balancing a plate on one hand with a pot lid on top of it. “Take your aunt her dinner,” she said.
I was so used to the sump pump that it was more likely to wake me when it went off than when it came on. It was off when my mother woke me that Saturday night. At first I thought it was Sunday morning and she was waking me for church, so I made a noise, a groan and a whine combined. I’d grown four inches in less than a year between my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, and my legs hurt all the time. The doctor said they were just growing pains. My mother said if I shaved my legs before I turned sixteen I’d be cleaning the bathroom on Saturday for the rest of my life. We only had one bathroom but I wasn’t taking any chances. The hair on my legs wasn’t that dark anyway, not like LaRhonda’s. She had a pink electric shaver she’d gotten for Christmas.
“Up,” my mother said, pulling on my arm, hard. “Get your waders on.” I couldn’t really figure what was going on, so I stood up and started to arrange the flowered coverlet on my twin bed, but she shook her head. “Now,” she said.
My mother had two rules: no leaving your room without making your bed, and no leaving your room unless you were dressed. She and Tommy were always fighting about what amounted to making a bed, and what amounted to being dressed. I was leaving my room in my pajamas, my bed all tumbled, so I knew something bad was happening. I couldn’t smell smoke and I couldn’t hear the sump pump and I knew that if something had happened to Tommy even my mother would be emotional. All I could hear was the sound of rain. It sounded like a truck was dumping a load of gravel on the roof. It had been raining hard for two days, but nothing like this.
The front door was open, and just outside it was one of the volunteer firemen in a black slicker. There were a couple of inches of water in our front hallway, so that the runner looked like it was going to float up and down like the magic carpet in the cartoons.
“Hurry up,” my mother said, handing me my waders. And to the fireman, “My sister’s back in the house up the drive.”
“She won’t budge, Mrs. Miller!” he yelled over the sound of water. “She’s up in the attic, and when I stuck my head up those stairs she let out a scream. I tried to calm her down but she says she’s not leaving.”
“Let me go up there,” my father said. “She’ll listen to me.”
“No you don’t,” my mother said. “No you don’t. If she wants to behave this way she can drown.” I started to sniffle, but my father heard me and put his hand on my head. “Your mother’s just blowing smoke,” he said. The water was lapping at the steps.
“Let me try,” I said.
“We got to get going,” said the firefighter.
“I need my slicker,” I said. My mother took it from the hook and put it on me carefully, the way she had sometimes when I was heading to the bus, going to kindergarten. She bent and zipped it up the way she had then, too.
“Go ahead,” she said, she and my father standing halfway up the hall steps. I ran back and threw my arms around my father’s legs the way I used to when I was a little girl, buried my head in the slippery fabric of his work shirt.
“Don’t drown,” I muttered.
“Don’t be silly,” my mother said.
“Not a chance, chicken,” my father added.
“It’s not safe to stay here,” the firefighter shouted over the sound of the rain. He had a good-size aluminum boat, but it still looked flimsy to me.
“We’re fine,” my mother said as I climbed in, and my father waved. He had his arm around my mother’s shoulders. They looked like one of those Norman Rockwell pictures that someone had hung up on the bulletin board of the home ec classroom at the high school.
“Just give me a chance to talk to my aunt,” I said as we rowed off into the darkness. “She’ll listen to me.”
But she wouldn’t. Her house wasn’t as bad as ours, anyhow. Except for the runoff from my waders her little living room was dry. It was a one-story house, and the ladder