizards inflate their pink necks. It is nothing like the version of Florida Rhode Island believes. That Florida is confined to tabloid headlines: 26-FOOT PYTHON FOUND UNDERNEATH 75-YEAR-OLD WOMAN’S HOME or ALLIGATORS ON THE LOOSE IN SUBURBAN MIAMI.
*
Her neighbor Chuck is sitting half in, half out of his metal utility storage shed. It’s lightweight, aluminum and fiberglass; the whole thing held together with wing nuts. Chuck has set a metal folding chair and a TV tray just outside the door. His sister, Patricia, has a three-bedroom home on the same property, but Chuck lives in his storage shed with no windows, no floor, and no plumbing. “I’m a green anarchist,” he told Ada when they first met. The ideology has to do with caveman times, dumpster diving, and friends in prison for blowing up car dealerships. Chuck doesn’t go shopping or burn fossil fuels. He rides a ten-speed bike in T-shirts magic-markered to read, RECLAIM! REWILD! RESIST! or STATE MELTDOWN or simply BURN, BURN, BURN.
His radio is tuned to the same station Ada’s listening to in the car so that the broadcast comes through in stereo with a slight delay. “I repeat, SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for southern Florida. We’ve got Chief John DeLamian here. Chief, what can you tell us?”
“Well, at this point, Mike, I can tell you we’ve got a SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for southern Florida.”
“Chief, maybe you could clarify for our listeners the difference between a WATCH and a WARNING.”
“Sure thing, Mike. A WATCH means we’re just watching, just gonna wait and see, while a WARNING—” Ada turns the car off.
“Hey, Chuck.” She passes through the low row of palms dividing her land from Patricia’s. Ada holds a two-fingers wave, an Indian chief coming in peace. “I couldn’t get any plywood,” she tells him.
“They sell out?”
“My car’s too small.”
“Ah ha,” he says. “Well then, you’re in for it. Total destruction.”
“I guess so.” She chews her lip again.
Chuck looks at her lopsided. She slept with him once, right after she’d moved here. In the intervening months she’s not made that mistake again. “There’s not much you can do to stop it, Ada. A hurricane will just take your plywooded house and deposit it upside down across the street.”
“Those scenes on the news up north always looked faked. Like a Christmas village, trailers in trees.”
“You must be some sort of monster.” Chuck shakes his head. “Beer, monster?”
Nowhere does a storm appear yet. “Sure. Thank you.”
He fishes her a can of malt liquor from out of an ice cooler. “Malt liquor gets the job done,” he told her when they first met, and in the time she’s known him she’s found that to be true.
Dull sunlight shines into his shed. At the foot of his cot there’s a small steamer trunk with one blanket neatly folded across it. “You go ahead and sit down there,” he says, pointing to the folding chair, the only seat there is. Chuck finds a spot on the ground, crossing his legs.
Ada stares at the chair.
“Don’t be such a Yankee.”
She takes a seat.
If Ada met Chuck up north she would have mistaken him for someone whose favorite book is Helter Skelter, someone who listens to hair metal bands. She would have thought he was someone who wouldn’t care if a bit of scrambled egg fell between the stove and the cabinet. He’d leave it there for years. But here, she likes him. “How come people aren’t catatonic with wonder?” he asked her once when a scarlet ibis walked through the yard on long yellow backward-bent legs.
Anyway, Chuck would never eat scrambled eggs.
He explained his theory to her when they first met. “Food is fifteen percent nutrients, eighty-five percent poison. Everyone knows it’s true but most people just keep on eating. I can’t do it. It fogs up my brain when I have a sandwich.”
“Really?”
“Yup. People in government keep a different food source. They give us this stuff to make us slow in the body, slow in the head. I won’t eat it. You shouldn’t either.”
“Don’t you get hungry?”
Chuck set his mouth in a way that let her know her question was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. Ada stopped poking his precarious foundation.