Teresa gripped the armrest of the passenger door. “We are going to be blown right off this bridge.”

Despite this prediction, they rolled onto the mainland and into the town of Cocoa. The first intersection they came to was buried under a lagoon that swallowed the station wagon’s bumper and dragged against its chassis. Roy plowed forward, hearing Teresa say his name: a single syllable she managed to bend in half with a nervous wrenching of her throat.

Evacuation of the island and the cape had been recommended by the governor, but it wasn’t mandatory, and for a while Roy had convinced Teresa they would be fine riding out the storm at home. They’d spent the morning gathering flashlights and extra batteries and candles, tacking up a blanket over the sliding glass door in the dining room, and making Xs across the windows with masking tape. In the middle of all this, it wasn’t Teresa but Karen who had leaned against the doorway in the laundry room and challenged Roy, asking him pointblank why he didn’t want to evacuate.

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why means why,” the girl had said. The extra roll of tape he’d been looking for was dangling from her wrist like a bracelet. “Why stay in the middle of a hurricane?”

She’d caught him off-guard. Knowing, even as the words left his mouth, that he wouldn’t be forgiven for the corniness of his response, he’d said, “Ever heard of protecting the home front?”

One of Karen’s cheeks had popped up as if snagged by a fishhook. “Yeah, right.”

“I’ve got this house and the store to worry about,” he’d added.

“But it’s not like you’re Shazam. What are you going to do, hold the walls up if they start to fall? Besides, you can’t be in three places at once.”

“Two places. Here, and the store.”

She’d clucked her tongue and handed over the tape.

Then, just as they’d been finishing the preparations, Teresa had gotten on the phone with a couple of neighbors, Mrs. Gardner and Mrs. Taylor, one of whom told her that the storm was ripping roofs off houses along Cape Canaveral and both of whom were gathering their families and heading for the mainland. After hanging up, Teresa found Roy in their bathroom, filling the tub with reserve water, and told him to forget it: they weren’t staying. He wanted to argue with her, put his foot down, but she had a wide-eyed, rabbity look and she was holding her rosary, and experience told him there would be no winning.

The bickering became explosive soon after they got a room at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge off U.S. 1. The children’s usual volley of insults and complaints felt like bees thumping against his forehead, and then out of the blue Teresa snapped, pulled Karen into the bathroom, and shut the door.