She picked up the envelope and the deposit slip. She checked, twice, that the slip was in the envelope, and that the folder of letters was in her big tote bag, and that the cashier's check was where it was supposed to be, in the zippered inside pocket of the purse she held against her side the way she had once held the fare box key. Then she locked both locks on the front door and went down the steps, one hand on the rail Lucien had welded the summer before he got sick.
* * *
She drove the long way. She had not planned to, but her hands turned the wheel of the Buick onto Fruge Street and then Mill and then Enterprise Boulevard, and she let them, because her hands knew the route better than she did. It was her old morning route, Bus 114, Calcasieu Parish School Board, the north loop. For twenty-nine years she had picked up children at these corners in the dark and in the rain and in the hundred-degree mornings when the air conditioner on the bus died and the children sat with their faces pressed to the cracked-open windows like puppies.
There was the corner where the Broussard boys used to wait, three in a row by height, the smallest one always holding the biggest one's backpack strap. The Broussard boys were grown now, and two of them had moved to Houston after the storms, and their great-grandfather, Alcide, still lived in the yellow house on the corner with a blue tarp over the back half of it and a ceiling in the back bedroom that had come down onto the bed in 2021 and never gone back up.
There was the corner where little Precious Guillory had stood every single morning in the same pink raincoat, rain or shine, from kindergarten through third grade, until she outgrew it and her mother bought her a yellow one and Precious cried for a week. Precious was a nurse at Memorial now. Precious had applied for a home repair loan for her mother's house on Pine Street in the spring of last year and been told, in a letter that Odessa had read with her own eyes, that the application had been declined due to "insufficient collateral value relative to requested amount." The requested amount was thirty-one thousand dollars. The house, before the storm, had been appraised at a hundred and twelve.
There was the church with the steeple still leaning. There was the empty lot where the Kountry Kitchen used to be. There was the house of the man who had run a barbershop out of his front room for forty years, which now had plywood on the windows and a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign that had faded to pink.
And then she turned onto Ryan Street and drove south, and the houses got bigger and the tarps disappeared, and there, at the corner of Ryan and Prien Lake Road, sat Gulf Coast Heritage Bank, in its new building with its new brick and its new white columns and its new sign. The old building had lost half its roof in Laura, too. That one had been fixed by Christmas.