Free The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story by Julia Reed Page A

gets so into it and I’d planned several courses, including a lobster spaghetti John and I had eaten in Sicily that I was determined to replicate.
    The first sign that something wasn’t quite right was the fact that I immediately found a parking space in the always nightmarishly congested Whole Foods parking lot. Then, on my way home, I noticed people waiting in long lines at gas stations—the ones that were still open, that is—while the roads themselves were mostly clear. When I walked back in the house, the phone was ringing. My mother, a steadfast watcher of television (there is one in almost every room of my parents’ house, which would prove to come in handy later) and a world-class worrier, was calling to tell me that we needed to start driving to Greenville immediately. “I am not kidding, Sister,” she said, using the only name she ever calls me (and which is pronounced “Suhstuh”) unless she is really, really angry. “This hurricane is coming straight at you.” Elizabeth, with whom I’d endured a tortuous evacuation during the Ivan false alarm (maximum speed of five miles an hour for the first four hours, coupled with a vomiting Honey), was next. There was no way, she said, she was she was going to get stuck in that traffic again (no one had any faith whatsoever that the new traffic plan would be any better than the last one). “We’re leaving now,” she announced, adding that McGee would not be far behind them.
    Despite all signs to the contrary—chief among them the fact that John himself announced that we were evacuating Sunday no matter what—I was somehow convinced there was still time for the thing to change course before we actually had to leave. Not only did I not want to consider the long-term implications, I did not, in the short term, want to abandon the live lobsters I had just stuck in the refrigerator or cope with tying down the thousands of potential projectiles that littered the construction site that was our yard. I was much relieved when, astonishingly, Eddie called to say he would take care of everything outside, and Byron and Cameron called to say that if the dinner was still on, they were coming. Egan’s plane did not leave until the next morning and all the earlier flights out were suddenly booked.
    So when Rose called I did not have to pretend to be calm. Rosemary Russ, who had worked for me for years keeping house, and who, along with her whole family, had come to Greenville to cook and serve all the food at our wedding (as they do at almost all my parties), is a phenomenally skittish woman. During the thunderstorms that are daily occurrences during New Orleans summers, she steadfastly refuses to answer the phone, convinced she’ll be electrocuted through the receiver if lightning strikes the power lines. I told her that if things stayed like they were, we were leaving the next day. “You better call me if you go a minute earlier,” she said, and I promised that I would.
    The night turned out to be lovely—prehurricane weather is always clear and breezy, and the impending doom we still did not take entirely seriously had us all feeling a tiny bit braver and more alive. Byron had gotten us an extravagant housewarming gift, a case of Billecart-Salmon, at about the same time we’d moved into Elizabeth’s, and he was as relieved to finally unload it as we were to finally be in the house. We hung out in the kitchen, toasted the new growth on the live oak tree Benton’s guys had recently planted, and munched Spanish almonds and tuna tapenade on toasted slices of baguette. By the time we sat down to the spaghetti, Byron, whose life’s blood is the weather, and John, who had talked to a geologist friend monitoring offshore rigs in the Gulf, both predicted the storm would jog to the east at the last minute; we would be prudent and leave, but we would not worry. Instead, we drank more wine and lingered merrily at the table, and then John and I hiked up to the third floor,