“Let’s go to your bedroom first,” Mia suggested. “If your clothes are hung up, I bet they’re just fine. I’ll load them in the SUV. If they’re wet, then we can put them in garbage bags and start laundry when we get home.”
Glad that Mia had the foresight to think about where to start, Stevie just nodded and headed down the short hallway to her room. The bedspread had soaked up water from the floor and was wet all the way to the mattress. She opened the bottom dresser drawer to find wet pajama bottoms that already had black mold on them. When she pulled the next one up open, everything was fine in it.
Mia threw open the closet doors and squealed. “The boxes on the floor are soaked, but your shoes and boots up on the shelf are good and so are your clothes. I’m going to take them to the SUV on the hangers.”
Stevie went back to the kitchen and got a plastic garbage bag to use for all the things in her dresser drawers. Her suitcases were stored on the floor of her closet, so they would be ruined.
“The pipes under the sink burst,” Cody yelled from the bathroom, “and the supply line to the toilet.”
“The ones under the kitchen sink did the same,” Jesse called out.
Stevie stopped in the hallway and stared at a picture of her and her mother hanging on the wall. “Oh, Mama, what do I do?”
Cody came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I’ll go to the grocery store and get some cardboard boxes to pack up all these pictures in. Even though everything on the floor is probably ruined, you’ll have some keepsakes left.”
Stevie turned around and laid her head on Cody’s shoulders. “That’s the most important things, right?”
“Yes, they are,” Mia said as she passed them with a load of clothing in her arms. “All this other stuff can be replaced, but pictures and memories can’t.” She didn’t stop but kept moving toward the open door. Every footstep made a sucking noise when she picked up her feet from the drenched carpet.
“My advice is that you shouldn’t move anything but Stevie’s personal things out today,” Jesse suggested. “The insurance adjustor should see things as they are. You can come back after he’s been here to take down pictures and think about the stuff in the kitchen cabinets, and such.”
Stevie wanted to argue with him, but common sense said he was right. By Monday, maybe things would be dried out enough that she could make better decisions about the rest of her things. “Okay,” she agreed, “I’m sorry you’ve brought so many vehicles. My clothing can probably all be loaded into the SUV. What about the rest of my vet stuff in the garage?”
“I checked out there,” Jesse said. “It’s backed up to the kitchen so the water from the pipes seeped through the wall, and whatever is on the floor is wet. The water didn’t get up into the car or on the shelves where you keep supplies. Maybe you could just take what you have to have, like any medicines or that kind of thing.”
“Want me to go out and start your mother’s car for you?” Cody asked.
“Yes, please,” Stevie said. “Keys are on the rack by the garage door. If it starts, I’ll drive it out to the ranch.”
She turned around and went to her room again, and started tossing all the dry things from her dresser and chest of drawers into one of the big garbage bags. “I’m a lucky woman to even have a place to go,” she muttered, “so why…”
“Because this is your home,” Mia said as she breezed into the room. “I’d be sad if this happened to the ranch house. It would even upset me if it happened to the bunkhouse or the empty place sitting over on the other property that Poppa owns.”
“What other place?” Stevie asked.
“When my grandparents, Mama’s parents, sold their ranch and moved out to the Panhandle, they sold their ranch to Poppa. It’s got a house on it that hasn’t been lived in in a long time,” Mia explained.
Stevie made a mental note to herself to ask Sonny if he would rent that house if she had to tear down her family home. Then she said, “Your dad and Cody think it would be best if we just take my personal things until after the insurance adjuster looks at the place.”
“I don’t know anything about all that stuff,” Mia said, “but if Daddy says that’s the smart thing to do, I’d trust him.”
Cody appeared at the door with a grin on his face. “The car started right up. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad?” she asked.
“Whatever was on the floor of the garage will probably have to be thrown away.” The smile faded. “I hope it wasn’t anything super important.”
“Probably Christmas decorations.” A wave of sadness swept over Stevie. She wished that she had put up a tree this past holiday. Maybe some of what was in the boxes would have been saved if they’d been on the tree instead of packed away.
“If we all take a load, we should be able to get the rest of this pretty quick,” Mia said.
Cody and Jesse went to the closet, and each gathered up an armload of clothing. Mia reached up and took down as many shoe boxes as she could carry. Stevie threw the garbage bag full of things over her shoulder and took them out to her mother’s car. Once she had put it in the back seat, she crawled in beside the bag and just sat there.
In a few minutes, Cody got in beside her, draped an arm around her, and pulled her closer to him. “I promise all our dates won’t end like this one.”
“If the second one does, there won’t be a third,” she said.
It’s time to move on and make a fresh start. You’ve been looking for closure, and here it is, the voice in her head said. The boxes that she had kept all her journals and keepsakes in were soaked, and everything was completely ruined.
Back at the bunkhouse, she sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the closed closet door. Cody had moved everything he owned out to the storage room in the main part of the house. Jesse had found a spare chest of drawers in storage and put it in there for Cody’s personal things. Next week, they would rescue the rest of what was salvageable from the house and store it in the barn.
But right then, the entire impact of losing her home hit her.
“It would have been better if a tornado had simply taken it all in one fell swoop instead of having to face the destruction a flood can do to a house,” she muttered.
Cody crossed the room and sat down beside her. “The insurance adjustor will be there tomorrow, and we can go back through the place again, once everything is dried out, and see if there’s anything else worth saving. At least your mother’s car started up, and you’ve got something to drive until Monday when the guy comes to fix your van.”
“And we can save my vet supplies that are on shelves in the garage.” She tried to hang on to a few positive ideas. “A lot of the things I use often are stashed in the van, so that’s a good thing. I’ve got a roof over my head, friends who care about me, my clothing was all undamaged except for one drawer full of pajamas. My mother’s voice popped into my head and told me that it was all just stuff. So why do I feel like I just fell into a black hole?”
“In the past few months, you’ve started a private vet practice. You’ve lost your last parent. You’ve been stranded in a winter storm with a baby alpaca and your archenemy. Now your house might not be worth saving,” Cody answered. “That’s enough to put a person without your strength over the edge.”