by Emily Cogburn

Doris ate her red beans and rice in front of the TV while watching the weatherman stab his finger at a red-blotched map. She wasn't really paying attention to his warning of heavy rain as she absently picked out the bits of sausage and fed them to her miniature poodle mix, Trixie.  Doris would have eaten the sausage herself--it was made fresh at the meat market down the street--but she had to lose some weight unless she wanted to have a heart attack at forty-six like Mama.

She shouldn’t have used the whole bag of Camilla beans, since Tycer was absent as usual. He hadn't bothered texting or calling, but he was probably at Melvin Gardens, the illegal bar run out of that defunct Mexican restaurant off La. 21. She'd been there exactly one time. The proprietor, a man with rings on every finger, ran a hose to the back of the dollar store for water and illegally tapped into the overhead power line. The restaurant smelled like a combination of old beans, sour sweat, and rancid beer. When she asked Tycer why he would risk contracting God-knows-what from the filthy glasses, he said that he needed to relax after work, which was a joke since he spent most days hanging around the vacant lot next to the used tire shop. Sometimes he mowed lawns; the other jobs she didn't want to know about. When people asked, he just said he was self-employed.

After she finished eating, she carried Trixie into the bedroom and put the dog right against Tycer's pillow. He didn't like Trixie to sleep with them, but she'd already given up on him returning that night. She tried not to worry, but it was hard to banish the dark thoughts. She'd picture him shot, left for dead in the drainage ditch that ran along La. 21, or bleeding on the seat of his pickup truck after a collision with one of the live oaks near the town municipal building. She imagined herself alone again. At least she had Trixie, who had been Mama's dog, but now stuck to Doris like white on rice, as she would have said. She greeted every customer who came into the salon, but then always returned to her fluffy, pink bed under Doris's hairdressing station.

After Mama's death, Doris had moved a few of her things into her own bedroom. She'd kept the white dresser from her childhood, but she added Mama's vanity and the dainty caned chair that matched. She could almost see Mama sitting in front of the mirror, applying her black eyeliner and brick red lipstick. After that was done, Mama would remove the cloth cap that covered her hair. As a hairdresser, she had to keep up with the latest fashions, so sometimes it was straightened and then rolled into fat curls and at other times she wore extensions or a wig. Mama hated the itchy wigs the most, but she bore them in every season except summer. "You got to be crazy to wear a wig in snoball weather," she said, referring to the iconic flavored ice treats that were only available during May through October, the most sweltering Louisiana months. 

Mama wouldn't have liked Tycer at all. She would have called him "no account" and maybe something worse. Mama hadn't had much use for men, anyhow. She'd given up on what she dubbed "the dumber sex" after Doris's father Jerome left to pursue fame and riches in New Orleans. She wouldn't tell Doris anything about him except that he'd run for mayor twice and lost. Jerome Wicker gave them one very important thing, though, the building containing their apartment and, below it, the hair salon where she and Mama had worked together for as long as Doris could remember. His grandfather had bought the building from Charles Breaux, who had built the sturdy brick block in the early part of the twentieth century to house a grocery store. Old man Wicker ran a hardware store in it for a while, but his son, Jerome's father, let the business die. Jerome had even less ambition than his father, but he also lacked the initiative to sell the building. So when he disappeared, Mama hired men to tear out the shelves and restore the hexagon tiled floor. She sold the shotgun house where she, Jerome, and baby Doris had lived, moved into the upstairs apartment, and started the salon. She had always done hair, she told Doris, but it took her husband leaving to make her into a businesswoman.

When she was little, Doris greeted the customers and swept the floor with her own child-size plastic broom. Mama quizzed her over dinner each night, not only on the names of the regulars but also who was related to whom, making Doris repeat the names and relationships back to her.

Once Doris reached middle school herself, eight years ago, Mama taught her the business side of running the salon. "You're smart. You don't need to be doing no hair your whole life. You gotta go to college, do something better for yourself," she said. Doris made sure the salon paid taxes, maintained its business license, and kept track of expenses. She wanted to do hair, though, and Mama refused to teach her.

The only reason Mama finally gave in was Hurricane Katrina. Refugees limped into Melville from New Orleans and all the smaller washed-away towns. Some even stayed in a shelter set up in the Melville municipal building. Mama was overrun with business. Customers sat outside under the cloth awning, baking in the heat as they waited for Mama to fix their frizzy locks, ruined by days of standing in line and riding on buses with no air-conditioning. Mama refused to hire anyone to help in the salon. So, every night, after the salon closed, she taught Doris how to straighten, dye, braid, and tie on extensions. Doris had watched for so many years that she caught on quickly and within a week, Mama trusted her to do simple cuts. But it was almost eight months before she would let her daughter handle a permanent by herself. Straightening hair was serious business. "If you fry a customer's hair they never come back. Not them or the ladies they sit with in church or their cousins or aunts or nieces. Nobody," she said. Using just enough of the permanent chemicals was an art. Mama was proud that she'd never destroyed anyone's hair. 

Doris felt the tears come to her eyes as she stared at the water-stained ceiling. Trixie began to lick her foot, as though she knew Doris was crying. Thinking about Mama opened a black hole in her mind. Losing her had made Doris feel like she'd been knocked over by those Katrina winds. The heart attack came when Doris was at the meat market, buying their plate lunches. If it hadn't been fried catfish Friday, she would have been upstairs microwaving leftovers or making pimento cheese sandwiches. But Mama loved the thin fried fish with coleslaw and a praline for dessert and Doris drove the three blocks to Raoul's every week for the special lunch. Doris got the call from salon regular Josie on her cell phone just before paying for the food. By the time she made it back, Mama was riding in an ambulance with the siren turned off. 

A year later, Doris’s own personal Katrina wind blew and blew. But the customers kept coming back, wanting their hair done, wanting to talk. The ladies gave her no time during the day to feel the emptiness inside of her. Only at night, when Tycer didn't come and she and Trixie were alone, did she ache like she had fever. Maybe that was why she stayed with Tycer. He helped her forget what was missing.

Mama would have said she could do better. Mama had told her she was smart and pretty. But Doris knew she was at best average-looking. She saw how men's eyes followed her friends, watched their behinds as they walked away. No one did that to her except Tycer. Doris didn't know if she was smart either. She'd gotten mostly As in school without trying too hard and she ran the salon by herself, even though people told her she should hire an accountant. Why bother getting help? What did she have to do besides work? She couldn't bear children, a condition that she'd discovered when Mama took her to the clinic to get on birth control. The doctor had told her she was missing crucial body parts necessary for childbirth, but the details had been lost on her. All she'd heard was that she was barren. The old biblical term seemed to fit her whole life. Barren. Just another reason for no man to want her. 

#

Doris didn't realize she'd fallen asleep until she heard Trixie barking. Mama had found the little, white dog one day nose deep in a takeout container that someone had left in the middle of the petunias. As if she knew that Mama didn't like dogs and would have turned her over to the shelter if one had existed in Melville, Trixie seldom barked at all and never in the middle of the night. Doris didn't know how long she'd been sleeping, but the window behind the daisy-patterned curtains Mama had made for her was black. Doris felt a little jolt of fear. 

"What's wrong with you, Trixie?" she said. The rain pelted against the glass like tiny bullets and she remembered the weather report. It wasn't a hurricane, she knew that. Just a lot of rain. Nothing to be afraid of, and yet that stabbing fear remained in her chest. She pulled the cord to the nightstand light and nothing happened, so she grabbed the flashlight from the drawer and clicked it on. She put on her slippers and padded cautiously downstairs, dog under her arm. On the third step she stopped and, for a moment, she thought she was still dreaming. "Oh, Lord," she whispered.

Water had filled the salon halfway to the ceiling, leaving just the top of the high mirrors visible. She swept the flashlight around the room, as if by seeing more she could make sense of a scene that her brain was unable to process. The heavy barber's chair Mama had recycled from old Ben's shop had disappeared under the filthy water. The wooden waiting room chairs floated on the surface, bobbing like lost ships among the debris of magazines, combs, half-empty shampoo bottles, and pieces of mail. Doris was reminded of the fish tank she'd had as a child--plants and castles underwater forming a world different from her own. The salon was gone, replaced by this alien, drowned room. She blinked, hoping she would wake up and everything would be back to normal. When it didn't happen, she trudged back to the bedroom and sat down on the bed with Trixie. She'd scoffed when Mama put an ax in the attic, just in case, after hearing the stories about people being rescued from their rooftops during Hurricane Katrina, but now it didn't seem so crazy. She pulled back the curtains and gazed out into the night, but she couldn't see anything except her own reflection, cloth cap covering the braided extensions that Josie had insisted on doing for her during the slow afternoon. She barely recognized herself. She was used to sorrow, but her moon-shaped face showed a new emotion--terror. She didn't want to drown like a rat in a bucket. Closing her eyes for a moment, she prayed for another chance. She'd try harder, live like Mama would have wanted her to. When she opened them again, she didn't see herself in the window anymore, instead she saw a wavering light breaking through the blackness.

As the light came closer, she heard a voice amplified by a megaphone that barely made it audible over the rain. She thrust open the window and called back as loudly as she could, "I'm here!"

A motor revved and soon a flat-bottomed fishing boat came into view. She ran to her closet and put on a polka-dotted raincoat over her nightgown. She only had a few seconds to think about what to bring with her. Anything left behind might be ruined or stolen by the time she got back. That thought almost broke her. If the salon was destroyed by the flood waters, what would she do? How could she go on? Shaking her head to steady her mind, she opened the jewelry box on her nightstand, scooped out the contents, and shoved them into her pocket—her grandmother's wedding ring with six stones, one for each of her children; her own high school ring; Mama's plain, thin wedding ring; and a pair of pearl cuff links that had belonged to her father. She wished she could take the photo albums Mama kept over the years, the high school diploma that had made her so proud because it read "magna cum laude," and the wedding photo of Mama looking young and slim. But time had run out.

The boat had glided up to the window, a dinner-plate size light attached to the back that almost blinded her. Under the hood of the black slicker, she recognized the Melville sheriff, John Broussard. 

"Are you okay, Ms. Doris?" he asked, turning off the engine and tossing her a rope.

Doris clasped the rope and pulled the boat toward the house. The water threatened to drag it away, but she held on, using all of her nearly two hundred pounds of body weight. "Aside from my salon being under water, yes," she answered.

"Tycer there with you?"

"No, sir, he is not." Doris handed Trixie to the sheriff. 

John started the engine and it filled the night with its stuttering growl. The light cast a glow over the churning water, revealing the roof of the Little Tikes Day Care, the top of the stop sign at the corner of Main Street and Magnolia, and the upper branches of the trees scattered between the buildings. As they motored past more rooftops and floating lawn furniture, Doris felt disconnected. All the familiar streets of her childhood had turned into something different and unrecognizable. It was like the day Mama died. Nothing would ever be the same. How could life possibly continue?

#

Holding Trixie in her arms, Doris watched people step off a school bus into the ankle-deep water that filled the parking lot of the Melville municipal building. Upon arriving at the makeshift shelter, she'd removed her soaked slippers and sadly tossed them into the trash can. They were one of her favorite reminders of Mama and now they were ruined, along with everything else. The mayor, Milton Tucker, was next to her, making her feel short and stout. He stood over six feet tall and hadn't gained a pound in all the years she'd known him. Milton was the third African American mayor of Melville and he'd worked his way up in the city administration before being elected. He had the oratory skills of a preacher and the mind of a factory foreman.

"I've lost everything," she told him.

Milton looked down at her. "I've heard that a lot tonight."

"Did your house flood?" Doris knew that answer before he said it. Milton lived on high ground, up past the elementary school. It would take a tidal wave to flood his home. But no one had expected her salon to succumb to water either.

"No, I was lucky. But I've been telling people that losing everything doesn't mean what they think it does."

"It does for me. I already lost Mama. Now her salon is gone and our apartment too. I got nothing left except Trixie."

Milton paused and gazed out into the night before answering. Main Street was a shallow river, the water heading for Bayou Mary, which formed the southeast border of the town. The bayou had always been able to absorb the rain, but tonight nothing was the way it had always been. The park next to the municipal building, which hosted crawfish picnics and family reunions, lay under at least two feet of water. Across the street, the high school perched a bit higher, but Doris thought her alma mater had taken on a few inches. Since she passed by it every day, the building didn't usually evoke too many memories, but tonight was different. She'd never really fit into the high school scene. Part of the reason she'd wanted Mama to teach her to do hair was to impress the other girls. 

"I been knowing you your whole life, Doris,” Milton said. “I saw how you took that salon and made it profitable when you were still just a girl. Yolanda was a wonderful person, but she didn't have a head for business. My mama used to tell me that half her clients paid her in cakes and yard eggs.”

"I can't argue with that," Doris said.

"You got her books in order and you kept her in line. You are a strong person."

"I am not." Doris felt the tears coming again, but she fought them back. "I still miss her every day. I'm lost without her."

"I see you here with your dog and you are still standing. You made it through your mama's passing and you will make it through this. I have fifty people in that building back there and some of those people have nowhere to go. I'm going to get donations of some beauty supplies, whatever you need, and you are going to be the designated hairdresser for this shelter. Then, you are going to apply to FEMA and you are going to rebuild that salon."

Doris grinned. "You always were a bossy boy."

"That's why this town elected me," he said.

"Tell me, boss, is the water gonna come in this building?"

Milton turned and looked at the brick and glass structure built in the 1940s. The auditorium hosted dances, town hall meetings, Santa visits, and prayer breakfasts. The mayor's office was located in the upper floor, along with those of the other city workers. People came in all day, complaining about potholes, paying or pleading for extensions on their utility bills, or asking when a stop sign would ever get installed at that intersection near the new gas station. 

"I believe the water has stopped," Milton said, pointing to the door below them that led into the lower auditorium portion of the building. Sandbags had been placed along the entrance, but the water lapped a few feet away. 

"Good." Doris raised her eyes to the bus again. The last person was walking off with a swagger she'd recognize anywhere. 

"Baby," Tycer said, sloshing toward her. "I hear the salon's under water. You can come stay at my grandma's place."

Doris dared herself to look into his eyes, fully black in the darkness. His grandmother had willed him her house, but by the time the poor old woman passed, it had already been suffering from neglect. He always said he was going to fix it up, but somehow it never happened. Lord help him, that was the story of Tycer's life. Promises not kept. Obligations sworn to, then ignored. He was wearing what Mama would have called "going out clothes"—creased pants and a button up shirt with no doubt fancy shoes now submerged in floodwater. He’d gone out without her. He hadn't texted or called to see how she was in the storm. Now, here he was, expecting her to come with him. Probably, he hoped she would clean his grandmother's house for him and fix dinner every night, like she always did, even though she ended up eating alone half the time. She was done with that. Done with him.

"No, thank you. I'll going to stay right here," she said.

"In the auditorium? Baby, they got nothing here."

"We got hot food, blankets, and clothes. We're bringing in cots as soon as we can," Milton said, pride in his voice. 

"Suit yourself. I'm going to hitch me a ride with the sheriff out to grandma's. Been meaning to fix that place up anyway."

"I know you have," Doris said. "But you meaning to do something is like a cock crowing into the wind."

Tycer stared at her for a moment before shrugging and slogging away. She had just lost something that she should have let go of a long time ago. It felt like she'd stripped off a heavy coat that she no longer needed. Somewhere, Mama was shaking her head and smiling, glad her little girl was finally coming to her senses. "Let's go inside and see how we can help those people," she said to Milton.

"You got it, sister," the mayor said, opening the door to let her in first.