The Address She Kept in Her Pocket

For eleven years after Hurricane Katrina swallowed her shotgun house on Pauline Street, Margaret Thibodaux carried a folded scrap of paper in her coat pocket. On it she had written the address — 4712 Pauline Street, New Orleans — as if forgetting the numbers might erase the last proof that home had ever existed. She moved through FEMA trailers, her sister's couch in Baton Rouge, a cramped apartment in Houston where the walls were thin enough to hear strangers weeping.…