Manatee Summer by Evan Griffith

Author:Evan Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

I hate to admit it, but Mr. Reilly was right about one thing: there is a storm brewing.

A Category 2 hurricane named Bernard is moving through the Caribbean, and according to Channel 9 News, it will be a Category 3 by the time it hits Florida later this week. The higher the category, the worse the storm. They go up to Category 5, which is basically a hurricane apocalypse.

On Sunday, while Mom is showing houses, Papa and I eat corn chips and watch the news. Hurricane Bernard is a huge churning swirl of colors on the weather map.

“Uh-oh,” says Papa.

“Uh-oh,” I agree.

I grab my walkie-talkie from my room. “Fox, are you seeing this?”

“I’m seeing it, Falcon. There’s a seventy-three percent chance this is going to be a bad one. Dad says we’ll probably have to delay our move till after the storm.”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s, um . . . a bummer?”

Except it’s not a bummer. It’s actually the best news ever.

During a commercial break, I step out into the backyard. The sky is still clear and bright—the color of the eastern bluebird eggs Tommy and I once found in a nest in his backyard. It’s hard to believe a storm is coming. But that’s the weird thing about Florida—one second, it’s the perfect summer day, and the next, it’s storming like the world is ending.

Usually the end of the world is a bad thing, but if it means keeping Tommy here, I’m all for it.

Back inside, I find Papa trying to stand. He can’t get the footrest of his recliner down. There are corn chips scattered around his chair.

“Papa, what do you need?”

“My tools,” he says. “We’ve got to prepare the house for the storm.”

I think back to last summer when Hurricane Lucy blew through town. Papa wasn’t living with us yet, but he came to stay with us during the storm and helped Mom get the house ready. He boarded up the windows with plywood and placed sandbags along the outside of the front and back doors to prevent flooding.

The news comes back on and zooms in on Hurricane Bernard on the weather map. The swirl of colors fills the entire screen. I shiver. I’m not usually afraid of hurricanes—sometimes they’re even exciting—but there’s something about this one I don’t like, even if it’s really helping me out with my keep-Tommy-in-Florida-forever plan. Maybe Papa is right. Maybe we should start preparing the house.

I push his footrest down and help him up, but before I can fetch his toolbox from the garage, Mom gets home and makes him sit right back down.

“Let’s all relax,” she says, picking up the corn chips. “The hurricane is days away, and it might not even come here. These storm paths always change.”

But Papa doesn’t look relaxed. He looks frustrated.

And the storm path doesn’t change. On Monday and Tuesday, I try to keep Papa from seeing the news—it’s I Love Lucy and nature documentaries all day—but I check the forecast on my phone and watch Bernard inching closer and closer to the coast.

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