She heard the bathroom swing open and glimpsed Mandy through the space between the door and the stall wall.
“They brought him out.”
Zakiyah was about to respond, but only a cry escaped her lips. She covered her mouth and nodded, forcing herself to sound relaxed.
“Okay, thanks,” she managed
Once the door closed and she was certain she was alone, Zakiyah burst into tears, sobbing long and low, holding nothing back.
• • •
Mia carried the blue ribbon Mr. Klekner had given her for winning the math challenge down the covered walkway to the parking lot.
“You blew that pick,” Michael Whittaker bellowed at his younger brother, Emmitt, as they walked in front of Mia. The boys were in sweaty basketball uniforms and stank. Badly.
“Two steps, turn, stop. Got it?”
Emmitt nodded as they reached the end of the walkway. Their mother’s SUV was only a few feet away down the curb, but it was raining buckets.
“Go!” Michael cried.
The two boys took off running, splashing water in every direction as they ran. Mia waited a moment before following. When she took off running, she kept the ribbon as close to her body as possible, shielding it from the weather.
Just as she reached the SUV, Emmitt slammed the door shut, flinging droplets of water in her face. She heard his mother yell at him and Emmitt turned back, having not registered Mia’s presence.
“Oh,” he said dumbly, opening the door and allowing Mia to climb in.
“Seatbelts,” Mrs. Whittaker said.
In unison, the children buckled their seatbelts and the SUV pulled away from the curb. As the boys resumed their basketball strategy argument and Mrs. Whittaker sank back into her talk radio, Mia realized “oh” would be the only word spoken to her the whole way home.
Ten minutes later, Mia hopped out, ran the fifty yards to her apartment door and was finally out of the storm. After being out in the rain, Mia relished being home in a dark apartment. She put her school books on the kitchen table, pulled a bag of chicken pieces from the freezer to thaw on the counter, turned on the television to catch the end of Judge Judy (her favorite show despite her mother’s protestations), and waited to look at her ribbon again.
When she was halfway through her social studies homework, she finally allowed herself a peek, having left it to dry on the television. It was a deep blue with gold lettering. Any suggestion that it was an award for math was absent, but Mia didn’t care. After a moment, she brought it over to the boxes of her father’s trophies and gently laid it among them.
• • •
The noise on the factory floor may have been loud on its own, but as the day went on, the rain heralding the arrival of Eliza was even louder. The thin metal roof sounded made it sound like buckets of roofing nails were being poured on it en masse.
The day-shifters cast nervous glances to the ceiling. Most were worried about the drive home, but there were a handful of Katrina survivors looking up as if believing it might be torn away at any moment. Around five o’clock, the intensity of the downpour got so loud several people went to watch at the windows and loading docks. The sky had gone completely dark as if it was the dead of night rather than a late summer afternoon.
“Man, I gotta drive home in this?” Elmer complained. “The 45 is gonna be fucked.”
“Nah, the sane ones left work a long time ago,” Beverly suggested. “Might not be that bad.”
“Are you kidding? You gotta go all the way to the Heights, right? Better stick to the cross-streets. How ’bout you, Big Time?”
Big Time had been pretty quiet for most of the afternoon, doing double duty on Alan’s station and his own with limited results. As the weather got worse and everyone up and down the line began gossiping about the storm, he was finally able to get caught up.
He shrugged at Elmer.
“I’ve got my truck. It made it through Katrina. Think it’ll survive a little Houston storm.”
Elmer laughed and was about to retort when Dennis’s voice came bellowing over a loudspeaker from the second-floor catwalk.
“Hey, can I get everybody’s attention? Stop the lines a second.”
Big Time reached over and hit the red rubber button that would bring Line 10 to a halt. The ten lines quickly went silent, and everyone looked up at where Dennis and a couple of the other supervisors were gathered. With the machinery stopped, the sound of the pounding rain was only more ominous, like a thousand angry beasts trying to break their way into the building.
“Harris County has just announced a multi-city flood warning. There will be mandatory evacuations of homes in floodplains and low-lying areas.”
A murmur went through the factory. Every third neighborhood in Houston qualified, the poorest ones especially.
“Obviously, we’re not going to expect any of you to come in tomorrow, but we will be running a couple of lines with skeleton crews to get at least a few units out the door.”
This got Big Time’s attention. He really hoped Dennis was about to say what he hoped he was going to say.
“So, we’ll be paying time-and-a-half to anyone who wants to come in. We’ll have sign-up sheets up front at the end of shift so we’ll know how many to expect.”
Big Time grinned. This was precisely what he wanted. He looked around, trying to gauge who else was going to take the bait, but figured most were going to take the day off whether they feared being flooded out or not.
“Shit, I’m in,” said Elmer. “That’s good money.”
“Thought you were all worried about the 45,” said Big Time. “How do you think it’s going to be in the morning?”
“For time-and-a-half, I guess I’ll find out.”
• • •
For Alan, the ride down to Harris County Jail was about as miserable as he was. The cruiser had smelled terrible even before three men in wet clothes climbed in, the
