“Everything is going to be fine,” I repeat.
“Does your truck have gas in it?”
“I don’t know; it’s been a couple days since I drove it.”
“We’ll take it to go get some water and you can fill it up at H-E-B if you need to.”
Hours later we’re back at the house with two vehicles filled with gas, one gallon of water per person per day (which I learned is the math for prepping water for a storm), a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter. We unload everything onto the kitchen island. I look at all of it and then look at her. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.” She shrugs and reaches for the peanut butter pretzels we stocked up on.
“But a storm is coming, and in the three hours we’ve been preparing, it hit category three.”
“Yes, but now there’s nothing left to do but wait to get hit.”
“That’s insane.” She strides over to the couch and plops down. Now she’s as relaxed as I was earlier, and I’m strung up like a live wire.
“That’s just how it is. Get comfortable.”
“We’re supposed to just make dinner, and watch TV like it’s another normal night?”
“Yup,” she pops thep.
I grab the bag of purple Doritos I got for myself—a Wisconsin classic that H-E-B occasionally has—and take a seat next to her on the couch. I go for the remote. “What do you want to watch?”
“Whatever Gordon Ramsey shows we need to catch up on.”
I turn the show on for her, but I don’t really watch it. Worries about the storm just keep running through my mind. Should we have evacuated? Nash packed us a go-bag in case this gets out of control and we have to be rescued or something, but maybe I should have taken the initiative and just packed us up? There are blizzards in Wisconsin, but since the snow is solid, there’s no chance of it flooding your house. This seems a lot more serious between the wind and the rain. I wonder if we’ll be on the ‘dirty’ side or not?I really need to stop googling.
All I know is Nash is the most important thing in the world to me and I would literally fight Mother Nature to keep her safe.
Chapter Sixty
NASH
Coming home to a hurricane isn’t ideal, but it’s been nice to take my mind off where Wyatt and I are and focus on getting us prepared. Hurricane Arthur is quickly approaching the Texas Gulf Coast.
Growing up here, I’ve been through Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Harvey. The former left us without power for two weeks, the latter dumped forty inches of rain over Houston in three days causing record flooding. This ain’t my first rodeo.
If I’ve learned anything in those years, it’s that it’s better to be safe than sorry. So even though people online are saying this isn’t going to be as bad as Ike or Harvey, I still put new batteries in the flashlight and set it next to the ship to shore radio I insisted Wyatt buy.
By the time we’re settling in on the night the storm is supposed to make landfall, I’m exhausted, but I feel like I’ve got everything done. Now we wait and see how the Texas power grid holds up. (HA—what a joke! It’s not going to hold up.)
I start piling extra blankets on the couch. “I think weshould sleep down here. It’s probably safer than being on the top story.”
“Okay, I’ll go get all the pillows from upstairs.”
After we make our hurricane-certified blanket fort in the living room, we settle in to watch more TV. It’s hard not to just watch the weather reports, but I make us take a break from it every now and then. It’s not going to change that much from now until the storm has moved past us anyway.
The anticipation of something bad happening makes the time feel as thick as molasses. The TV plays show after show and we watch and wait.
Around midnight I can hear the start of the wind whistling through the trees. “Do you hear that?” I pause the TV so Wyatt can listen.
“Is that it?”
I nod. “It’s the beginning of the winds hitting us.”
We sit, huddled together, Wyatt’s arms fully wrapped around me, TV paused as we listen to the incoming storm.