Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 78760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 394(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78760 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 394(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 263(@300wpm)
I snorted.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with nice things, anyway,” I informed her none too gently. “Your house would probably catch on fire if you brought home something that wasn’t replaceable.”
She sighed.
“That’s not the point here,” Mom said. “She broke my table. How the hell does a baby break a table?”
I didn’t know the answer to that, so I took Tallulah and secured her into the car.
The moment I had her strapped in, I reached for the blanket that she always demanded she have, and placed it into her lap.
She pressed her face to it and nuzzled it as I closed the door.
The gas pump clicked, signaling it was finished, and my mother hung it up while I grabbed the receipt.
“Do you need any before I go close down the pumps?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“No,” she declined. “Your daddy filled mine up for me when he went out for sand bags.”
I nodded my head. “Was it bad when you left?”
She grimaced. “He had to move the dogs into the house with him because it was getting too bad. Now they’re currently shitting all over my garage and running in it.”
I gagged.
Dad’s duck dogs liked to shit right in front of the cage, and then run in it when they got excited.
While Dad worked them for a few hours a day, Mom would go into their cages and clean them.
Needless to say, she didn’t like their shit. She most certainly didn’t like their shit where she wanted to park her car.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “But the good thing is that you have a garage you can put them in. Just think, it could still be cluttered with all of my shit, and they’d be in the house.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Go lock up so we can leave, girl,” she ordered, giving me that ‘mom’ look.
I jogged back to the door, trying to ignore the way my feet moved through the water that was now up to my ankles, and headed back inside. Once everything was closed up, I switched off the pumps and headed back out, locking the doors behind me and hurrying back to my car.
The moment I reached for my door, Mom pulled out of the parking lot and went in the direction of the hospital.
I pulled out the opposite way, heading back home.
I’d just started to pick up speed when my mom called me.
“I forgot to give you her clothes,” she said the moment I answered the phone.
I groaned.
I’d given Mom my basket of laundry, and she’d washed my clothes while I was at work.
I either needed to stop, or I wouldn’t have any clothes for the next three days, because there was no way in hell we were going out in this again if it was going to continue to pour.
Pulling over, I waited while Mom came back.
The moment she was behind me, I got out and cursed when my feet hit the ground and the water rose to the bottoms of my calves this time.
“Jesus, this town needs to work on getting some better drainage.”
It’d always been bad, but the amount of rain we were getting was something the town of Mooresville had never seen before. In all fairness, how in the hell was the town supposed to prepare for something they never saw coming?
That’s right, they couldn’t, but it still didn’t stop me from cursing the engineers who designed the drainage system for the city.
“Sorry,” I apologized as I took the basket out of the backseat.
She waved me off, and I headed back to my car, throwing the basket in the seat next to Tallulah.
Waving, I opened my door and lifted my leg.
“Ohh!” my mother called right when I was about to drop back into my seat. “Her medicine!”
My belly rolled as I realized what, exactly, I almost forgot.
She couldn’t go anywhere without her medicine. If she did, and she had an asthma attack, she could literally lose her life in a matter of seconds.
I had backups at my house, my parents’ house, in my car, and parents’ vehicles.
Today, though, my mom told me that she’d misplaced her meds, so I’d given her the spares out of my car until she found them, intending to have her prescriptions refilled sometime in between leaving the hospital and going to work.
But I’d gotten distracted by Tommy and wound up going to breakfast with him instead.
And just look at where that almost got me!
“Thank you,” I whispered, once again sloshing through the water.
She waved me off, and I dumped the meds into the basket of clothes that my mother had so helpfully folded for me as well.
Tallulah waved at my mother as she pulled a U-turn in the empty street, and I started off in the direction of home.
My eyes were glued to the street around me, and I was driving so slow I likely looked incompetent.