As I turn back to the cashier, I can’t resist throwing down a smug look at the old lady with the cart. She feints like she’s going to ram her cart into me and I back up. Cackling like an evil witch, she pulls back to let Roxanne into the line. As I pay for the groceries, Roxanne helps the old lady load hers onto the belt. Finally, I’m done and I tug on Roxanne’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
Back in the car, I stow the groceries in the trunk and Roxanne gets behind the wheel. Staring straight ahead, she says, “What the hell happened back there?”
“I stood up to a bully.”
“A ninety-something year old bully?”
“A person’s age has nothing to do with their personality flaws.”
“Dana, she weighed eighty pounds soaking wet.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll probably have a bruise on my hip for weeks.”
She’s shaking her head, but I can see the laugh lines at the side of her mouth. Silently, she pulls out of the parking lot and we head back through town and back up the hill.
“Anyway,” I say, rubbing at my hip, “Are you still going to make me cookies?”
She finally laughs. Reaching across the car, she slaps me on the thigh, hard. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“No way. Life’s too short to let old people take advantage of me.”
She laughs softly, and we drive the rest of the way in silence. Thinking about the store, I envision telling the story to Sam. She’ll probably be pissed that she wasn’t there. It would have been an entirely differently situation if she had been. She would have been blocking for me while I slid into the new line. And I never would have gotten the elbow to the back if Sam had been there. Women are different from buddies. Sometimes, you have to be on better behavior with them.
When we get to my house, I note that my sister’s car is already in the driveway.
Roxanne pulls up to the door and Susannah comes running out.
“Hey, I wondered where you were.” She runs over to give me a hug.
“I went down the hill with Roxanne to get groceries.”
“We brought pre-popped popcorn, cut veggies, and several bags of ice in the world’s best cooler.”
Coming around the side of the car, Roxanne raises her eyebrow. “We?”
Susannah manages to look smug and sheepish at the same time. “Thomas came with me.”
“I thought you two were...” Interrupted by Thomas coming out the front door, I make a note to get my sister aside later and find out what’s going on.
Thomas smiles as he approaches the car. “Hey, Dana. Hi Roxanne. Can I help carry in your groceries?”
“Please do,” I say.
We get all of the bags in one trip and then Thomas and I go back out to Susannah’s jeep to move in some water he brought. “You can never have too much.”
Since the storm is coming from the southeast, we move both Roxanne’s car and Susannah’s jeep to the other side of the house, making sure to position them as far away from any hanging tree branches that we can. Thomas looks up at the closest tree. “How sturdy are they?”
“It’s the best we can do.”
Back in the house, Susannah and Roxanne have started mixing cookie batter. Leaning over the bowl Roxanne is stirring gets me a whack on the hand. “What? I was just looking!”
“You were hoping to score some cookie dough and that isn’t going to happen.”
“You’re a hard woman, Roxanne.”
Susannah snaps me with a dish towel. “Shouldn’t you be walking around the house securing the perimeter or something?”
“I did that already? What did you do to secure your place?”
She shrugs. “I put everything I could think of into waterproof containers or Ziplocs and elevated everything off the floor. The sensitive stuff is here.” She gestures toward a pile of her belongings on the floor.
“You had better find a place for all of that,” I cautioned. “Once the storm starts, we’re likely to have water coming in under the sliders, even with the shutters on.”
Thomas walks over. “Where can we put this?”
“Best place will be the spare bedroom on top of the bed or dressers. I moved everything to the center of the room and have all of the potential leakage areas in the windows stopped up, but you can never tell. Best we can do is be as prepared as possible.”
Susannah and Thomas start moving her stuff to the other room. The skies have just opened up and the rain is starting to pound against the roof. It will still be several hours or more until the actual storm gets here. These rain bands will cause a lot of mud on my road, though. I should call Sam and tell her to hurry up. I’m pacing like an expectant father. The storm is projected to be a category two when it hits us, which is not too bad. However, you can never tell if it is going to pick up and if the wind is bad enough, it will take out the power lines and block the roads. Plus, with sideways rain, we’re looking at the possibility of flooding. My hilltop house is perfect to avoid surge and flash flooding, but we won’t be as safe up here from the high winds if the storm becomes really bad. Still, I’ve made a lot of improvements on this house over the past several years and I think it’s pretty hearty in a moderate to severe storm.