GPS Read Free Page B

New Orleans and his connections to its Triple-A club, the Zephyrs, which had affiliations with those three clubs during those years. If what he’d heard at spring training was true, he’d face the challenge again next season when the Zephyrs were apparently set to align with the Florida Marlins. Yuk.
    As was the case for millions of others along the Gulf Coast, the autumn of 2005 became a major milepost in Jeff’s life. Not because of any physical devastation, however, but because everything around him was changing and he wasn’t, at least not for the better. Instead of the annual January Dominican trip he’d twice dragged Riley on — kicking and screaming on the first one and then talking vacation home possibilities after the second — Jeff and his wife spent all but one of the post-Katrina months doing anything and everything they could to volunteer in the hardest-hit parts of their town. They lived mostly off her award-winning columns in the Times-Picayune.
    Strangely, in the days before the storm made landfall the paper had granted her a month off on the simple promise she would be back in early October to spend the next year, or longer, trying to explain to the rest of the world what was happening. Perhaps the Pic was already sensing most of the substance of her work thereafter would be extracted from the desolate streets in which she and Jeff ended up toiling almost every day until spring. And for those months it was, at least the months after the couple’s September escape from their devastated hometown.
    Strange, Jeff always thought, that a Times-Picayune journalist would be leaving New Orleans in the days before Katrina with no plans to return for a month, but who was he to judge? He was going with her, as the Zephyrs had evacuated to Oklahoma City on Aug. 26, three days before the storm made landfall. When they got back, Jeff and Riley also managed to make time to move from their pre-marriage apartment into a house. Another odd Katrina irony, Jeff now thought.
    As the storm approached, Riley’s parents had hatched their own cut-and-run plan, offering to their daughter the house on Carondelet Street they’d moved into after getting married in 1972, with an understanding they didn’t care to return except for visits to her. About the same time, Jeff and his wife got the hell out of Dodge too. They cashed in some of Jeff’s vault of frequent-flier miles and headed west to Arizona.
    Jeff’s tenet of, “I’m not flying anywhere I’m not being paid to go,” of course, had to finally give way. That had been Jeff’s line for years, and his distaste for flying eventually led to this whole driving-everywhere idea that Riley had sprung on him. The couple’s pre-Katrina flight to Phoenix — where Riley spent the month evaluating her life and crying over what she called her lost hometown and Jeff spent the month evaluating the many different flavors and intensities of whiskey — was the first and only pleasure flight the couple ever made other than the two Dominican trips, and it fell well short of its billing.
    In the months after their return, it was double-duty — hauling, dragging, sorting and sweating, and late-night writing for Riley. Both of them burned the candle at both ends right into Jeff’s next baseball season. But the couple rejoiced in the fact it had managed to live all but that first month of its post-hurricane life in the Carondelet Street house, the one which Riley’s parents fled when they “finally got out of that poor, heartbroken old town.”
    “ In two, hundred, feet, turn right.”
    Jeff was amazed when the GPS woman had methodically chirped out exact directions to that familiar Carondelet Street address. He steered street by street from his crappy new, yet very old, place on Esplanade Avenue on the northeast end of the Quarter to the place where he’d spent the last two and a half years of his life and his marriage — mostly happy, he thought.
    His old address was one he