Before Mom left us, she took me to see a movie at that mall. Randy was with her. He bought me popcorn and took me into the theater, sat next to me until the coming attractions. “Hey,” he said. “Your mom and I have to go do something—you’ll be fine sitting here on your own, right? Just watch the movie, okay?” And Mom leaned across him. “We’ll be back before the end. You don’t need to pee, do you?” And I told her I didn’t, even though I did. Then they left me in the darkness with the big tub of popcorn and a movie about animated mice that I can’t even remember.

Dad smashes the window of a van with his hammer, then reaches in and pops the lock. He works on the radio until he’s got the thing yanked out, an old model with wires which he inspects. “These ought to work,” he says, and puts them in his bag before moving on to the next car, where he finds an old pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment. I grab the empty gas jugs from our rowboat and start in on the parked cars.

Snails cling to the windshields as I siphon the gas, their wet sucking sound a language none of us can understand. Most times the gas in these cars has already turned sour, but every once in a while we siphon out something good enough to filter that keeps our truck alive. Last winter our generator growled and coughed from old gas until it finally died, and I doubt the truck will make it much longer. All the same, I siphon. The first two come out brown, full of rust, but in the tank of a hatchback I smell the pine sharpness of good gas and start filling our jugs.

This mall reminds me of before the flood. How Dad pounded and sawed in the garage during those last months before Mom left. He bent the oak planks for our sailboat while my mother called him Noah, which he used to like, until she began saying it differently. After Mom disappeared, Dad took me sailing to search for her. He taught me how to raise the sails, catch the wind, and steer the tiller as he scanned the horizon. I didn’t tell him that Mom had said Randy had a yacht in Newport. How she’d told me if the rains kept coming, it’d be real dry. How she’d promised to show it to me one day.