#27: Rita

He wasn't even outside the tollway before he realized what a bad idea this evacuation was. Two days later, having traveled less than a hundred miles, he knew that he should have turned back during those early moments.

There was no where to stay but a crowded gymnasium. The cast-off cafeteria food, the information sheets being handed around, and the smell of a thousand displaced Houstonians sleeping in the same huge room made him wish the hurricane would wipe out his little apartment so he could just move on.

But he called her anyway.

She left with her new boyfriend. They'd headed north to Huntsville where he kept a small lake house. When she answered he could hear the ambient sound of people enjoying themselves. In the middle of their conversation, she turned her face away from the phone to request that her steak was cooked "medium."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I have to go. I'm making the potato salad and I need two hands. I really don't want you to be upset, if that's any consolation."

"It's not. That steak would be consolation."

She laughed.

"I just need a fresh start, I guess," he muttered into an empty phone.

And by the time the hurricane had passed, and news had reached him that the damage was minimal, he was too tired to think of turning around and heading back down 290 again. But not even Rita was going to hand him a fresh start.


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