CHAPTER 12
I didn’t know it had happened until I looked across the bed at my feet and thought a bath would be nice on a cold night like this. Then I remembered that I’d turned it on already. The roar of the water had just become background noise, like the whipping winter wind. I ran into the bathroom, slipping and splashing on the checkered tile, the water flowing over the edges of the tub. You think you will hear it if a bath overflows. You think that you’d know. It just all sounds the same until it’s too late. Hattie yelled up that there was water coming through the dining-room light, and we put out a bucket to catch it until it stopped.
I look back on that moment and see now that this is what we spent our lives doing: trying to contain the flood.
I was back in the fold, home to the
