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in August 2005, and they hadn’t had much to begin with. Momma had worked as a waitress at Cajun Sam’s, which got flooded and never reopened.
     
    Same thing for their ground-floor apartment on Florida Street, or so Aunt Marie had told them; they had evacuated ahead of the surge and had never been back.
     
    And to this day, Momma never knew what happened to her brother Clare, who had been seen in or around the Superdome during all that mess, but never after.
     
    They wound up here in La Porte, Texas, among the oil workers and righteous Texans who, at first, seemed quite happy to show their charity and take in those displaced by the hurricane and flooding.
     
    The First AME Church had been great; no complaints there. They’d found Xavier and Momma a motel room and some clothing and meals, then vouchers for the same as things calmed down.
     
    They’d hooked Momma up with a job at a Cajun barbecue place named Le Roi’s over toward some airport, all with the understanding that it was temporary, that one day soon they would go back to New Orleans.
     
    But that day had never come. Xavier had been put into the second grade at Bayshore Elementary, and it turned out to be a better school than the one he’d attended in New Orleans, or so Momma told him.
     
    And her job paid better than the one at Cajun Sam’s, too. Eventually—with help from the church—they’d moved out of the motel to the place they had now, and Xavier had gone through grade school and junior high and well into high school.
     
    Maybe it was hanging around the kitchen at Le Roi’s that gave him the idea—or, more likely, gave other people the idea that this was his idea—but Xavier was on the way to becoming a cook, if not exactly a chef. He started out washing dishes and busing tables, then graduated to chopping vegetables.
     
    But around that time, Momma was diagnosed with cancer, and theysimply needed money. Hanging around Le Roi’s, Xavier had gotten to know a few of the boys who, in addition to cooking meals, sold other things people wanted.
     
    Eventually Xavier had started doing favors for them, running out at all hours to pick up or drop off or collect.
     
    When he was eighteen and had been running errands for only a year, he’d gotten caught. Because of the amount of material he was carrying, and the fact that he was no longer a juvenile, he’d been sentenced to six months in the misnamed Harris County Leadership Academy.
     
    It hadn’t been that tough—though it was surely one of those experiences that looked better in the rearview mirror—but it had pretty much screwed him with the folks at Le Roi’s.
     
    And when he got out, why, he found that the knowledge he had picked up running errands made it possible for him to go into business for himself.
     
    Low level. He was never going to get rich. He would be living with Momma until she died (her cancer had gone into remission, but Xavier knew that meant she wouldn’t die today, but don’t look for her to celebrate, say, New Year’s 2022).
     
    His errand work—basically growing and dealing pot—had been so low-level that he’d had to pick up some part-time jobs, mostly construction, but a little plumbing (there was always a market for small men who were willing to climb through shit under people’s houses) and some electrical work.
     
    The electrical work had led to one strange summer where Xavier had helped wire and set up a computer network at an office building. He started thinking that if he enrolled at Remington and got a certificate, he might have a career in IT.
     
    He was looking into it. He’d gone online to check the price and the application dates as recently as last week, right around the time
Destiny-7
got launched toward Keanu.
     
    Now he was a fucking refugee again. Wasn’t once enough for a lifetime?
     
    “Shit!” The cracker had started in on a storage place under the seats of the tiny RV dinette. The cushions were still in place, held there by a