While I eat, I stand by the back door, somehow still exhausted even though I've just slept four hours. The computer on my desk is open, the volume turned as high as it can go. I'm not expecting to hear from Kyle until sometime this evening, but I don't want to miss him just in case he signs on early.
And it's a good thing I have the foresight to do this, for not five minutes after I've finished my sandwich and am curled up back on the couch the ding comes. With my blanket wrapped tight around me, I practically leap to the desk chair.
Hi baby, his message says in a pop-up window in the middle of the screen. How are you? How’s the storm?
I'm good, I type back, fingers still weak from my nap. Still at work?
You know it. On my lunch break now. Don't have too much time but just wanted to check in and make sure everything was alright. How's the storm?
Not too bad. A lot of rain, but that's to be expected. Nothing out of the ordinary. No trees have fallen yet thankfully.
His reply to my message takes a full minute to arrive. As I wait, fingers poised, I can see him typing and re-typing the words I know he is going to say next.
Are you sure you shouldn't get out of there?, finally comes the response I’ve been expecting. I know you said you'd be fine but the weatherman is predicting even more rain than before. I'd rather you be safe than sorry.
Now it’s my turn to hesitate. I write one message, erase it, write another, and then erase it again. Finally I type:
I know you’re worried, love, but I promise you I'll be fine. I've been through this before. It's not bad, just rainy. Really.
...okay..., comes his response immediately. I can hear his sigh through the computer.
Anyways, I type. How is work? The job keeping you busy?
Extremely. It's looking like it might take longer than we thought. Might have to come back tomorrow to finish it. Unless the boss says he wants it done tonight.
Yuck, I respond.
Yuck, indeed. Anyways, gotta get back to it. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I should be on around the normal time tonight assuming I don’t stay. Stay safe, okay baby? Don't go outside, not unless you have to. Do a puzzle or something.
No way. I hate puzzles. But I promise I won’t to outside. You stay safe too.
HA! Says the one with a hurricane hanging over her head.
No, but you're cute enough that I worry someone might kidnap you. I would
Are you trying to make me blush? The guys already tease me enough.
Aww, they're just jealous.
Anyways, I type, I'll let you go. Don't worry about me. This is hardly a hurricane at all. The boredom is going to b the worst part. Only so many hours you can watch television or read. Just finish up your work as fast as you can and I'll talk to you tonight.
Can’t wait. Watch some TV for me. Can’t wait til we can veg side by side.
Me too.
And then he's gone and once again it’s just me alone in my trailer. Six hours. That was all that needed to pass before we would talk again. God, that seemed like a lifetime! How had I passed time before Kyle? Maybe I would do a puzzle after all. If Mom hadn’t donated them during one of her cleaning—
BOOOOOOOMMM!!!
A crash just outside the trailer makes me jump up from my seat, my heart nearly leaping out of my chest as fear shoots through me. Realizing what has happened, I run over to the back door and wrench it open, the vicious wind almost bowling me backwards over as it sweeps into the house.
"Oh no...”
A tree has fallen, but not just any tree. It’s the biggest one in the backyard that’s gone down, a stately oak with a trunk three feet across. It's sprawled out across the back lawn, stretching from one end to the other, its topmost branches tickling the side of the trailer.
I stand there a moment, my mouth hanging open in disbelief. A hundred-year-old tree. That’s a hundred-year-old tree, I tell myself. It’s trunk is scarred with more decades of inclement weather than I will ever know, including the cuts of every hurricane.
Seeing it lying there, its huge system of roots wrenched up from the ground, its shattered branches scattered across the yard like the severed limbs of an insect, for the first time I am gripped by real worry. A mere three feet to the right and it would have landed directly on top of the house. And thank God it hadn't been the tree next to the trailer that fell. You might be dead right now.
Shuddering at the thought, I turn and go back inside. The wind has picked up so much that I have to throw my weight against the door to close it.
Maybe Kyle was right, I think as I stumble over to the couch and collapse down onto it. Maybe staying wasn’t such a good idea after all.
4.
Kyle
Holy hell, I hate this job.
Such is the thought that goes through my mind when, giving the wrench in my hand a twist, the cap pops off the end of the pipe I'm positioned before and brown, foul-smelling, water shoots out all over me. Within seconds, I'm drenched from the waist down. Another minute and the ditch I'm standing in is knee-deep in water, the water's smell a cross between old gym socks and microwaved cow dung.
"Dammit," I grumble as I struggle with the slippery cap, working to get it back on the end of the pipe. But it's no use, not with the amount of water flowing out. "Who in the hell forgot to shut the water off?"
The men standing on the lip of the ditch above me, all three wearing the same grin, look away pointedly as I glare up at them.
"Uhh..."
“It wasn't..."
"Well, you see, I was..."
"Never mind," I growl as I toss my wrench up blindly to the men. My clothes weighing a thousand pounds apiece, I wearily drag myself up and out of the ditch and onto the dirt shoulder of the four-lane roadway we’ve been working to lay pipe alongside of for the last two days. “I’ll do it myself since you nincompoops can't seem to do anything right."
“Nincompoops?” my second-in-command, Tim, echoes. “Who talks like that? Nincompoops. Sheesh. What is this, the 1930s?”
Paying him no mind, because I know all he wants is to rile me up further, I squish my way over to the last section of pipe we laid and twist a nozzle sticking out of its side. Immediately, the water rushing out of the uncapped pipe end slows to a trickle.
"Aww, boss, don't be mad," one of my other workers, Mike, drawls. He has a wad of chewing tobacco stuck inside his lower lip, the hairs of his beard all around his mouth sticky with the runoff.
"We all talked about it and agreed you needed a shower. I didn't want to say anything, but you smelled terrible when you came in this morning," Tim says, chuckling and ribbing Aaron, the newest in the crew.
"Hilarious," I grumble as I stomp back over to where the three men are standing. Hands on hips, I look down into the man-deep ditch half-filled with water. "But looks like we're going to have to drain the ditch before we can continue. I'm going to leave that up to you three stooges while I go change. Think you can handle it, nincompoops?"
"Yes, sir!” the three men, not one of them more than a year younger than me, chant in unison.
Without another word, I turn and walk the hundred yards down the road to where my truck is parked. The sun is high overhead, the sky clear, the air hot and heavy upon my shoulders. Not even a whisper of a breeze is blowing. All around me are the wide-open plains of northeast Texas. Downtown Dallas is just visible on the horizon.