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A group of men sat around a TV, watching the weather channel with the sound off, swapping hurricane stories in raucous voices. A dark, wizened man told about growing up in Miami and being sent out to pick avocados off the trees in the yard prior to the storm so the wind couldn’t hurl them through the windows. A man with a white beard relayed that, up in Georgia, Hurricane Floyd had ripped all the green pecans off his trees and flung them into his bathroom. Sixteen wheel-barrows worth.

One fellow, who was drinking a Bloody Mary and appeared to be pregnant, told about how a few years ago, here on Alligator Point, during Hurricane George he’d passed out on his sofa, dead to the world, after a hurricane party like this one, his arm dangling down off the side. In the middle of the night he’d woken up with his hand underwater. He’d managed to get out of the house and tried to drive away from Alligator Point but had ended up wrecking his brand-new El Camino in front of the campground and abandoning it. “Time I got back there, couple days later, somebody’d stripped my car bare, made a skeeter out of it.” He cackled, and his listeners roared appreciatively.

Okay, maybe Vic had been too judgmental. Another way to view this situation was that these people were relaxed, and they’d been through more storms than Vic had, so what the hell? Why not join them? Ava and Travis had disappeared, so he went by himself into the kitchen, where two matrons in wrap skirts were unloading plastic bags of frozen food, stuff they’d removed from their own freezers and brought to the party so it could get eaten up before the power went out. He helped himself to one of the charred steaks that had been grilled in the garage, speared a baked potato, and scooped up some coleslaw, plopping it all on a plastic plate, and grabbed a beer. He sat down on the living room couch to eat.

Gigi nestled beside him, swigging a fresh beer. She wore a black-and-white striped tank top and white flouncy skirt, freckles dusting her nose, her mane of hair pulled back in an appealingly messy ponytail. Gigi herself was an appealing mess. Had he thought that his attraction to her would simply disappear? He found himself wanting to confide in her, to talk to her about the whole Buff thing, tell her how angry and disgusted and sick about it he was but also wanting to make clear that he wasn’t mad at her, only her brother; and he wanted to tell her he’d decided not to tell his boss about her cheating, but people kept coming up and interrupting them, asking Gigi to introduce him.

The people also kept bringing him beers and he kept drinking them. At one point he escaped to use the bathroom, and on his way back out Gigi’s mother caught him. “Vic, so good to meet you,” said Maude Coffey, a tanned woman in a raspberry-colored sundress and a streaky helmet of hair. She could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five. “Gigi’s told us so much about you.”

Vic mumbled something and glanced around the room for Gigi, but he couldn’t see her anywhere in the mix of tropically arrayed, blissfully oblivious guests.

The wind raged and rain pelted sideways against the house, now accompanied by a bass line of thunder, making it hard to hear Maude, who spoke in a quiet, hoarse voice. “He’s got a court date coming up in two weeks. Matt Sandy’s defending him, but I’m worried.”

It took Vic a while to figure out that he was Buff, her son. Why was she telling this to Vic, of all people? “Matt Sandy,” Vic said. “He gets all the drug dealers off.”

“The therapists call it ‘sexual addiction.’ He’s been in treatment twice, but so far it just hasn’t taken. Guess we haven’t found the right program.” Blinking back tears, she grabbed hold of Vic’s arm. “He’s not a bad person. He truly isn’t.”

Vic took a deep breath. “You might’ve warned the members of his congregation,” he said in what he hoped was a reasonable tone. “How come he’s not on some registered sex offender list? We like to keep track of those in our neighborhood.”

Maude fixed