“So I hear.”
“We were discussing…” Maggie looked at Jo, unable to recall one word of the conversation.
“Barbra Streisand,” Jo supplied.
“Oh, yes!” It all came back to her now. “And Crystal Blue Persuasion.”
“We got that on the jukebox,” Brick said. “Will you dance to it?”
Maggie turned to Jo. “I’ll dance with you to it.”
“In honor of our cat,” Jo Ellen told Brick with indescribable seriousness.
Then they both laughed.
Brick’s grin had reached its full wattage. He offered an arm to each of them, gallant as a man at a debutante ball, as if escorting two giggling, stoned grandmothers across a blacked-out roadhouse was the precise thing he had been put on the earth to do.
“Come on, then. Let’s get you back to the party before you miss it.”
Maggie took the offered arm.
She was warm, and she was loose, and her oldest friend was laughing on her other side, and a good man was steering them through the dark, and a hurricane was breaking itself against the roof but would not get in. The generator would catch in five minutes. The lights would come up. The music would start again.
“Brick?” Jo Ellen asked on a breathy whisper.
“Yes, darlin’?”
“Can you get us some french fries?”
“Of course. You ladies sit right here, and I’ll see that the fryer’s up and runnin’.”
They slid into their chairs, and Maggie propped her head on her hand, not even caring that her elbow was on the table. She just stared at Jo Ellen, and in the dim light and hazy head, all she could see was an eighteen-year-old who became her best friend and sister…and still was, sixty years later.
They had not slept, but they had survived. In fact, Kate decided, they’d had fun…until they just wanted to sleep and couldn’t.
The Rock Hill rental had come through the storm with almost nothing to show for it. A long, loud night, the wind testing every seam of the roof, the lights flickering and holding, and then, sometime past three, the worst of it pulling north and the roar settling down.
During that, Kate had tried to sleep but mostly listened to her daughter not sleeping in the other twin bed, the two of them awake in the dark, occasionally talking but mostly just waiting it out.
Now the window was gray with early light, and Emma’s voice came across the gap between the beds, soft and scratchy with the long night.
“Mom. You awake?”
“I’m awake.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“A little, not much. You?”
“Not really.” Emma rolled onto her side to face her, and the gray light caught the shape of her tangled coppery hair, the quiltpulled to her chin. She could just see her over the nightstand, where the Bible Seamus gave her sat, a little worn at the corners now in a way that Kate had noticed and not remarked on. “That was kind of scary.”
“It was. And it’s over, and we’re fine, and the house is fine.”
“Is the Summer House fine?”
“We don’t know yet,” Kate said, glancing at the phone that had already lit up, as she’d exchanged texts since five with Eli. “We’ll know today.”
Emma was quiet a moment. Outside, a bird Kate could not identify had started up, undeterred, as though nothing at all had happened.
