On Friday, Andrew and I drove east - not to the Baton Rouge temporary home, but to the New Orleans tentative home - to be with Malcolm for the weekend. The closer we get to being back together, the more we can't stand to be apart.

I-10 was less of a grind. No convoys of Humvees and power company trucks. Now it's wide load trailers being moved, and contractors turtle-ing around in RVs. The volume of automobiles is down, and it makes the ride easier, except for the narrow barricaded lanes around Beaumont where I'm sure someone's going to scrape their car against mine. This is a new phobia I have - that drivers won't stay in their lane, a milder variation on drivers jumping the median and hitting A and me head on. This happened last week with the mother of one of my stepson's best friends. She died. She and her husband had had a fight, she'd left, he'd tried to phone her, she'd reached for her cell and in so doing, left the road. The man in the truck she hit lived.

I have a callous on my left pinkie and it's from gripping the steering wheel. In the grocery store, I've been light-headed, and finding myself all of a sudden listing to the left, in need of a place to sit. Figured out I was forgetting to breathe, like the air's in short supply and I don't want to use more than my share. Or maybe I'm trying for stillness. Note to self: Inhale. Exhale. Plenty of air. Yellow wildflowers have filled the median around Lake Charles, and on this trip I noticed farmland and cows I've been too panicked to see.

Malcolm took permit-hungry Andrew, 15, out driving Saturday through the Lakeview neighborhoods that were destroyed by the levee breech because there's traffic but not too much and no one's in a hurry. There are left and right turns to make after using his blinker and coming to a full stop, and challenges in the road like tree branches, lawn figurines, piles of dried muck. A did well and went for longer than he thought his father was going to last because, I think, these streets demand care, quietude and respect. They are ruins, lined with the homes of Andrew's buddies. Pompeii by the levee. Come March, Andrew would've passed the drivers' license test, and he'd have been pulling into these driveways while he waited for Jake or Blake or Ross or Michael or Andy or Boe to run out, soccer cleats or bookbag in hand, Kanye West on the radio, not too loud, seatbelts fastened?