"Leaving for Kenosha"

"Leaving for Kenosha"
by Richard Ford

Rating: 7.5



Short story, set in New Orleans on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in which a father takes his teen-age daughter to the Lower Ninth Ward to say goodbye to a classmate who is moving to Wisconsin. It was the anniversary of the disaster.

And for an instant, then, Walter experienced a sensation of something being about to happen around him. It wasn’t clear what. But a sensation of impendment. Neither good nor bad. Though it also occurred to him that if he could just pause in his thinking now, not follow his thoughts any further, just breathe, then this sensation would in all likelihood develop into nothing bad. So that he went on with driving back toward the center of the city, rising in the steamy distance of the late afternoon. He would make no more efforts to answer Louise’s childish questions about Italy and China. No words were really the right words to answer with. In a day he’d forget all this. This was a smart child—Louise—but not smart beyond her years. She would forget many things, too. ♦