The Light Pirate(5)

When Lucas has retrieved the last of the plywood, he wipes his hands on his T-shirt and little gray mildew smudges appear. “That’s good for tonight,” Kirby says. “We’ll bang ’em up in the morning.” He’d like to put them up now, but letting Frida’s dinner get cold will only make things worse. Heading in, he glimpses her standing there in the window, the curve of her hand resting on top of her belly as she frowns at him, framed by green curtains and her voluminous dark curls, as if she’s been standing there for hours, perfecting her pose, waiting for him to come round the corner so he can see this icy vision of martyrdom.

“When’s the storm getting here?” Lucas asks, clawing at his shirt. Always grabbing at some article of Kirby’s clothing, these boys. Always asking for a little more of him.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Kirby says. “But probably won’t be a direct hit. Forecast says it’ll make land farther north.”

“I saw the Robisons leaving this morning. Jimmy said they’re ’vacuating. But we’re not, are we?”

“Well,” Kirby says, and fixes his eyes on his oldest. “That depends. Are you scared of a little wind?” Lucas shakes his head before the question is done being asked. “Are you scared of a little rain?” Another shake. “Then we’re not evacuating.” He says this last bit as Lucas clambers over the sandbags stacked in the open doorway. Kirby doesn’t intend for Frida to hear him say all of this, but she does, and when he follows Lucas into the kitchen and catches the look on her face, puckered and tearful, he’s instantly ashamed of himself. He only meant to make his son feel safe. But then his guilt swells too big and it changes into something bitter, something charred. He can feel it turn—the apology he knows he should offer, the sorry on the tip of his tongue, burns.

“Wash your hands, Lucas,” Kirby says, his mouth full of ash.

“I already did.”

“So do it again.”

Lucas makes the sound of a child being forced to do hard labor and stumbles toward the sink, suddenly limp under the weight of this task. This time, he uses the soap.





Chapter 3




Dinner is eaten quietly. The boys pick at their food. The chicken is dry. The mashed potatoes are lumpy. The greens—the greens are bright and well-seasoned, but these boys don’t like greens unless they’re cooked in molasses, the way their mother makes them, and even then they are dubious.

“Eat,” Kirby commands, confused by their ravenous eyes and heaping plates. What he doesn’t fully understand is that these boys aren’t hungry for food. They’re hungry for him. His attention. His affection. Even before the divorce they were hungry, fed on scraps when he had the time and energy to play. Now they are starving. At their other house, Chloe tells them that Kirby abandoned them all. They don’t believe this, not yet, but they’re scared that it might be true. “Frida cooked you dinner and you will eat it,” Kirby adds, but this only gives them another reason not to. Over the summer, Flip and Lucas tormented Frida because she has what they want. What their mother never had. It’s the only way they know how to be loyal to Chloe without sacrificing Kirby’s attention. This weekend, as always, they can’t stop thinking about how soon these precious hours with their father will end. They are such different boys, but in this yearning for more time they are united.

“They don’t have to,” Frida says. She can see that the harder Kirby pushes them to like her, the harder they will resist.

“They do, actually,” Kirby replies, his tone sharp. So the boys eat the food they don’t want, because their father tells them to. Lucas tears into his drumstick. Flip shovels mashed potatoes into his mouth. Still they’re hungry. Frida is just an interloper, another heart for Kirby to feed, a reason the boys have less than they used to. She tries to win them over with kindness and pity, but this tastes wrong to them. Her smell is too mossy, her voice is too low, the food she cooks for them is wrong. She is an acquired taste that they don’t want to acquire. Instead, they eye her round belly and see how little they are about to matter. The love in this house is finite. Tense. Transactional. There isn’t enough for them, and soon there will be even less. They feel a storm coming, too.





Chapter 4




The rain starts as Frida scoops the cold, congealing mashed potatoes into Tupperware. There is too much food left over—Lucas and Flip were being fussy and she wasn’t thinking about how long they might have to go without power when she decided to buy a whole chicken. She wonders if she should just throw the mashed potatoes away, but at that moment it seems like more work than to save them, so she clicks the lid into place and stacks the container in the fridge with all the other Tupperwares, little cloudy boxes with their rainbow of contents. It might be beautiful if she didn’t know what was inside them all—fried plantains gone soggy; pink beans and rice; roasted carrots; overcooked chicken. But she does, and so all she sees is a constellation of food that no one wanted the first time. The recipes she knows by heart they hate, and the recipes she learns for them seem to go wrong. She always enjoyed cooking, but Kirby is useless in the kitchen and somehow the task of feeding them all has fallen to her. She likes cooking less now. She misses the grind of Houston—at least there she knew what she was working toward, and the only person she had to take care of was herself.