He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Hurricane Watch

They took my father in at midnight on the arson charge.

He went in the back of the deputy's car in his wet undershirt, with his cap in his lap and his head turned to the window, and he did not look at me.

I stood on the shell lot in the blue light and watched the taillights go.

"Do you want to go to him?" Cal said.

"No," I said.

"Do you want to go to your mother?"

"Yes," I said.

He drove me.

My mother was awake in the front bedroom with the phone beside her on the quilt, and the cord stretched to the limit of its reach.

"I crawled," she said, when I came in. "I got the receiver down by the cord. I've not done that in a year."

"Mama."

"I'd have crawled further." Her chin shook. "I told that sheriff to come in his own car."

I knelt by the bed and laid my head on her blanket, and she put her hand on my hair.

Cal stood in the doorway.

My mother's eyes found him over my head.

"Mr. Reese," she said. "Thank you for driving her."

"Mrs. Guidry," Cal said.

"She'll stay with me tonight," my mother said.

"Of course," he said.

"You'll come for her in the morning."

"If she asks me to," he said.

My mother studied him with her grey eyes.

"That's a good answer," she said.

I stayed in my own bed under the eaves.

At six the next morning my phone buzzed with a text from the county.

Then another, from a weather app I had installed in 2017 and never opened.

NHC advisory: Tropical Storm Warning, northern Gulf. Potential for rapid intensification. Landfall window Saturday, 72 hours.

I lay with the screen lighting my face and read it twice.

Then I got up and made coffee.

I boarded the house by myself that morning, because the man who usually did it was in the county jail.

I found the plywood in the shed where it had always been, numbered in marker in my own handwriting from the last scare.

I cut the sheets and carried them to the front windows and screwed them over the glass.

Cal found me on the ladder at noon.

He climbed out of the SUV in jeans and a work shirt with a toolbox in one hand.

"I called a crew," he said. "They'll be here at two to do the dock."

"I've nearly finished the house."

"I see that." He looked at the neat rows of screws. "You'd better show me what to do on the other side."

We worked until the light turned.

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