Her mother, grandmother, great-grandparents and a visiting cousin laugh at the little girl pretending to scrub the box she used as a dining table just hours earlier.
The moment was one of the few happy times the extended family of seven adults and two children has enjoyed since Hurricane Katrina tore their lives apart on Aug. 29.
"There's no routine," said Brenda Schiro, Brenee's grandmother. "You get up in the morning and fix a bowl of cereal and there's nothing to sit on."
Schiro and her family evacuated St. Bernard Parish, La., on Aug. 28, never imagining an odyssey that would take them to hotels in Monroe, La., Hope, Ark., and Hattiesburg before they moved Friday into a two-bedroom apartment on Bay Street.
"I worked all my life, paid for my house, just remodeled it and then boom," said Claudia Smith, Schiro's mother. "It's hard. There's nothing to do. I don't know what's next."
What would be a comfortable apartment for a couple or for two or three college students is much too small for three families used to their own homes.
"It's miserable," Smith said. "You have to wait to get a bath. When you put all these people together, you're going to fight. We all want to leave, but there's no where to go."
The others are at loose ends - waiting for insurance settlements on their uninhabitable homes, trying to find land where they could live in FEMA trailers, wondering if they should look for work.
Their worldly possessions are few - two vehicles, five air mattresses and bedding, a computer and television Chantel Schiro brought when she evacuated, two $89 TVs bought for the Smiths' bedroom and for Brenda Schiro's, the clothing they crammed into suitcases as Katrina threatened.
"We've got to go get something to sit on to eat," Brenda Schiro said. "We don't have anything but I can't find anything - I'm always digging in the suitcases again."
Claudia Smith worked for 20 years at Church's Fried Chicken in Chalmette, a job she desperately misses. She is pessimistic about the future of the area where she spent her lifetime.
"He's not getting it now because of what's happened," she said. Both she and her husband, who has a pacemaker, are running low on several prescription drugs they take daily.
Brenda Schiro was on medical leave from Kmart after suffering a back injury in a fall from a ladder in March. She, too, has medications that will run out soon.
"We are people who are used to getting up in the morning and going to work," Solis, 50, said. "There's nothing to do. That's why we're so lost. We have no direction to go in."
After a harrowing escape from their flooded home in Chalmette, Solis and her 72-year-old mother wound up in Texas and eventually Hendersonville, Tenn., where Solis' former sister-in-law opened her home to them.
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