“He lied to me too,” Frances said. Her voice was resigned and patient, the voice of someone long used to lying men. “At first I was angry. I mean, this is my retirement! But then I thought—maybe it will work? Maybe I’ll dance at your wedding and kiss your babies. Don’t you want that?”

Marianne started to cry.

“Here,” Frances said. She picked up one of the smaller orchids, with tiny orange-and-purple flowers, and handed it to Marianne. “You should have this. For your office.”

“I don’t think I’ll have an office anymore,” Marianne sniffed. “Aren’t you and your friends evacuating soon?”

“Of course not,” Frances said, straightening in her chair. “I don’t abandon ship, and I don’t accept your resignation.”

Marianne took the orchid and left. By the time she got back to the Ranch, it had already lost two of its five flowers.

The wind had died down again, and it was dark enough to make her way back to her room without anyone noticing. Or maybe she could escape, join the lucky evacuees slowly inching their way up I-75 in advance of Tropical Storm Helen. She imagined herself in the stolen car, music playing, nothing to do but drive north—away, away.

19

By Saturday the storm was officially classified a hurricane, with landfall predicted for Monday night, but Marianne was not among its evacuees. Neither was Janine, whose daughter had lucked into a reporting gig and had taken their car, or Tom, who had nowhere else to go, or Davonte, whose manager/coach was suddenly unreachable. On Saturday afternoon Lorraine rode with a small group of students to Tampa, where they’d booked flights back to where they came from—New York and Amarillo and Chattanooga and other less vulnerable destinations. Most people drove, following the marked evacuation route to join the traffic jams Marianne had fantasized about, but no one offered her a ride.

At the Ranch, none of the remaining students—not Janine, not Davonte, not even Manfred—was speaking to Marianne after reading Martin Rice’s exposé in the Thursday paper and receiving a long email from Regina expressing disappointment in Marianne’s leadership and doubt about her mental health. Students avoided her, as if her mental instability or her atheism, or some combination of the two, might be catching, and on Friday she’d been fired, over the telephone, by Mark.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. He did not mention a severance, but suggested that they could possibly still use her as a reader of applications.

“That’s okay,” she said lightly. She pictured her voice like a pale balloon, escaping, then bumping against the ceiling. “I’ll pack my things and be gone before the storm.”

“You can stay through the storm.”

“Ha,” she’d said. “That doesn’t seem advisable. Or likely.”

“But where will you go?”