never just one thing. Too much sun on the water by itself can't cause a storm. Storms are equations, and the math of wind and water and luck has to be just right for it to grow.
This storm, young and fragile, runs the risk of being killed by a capricious shift in winds coming off the pole, or a high-pressure front pushing through from east to west. Like all babies, this storm's nothing but potential and soft underbelly, and it will take almost nothing to rip it apart. Even as attuned as I am, I don't really notice. It's nothing, yet.
But the weather keeps cooking up rising temperatures and the winds stay stable, and the clouds grow thick and heavy. The constant friction of drops churning in the clouds creates energy, and energy creates heat. The storm gets fed from above, by the sun, and from below, by blood-warm water, and a generator starts turning over somewhere in the middle, hidden in the mist. With the right conditions, a storm system can sustain itself for days, living off its own combustion, an engine of friction and mass.
It's just a few days old, at this point. It won't live more than a few weeks, but it can either go out with a whimper, or with a bang.
This one can go either way.
It moves in a wide, slow sweep over the water. A wall of white cloud, drifting gray veils. No rain makes it to the ocean below; the engine sucks it back up, recycling and growing.
As the moisture condenses inside the clouds, conditions get strange. Intense energy sends water into jittering frenzies, producing even more power. The clouds darken as they grow denser. As they crawl across open water they are getting fatter, spreading, spawning, and that engine at the heart of the storm stores up power for leaner times.
And still, it's really nothing. A summer squall. An annoyance.
But now it's starting to know that it's alive.
TWO
By the time we broke up the Great Mall Trek of 2004 for lunch, Sarah, Cherise, and I had enough shopping bags to outfit an Everest expedition, if the climbers were planning to look really, really adorable and hang out extensively at the beach.
Sarah had always been a natural-born clotheshorse. Not as curvy as me, and with the kind of perfect angular proportions that sparked envy and were held up as examples by plastic surgeons to keep them in the lipo and sculpting business.
Life with the French Kiss-Off (as I decided to title Chretien) hadn't ruined her, except that she had some lines around her eyes, a good haircut gone bad, ugly shoes, and a generally sour attitude about men. A nice toning lotion took care of the lines. Toni & Guy bravely addressed the hair issues. Prada was very willing to practice some accessory therapy. I didn't think anything could possibly help her with the attitude, except massive applications of chocolate, which with her figure she wouldn't accept. After half a day of it, I was ready to send Sarah to the Bitter Ex-wives Club for an extra session of getting in touch with her whiny inner bitch.
"He was a lousy lover," she declared, as she was trying on shoes. She had perfect feet, too. Long, narrow, elegant-the kind of feet men liked to think about rubbing. Even the salesman, who surely must have had his fill of stinky, sweaty toes, was looking tempted as he held her by the heel and slipped her into a strappy little pointy-toed number. Personal service. It only happened at the best stores these days, but then, he was trying to sell her shoes worth more than your average television set.
"Who?" Cherise asked, inspecting a pair of kitten-heeled pumps. She must have missed the entire ongoing monologue about the flaws of Chretien. I stared gloomily at the ruby red pair of sandals I'd been saving up for, which were likely to go out of style and come back again three generations from now before I could actually afford them again, at the rate Sarah was shopping.
Not that I hadn't asked for it. And it was in a good cause. But I really needed to introduce her to the concept of outlet malls.
"The ex, of course," Sarah replied, and tilted her foot to one side to admire the effect of the shoe. It was, I had to admit, very nice. "He had this