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“Mother was a big fan of fashion and writing,” he says, pointing to a painting of his mother, Mary Mahoney, the restaurant’s founder. “When Wyatt Cooper came into your restaurant in 1976, that was a pretty big deal.”

I went to hear my father speak to a crowd of ladies in Biloxi. His book had just come out. He spoke to them of families and memories; he connected with them right away. At night we slept in the same hotel room, and he worked in the bathroom writing his speeches, with the door closed so the light wouldn’t keep me up. I can almost remember the feeling, the safety. After he died, nothing ever felt safe again.

IN WAVELAND, NOT MUCH is different. The urban search-and-rescue team from Virginia with whom I spent time has just pulled out. More roads have been cleared, but that just makes it easier to see the devastation. A handful of work crews pick up downed trees and try to restore power lines.

I head over to the house where a month ago they found the bodies of Edgar and Christina Bane and their two sons, Carl and Edgar Junior. When I arrive, there are two cars parked outside. It turns out that Christina and Edgar Bane also had two daughters, Laura and Serena. They didn’t live at their parents’ house, and both survived the storm. They’ve come back to visit because yesterday was their mother’s birthday. She would have been forty-five years old.

“A couple days after the storm, we came back,” Laura Bane tells me, standing in what used to be the kitchen of her parents’ home. “When I first turned the corner, I was all excited because the house looked untouched—no shingles missing or anything. As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I seen they had some writing on the door. They had a V with a circle around it. And underneath it, it had FOUR DEAD. So that’s kind of when I just went crazy.”

The writing on the door is barely visible now.

Laura is twenty-five but already seems much older. Her hair is pulled back tight into a ponytail and there’s a blurred blue teardrop tattooed under her left eye. She has three kids and another on the way. Her sister, Serena, is eighteen and has the awkward posture of a girl not yet a woman. She already has a child, though, a little girl who is wandering around outside. Serena clutches a photograph taken in May at her high school graduation. She found it in her boyfriend’s car. It’s the only photo she has left of her mom.

Christina Bane’s ashes are now in an urn in the apartment where Serena is staying. “At night my daughter, she’ll go and she’ll kiss the urn and she’ll be like, ‘Night-night,’” Serena says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell her. I never thought I’d have to do any of this. I’m eighteen. I never thought my parents would die when I’m eighteen. They were so young.”

In honor of their mother’s birthday, Serena and Laura had planned to barbecue today on the dried-out lawn of their parents’ house, but the stench is still too great.

“My dad was right there next to the sink,” Laura says, unaware that I saw his body there one month before. I try to tell her, but I don’t think she understands. “The coroner did tell me that the refrigerator was in the middle of the living room floor, like right below the fan. And they had prints—like, feet prints—right inside the refrigerator, like they tried to get up to the attic. But the water was above the attic. So even if they did get into the attic, they wouldn’t have survived.”

For a moment I’m reminded of searching my brother’s apartment after his death. I was looking for clues that might explain what happened. I was hoping to reconstruct events, build a time line. In the end it wasn’t possible.

“I do try to imagine how it went, like step by step,” Laura says. “I guess the water came in real fast, and they probably just panicked. My mom, she was the only one who knew how to swim. I think she could’ve saved herself but she didn’t because she wasn’t going to be able to save my brothers and my dad. So she just went with them.”

“She’d been married to my dad for twenty-five years,” Serena says softly. “There was no way she