“Didn’t have time to change,” he said. “Borrow your bedroom?”
Since I’d sort of flung things around when I went from dress and pantyhose to jeans and sneakers, I pointed him to the guest room instead. While he changed, I neatened my bedroom, hung up clothes and straightened all the surfaces. Maidie’s promised to find me someone to do the heavy scrubbing and vacuuming one morning a week, but she hasn’t gotten to it yet.
When Reid came out, I handed him my guitar case and went around locking doors, something he watched with amusement.
“You don’t need to worry about burglars out here in the middle of Knott land, do you?”
“I’m not so worried about burglars as I am about Knotts,” I said lightly.
Half my brothers think nothing of opening an unlocked door and sometimes they’re just a little too curious about my personal business. Seth and Maidie are the only ones I trust with a key, which is why I’m trying to get in the habit of locking up every time I leave. I pulled the side door closed behind us and made sure it was securely latched.
“What happened to your fender?” I asked as I circled the front of Reid’s black BMW.
It had a serious dent just behind the right headlight.
“Damned if I know,” he said. “I found it like that after court yesterday. Two days out of the shop and somebody backs into me. Didn’t even have the courtesy to leave me his name.”
Considering a courthouse parking lot’s clientele, this did not exactly surprise me. What did surprise was that he wasn’t bitching about it louder. Reid’s as car proud as my nephews and with a five-hundred deductible, every little ding comes out of his pocket.
Rain was falling heavily again and my rutted drive had washed out in a couple of places so that we had to go slower than usual to ease over the humps. We didn’t get to Steve’s till almost eight-thirty.
Despite the pounds of barbecue I’d eaten in the last month, that tangy smell of vinegar and smoked pork did make me hungry. We sat down at a long wooden table where Haywood and Isabel were finishing up and we both ordered the usuaclass="underline" pig, cole slaw, spiced apples and hushpuppies. We even split a side order of fried chicken livers. (Yeah, yeah, we’ve both heard all the horror stories of cholesterol and mercury in organ meat, but Miss Ila, Steve’s seventy-year-old cook, knows how to make them crispy on the outside and melt-in-your-mouth-moist on the inside and neither of us can believe something that good can do lasting hurt if you don’t indulge too often.)
Except for Steve, Miss Ila and a dishwasher, we four were the only ones in the place till Andrew’s Ruth and Zach’s Lee and Emma came dripping in from choir practice a few minutes later and ordered a helping of banana pudding with three spoons.
“We just came by to tell y’all we can’t stay,” said Ruth, pushing back her damp hair. “Mom’s worried about the roads flooding.”
“The water was almost hubcap-deep at Pleasants Crossroads,” said Lee, “but that ol’ four-by-four’s better’n a duck. We won’t have any trouble getting home.”
All the usual customers had scattered earlier and it was clear that the rest of our families were staying home, battening down miscellaneous hatches in case we got any of Fran in the next twenty-four hours. Aunt Sister had already called to say that none of her crowd would be coming. When the kids left, Miss Ila and her helper were right in behind them. Steve put the CLOSED sign up, but we didn’t reach for our instruments. Instead, we talked about Fran and what more rain would do to our already-saturated area, amusing each other with worst-case scenarios in half-serious tones, the way you will when you’re fairly confident that any actual disaster will bypass you. Hurricanes do hit our coast with monotonous regularity, but this far inland, we seldom get much fallout beyond some heavy downpours.
Crabtree Valley Mall was built on a flood plain and it does indeed flood every three or four years. (The local TV stations love to film all the new cars bobbing around the sales lots like corks on a fish pond.)
Bottomland crops may drown when the creeks overflow, a few trees go down and mildew is a constant annoyance, but most storms blow out before they reach us.
“Don’t forget Hazel,” said Isabel.
As if.
Hazel slammed through here in the mid-fifties before Reid and I were born, but we’ve been hearing about it every hurricane season since we were old enough to know what a hurricane was. Each year, I have to listen to tales of porches torn off houses, doing without electricity for several days, and about the millions of dollars’ worth of damage it did. Down in the woods, there are still huge trees that blew over then but didn’t die. Now, all along the leaning trunks, limbs have grown up vertically to form trees on their own.
“Hazel knocked that ’un down,” a brother will tell me as he launches into stream-of-consciousness memories of that storm.
“It hit here in the middle of the day while we was still in school,” said Haywood, warming to his tale like the Ancient Mariner.
“Back then, they didn’t close school for every little raindrop nor snowflake neither,” said Isabel, singing backup.
“They should’ve that day though. Remember how the sky got black and the wind come up?”
“And little children were crying?”
“Blew past in a hurry, but even the principal was worried and he called the county superintendent and they turned us out soon as it was past.”
“Trees and light poles down across the road,” said Isabel. “Our school bus had to go way outten the way to get us all home and we younguns had to walk in from the hardtop almost half a mile on that muddy road.”
“Daddy and Mama Sue—”
Haywood was interrupted by a sharp rap on the restaurant’s front door.
We looked over to see a tall dark figure standing in the rain.
Steve signalled that he was closed, but the man rapped again.
The glass was fogged up too much to see exactly who it was. I was nearest the door and as much to end Haywood’s remembrances of Hazel as anything else, I went and opened it to find Ralph Freeman.
He was soaking wet and obviously worried, although he managed one of those bone-warming smiles the instant he recognized me.
“Come on in,” I said. “Steve, Haywood, Reid—y’all know Reverend Freeman, don’t you? Preaches at Balm of Gilead?”
They made welcoming sounds, but Ralph didn’t advance past the entryway.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, dripping on the welcome mat, “but it’s my wife. She was out this way today, visiting Mrs. Grace Thomas, and I was wondering if any of y’all saw her? White Honda Civic? Sister Thomas says my wife left her house a little after twelve and nobody’s seen her since.”
“Grace Thomas,” said Haywood. “She live on that road off Old Forty-eight, right before Jones Chapel?”
“That’s right,” Ralph said, turning to him eagerly. “Did you see her?”
Haywood shook his head. “Naw. Sorry.”
The others were shaking their heads, too.
“I just don’t know where she could be,” said Ralph. “I thought maybe she’d had a flat tire. Or with all this rain, these deep puddles, she might’ve drowned out the engine. But I’ve been up and down almost every road between here and Cotton Grove.”
“I’ll call around,” said Haywood, heading for the phone. “See if any of the family’s seen her car.”
“Did you call the sheriff’s department?” I asked.
“They said she’s not been gone long enough for them to do anything official, but they did say they’d keep an eye out for the car.”
“Highway patrol?” Reid suggested.
“Same thing,” he answered dispiritedly. “And I’ve called all the hospitals.”
“Now don’t you go thinking the worst,” Isabel comforted. “She could’ve slid into a ditch and she’s either waiting for someone to find her or she’s holed up in somebody’s house that doesn’t have a telephone.”