It was Frank.
“The city found forty-one homes with water damage. Seven uninhabitable for now. Willow Court’s ground-floor storage is a mess. Harbor Point lost equipment and some unfinished interiors. Nobody from the evacuation area is reported missing.”
Lena stepped into the hallway to listen.
“Any injuries?”
“A few minor ones. One firefighter hurt a knee. They think everybody will be okay.”
She closed her eyes.
Nobody missing. Everybody accounted for.
It was the kind of sentence that could carry an entire exhausted body through another day.
When she returned to the kitchen, Loretta had stopped eating.
“Bad news?”
“Damage. A lot of it. But people got out.”
Her mother considered this.
“Good,” she said. Then she looked down at her plate. “Miss Jenkins lost all her old letters. Kept them in a box under the bed. Her husband wrote them when he worked on the railroad.”
Lena sat.
“I didn’t know.”
“There are a lot of things about people you don’t know until somebody has to carry them out of a house,” Loretta said.
That night, Lena found Nia in the garage inspecting a stack of used cardboard boxes.
“What are you doing?”
“Grandma wants to get people new storage bins. She says cardboard is no good if you live near water.”
“She’s right.”
Nia looked at her. “You’re thinking about the flood again.”
“I’m thinking about what we missed.”
“You didn’t make the river rise.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t build that new drain.”
“No.”
“Then maybe you could stop talking like every damaged chair in Briar Crossing is yours to fix.”
Lena leaned against the door frame. Her daughter was sometimes unbearably wise for someone who still forgot to put dishes in the sink.
“I know,” she said.
“Do you?”
“I’m trying.”
Nia handed her an empty box.
“Good. Start by helping Grandma pack supplies instead of reading reports for one hour.”
Lena accepted the box.
“One hour?”
“Two,” Nia corrected, with a smile that reminded Lena of herself at sixteen.
They worked in the garage while the rain finally stopped.
A week later, a neighborhood meeting took place in the gym of a church above the river. More than a hundred people came. Some carried photographs of ruined furniture. Some carried envelopes of repair estimates. Some wanted to know why the warning siren had failed. Others wanted to know who had approved the Harbor Point drainage changes.
