It was his father, Harold.
I could hear him through the phone from the other side of the bed. Harold is seventy-four and slightly deaf in one ear, so he talks to everybody like they’re standing across a parking lot.
“Tommy! The pipe! The pipe in the upstairs bathroom! It’s coming through the ceiling! Your mother’s standing in the living room with a mixing bowl!”
It had been nine below zero that night. A copper pipe in the wall of their upstairs bathroom froze and split, sometime around two in the morning. By the time Eleanor woke up and heard what she thought was rain, water had been pouring into their old farmhouse in Ballston Spa for three hours.
Thomas was out of bed and into his jeans in about forty seconds. I was right behind him.
When we got there, it was worse than I imagined.
The living room ceiling had come down in big wet chunks on top of the couch. The hardwood floors were already buckling. The water had run down inside the walls, into the kitchen, and down into the basement, where it had shorted out the furnace and soaked thirty-eight years of family photo albums.
Eleanor was standing in her bathrobe in the middle of the kitchen, holding a mixing bowl under a stream of water coming out of a light fixture. She wasn’t crying. Eleanor doesn’t cry in front of people. She was just standing there, holding the bowl, with a strange calm look on her face.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said.
Thomas took the bowl out of her hands. He put his arms around her.
“You’re coming home with us, Mom,” he said. “Both of you. Today.”
Eleanor looked over his shoulder at me.
“Claire, dear. Are you sure? We couldn’t possibly impose.”
“You’re not imposing,” I said. “It’s a few weeks. We’ll make it work.”
A few weeks.
I want you to remember I said that.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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