Emotional Support Dish Towel #2
The lights flickered once, then again, and then failed completely, leaving me in a darkness so total it felt like being submerged.
I waited, heart thudding, for the generator to kick in, but the only sound was the relentless battering of water and hail.
The silence was thick and dangerous. Even the refrigerator fell quiet, the sudden shutoff making the kitchen feel ancient, preserved in the last breath of cold air.
I sat there, paralyzed, clutching the stack of letters as if they might anchor me to the floor.
When I exhaled, I realized I’d been holding my breath.
Panic rose in my throat. I couldn’t stay in this house.
I couldn’t stay in this moment, in this version of myself that was so raw and stripped down, so close to collapse that even a breeze could finish the job.
I made it to the door on reflex, grabbing my keys and my phone, already planning to drive anywhere that wasn’t here—the gas station, Main Street Eats Diner, the edge of the world.
I stepped onto the porch, and the rain battered me instantly, a cold slap that cut through my shirt and jeans in seconds.
The wind swept my hair across my face, stung my cheeks, and I stumbled down the steps into the mud.
Herbie was parked under the lone maple. I yanked open the door, slid into the driver’s seat, and jammed the key into the ignition.
The engine coughed, sputtered, and died.
I tried again. And again. The dashboard flickered, the fuel gauge stubbornly at a quarter tank, the battery light a dull, angry red.
I swore, punched the steering wheel, and closed my eyes.
I didn’t have the right kind of luck for a heroic escape.
I fished my phone from my purse and saw that I had one bar, maybe half.
The screen glowed blue-white against the dark storm, and my thumb hovered over the only number that made sense.
The call failed before it even rang. I tried again, and this time it connected, barely, a tinny, staticky echo of Dawson’s voice on the other end.
“Hello?” His voice was tight.
“Dawson—” I almost said I need you, but the words sounded too infantile, too much a regression. “The power’s out and the truck’s dead. I—”
“Where are—” The call broke, the syllables torn up and rearranged by the weather. “Sadie—storm—safe—"
“I’m at the farm. I—” There was a crack of thunder so loud it swallowed my words. The screen went black. Call failed.
I tried to call back, but it didn’t go through.
I tried again, same result. I attempted a half dozen more times, just in case, but to no avail.
I threw the phone onto the passenger seat and sagged against the window, forehead pressed to cold glass.
Outside, the wind drove debris across the yard in streaks, the maple bent almost to a right angle, and the air was thick with the smell of ozone and wet earth.
For a second, I considered just sitting there, letting the storm run its course, but the growing sense of vulnerability—alone, exposed, powerless—spooked me back inside.
I sprinted through the rain, slipped once in the mud, and barely made it through the front door before the porch light snapped and fell, glass dusting the steps behind me.
I slammed the door and sagged against it, breathless, soaked down to my bones.
My jeans clung to my skin. My teeth chattered as I peeled off my hoodie—well Dawson’s hoodie that he’d let me borrow at the hospital but I’d kept—and shoes, leaving a trail of water across the entryway.
Not wanting to wait out the storm in soaking wet clothes, I wandered upstairs and found a box of old clothes in my childhood bedroom closet.
I changed into a pair of Cupid High sweats and a t-shirt two sizes too big that were actually Dawson’s gym clothes from high school, and grabbed the pillar candles from my dresser and my matches, then shuffled back to the kitchen, phone flashlight strobing shadows across the walls.
I set my pillar candles around the living room and two in the kitchen, lit them, then I looked at the letters, stacked in neat chronological misery, and felt the same ache return—the sense of a life I could have had, if only I’d been braver, or kinder, or less in love with running away.
Yes, I left because of what I saw, but maybe that was also just an excuse to get out.
To leave a town that I felt I disappeared in, that I would never be able to know who I was in.
If I truly had a come-to-Jesus moment with myself, I had to admit that there was a big possibility that’s what I’d done.
Not because I hadn’t loved Dawson, I had, he was the one good thing in this town.
The problem was, at times, he felt like the only good thing in my entire life.
I sat in Buddy’s chair, knees drawn up to my chest, and started reading again.
The words blurred with each flash of lightning.
My eyes watered, but I kept going, as if his confession could somehow burn away regret.
I traced Dawson’s chicken scratch handwriting with my thumb, memorizing the slopes and jagged corners, the places where he pressed too hard or I could see he was concentrating on perfect penmanship, or gave up and scrawled.
I was so mad. Mad at Dawson, but not for him waking up in Vicki Blair’s bed.
I was mad at myself for copping out and using that as a convenient excuse, and Dawson for letting me.
All the time we’d been apart, I’d tried to convince myself that what we’d shared as teenagers wasn’t real, that it was just puppy love or infatuation.
But now, being back here, reading these, spending time with him again, it was real.
We really loved each other. And then one night, a series of unfortunate events and rash decisions on both our parts, seemed to negate that truth.
Time passed in fragments—the storm, the darkness, the letters, the slow feeling of my hair drying in the heatless air.
Every once in a while I would think I heard footsteps on the porch, or the faint metallic click of the mailbox, but every time it was just the wind or the house settling.
I alternated between reading and watching the window, the yard lit up in strobes by distant lightning.
The world outside felt a million miles away.
At some point, the storm reached its crescendo.
The thunder was so close it rattled the mugs hanging on the rack in the kitchen cabinet.
Lightning split a tree in the back field, and I saw it go white-hot and then black in the space of a single heartbeat.
I was happy, then, that I didn’t have animals to tend to.
I worried about all my neighbors, Dawson included, who had horses, cows, chickens, goats, all sorts of living things that would be terrified in this.
The force of the wind made the house hum and vibrate, and for a second I thought it would lift off the foundation and carry me out over the flooded pastures.
Since there was nothing I could do, I tried to lose myself in the letters.
I was halfway through the stack when I saw the headlights sweep the driveway.
First just a flicker, then two sharp beams carving through the deluge.
I blinked, almost certain I was imagining it, but then the engine noise cut through all the storm’s percussion. Someone was here.
The vehicle looked familiar—a hulking, mud-spattered pickup, lights still on, windshield wipers slashing back and forth.
I saw the driver’s side door open and a figure emerge, moving quickly and hunched against the rain.
My body recognized him before my eyes sent the information to my brain.
He hit the porch steps at a dead run, and the motion was all muscle and purpose and inevitability.
Dawson.
I rushed to the door and flung it open. He stood in the entryway dripping onto the mat, shoulders heaving with the effort of the dash from the truck. He was soaked to the skin, hair plastered across his forehead, flannel glistening with rain.
He looked like a man who’d just crawled out of the ocean, every square inch of him drenched, hair dripping onto his heavy brow and rain running off his jaw in fat silver rivulets.
For a moment, he just stood there, towering and heaving, his silhouette nearly filling the door frame.
The sight of him—so raw and elemental—was almost cinematic.
It would have been funny if I didn’t feel like I might break down all over again.
He toed off his boots, leaving them by the door, and glanced at me like he wasn’t quite sure he should be here. The wind slammed the porch behind him, rattling the metal frame of the screen. I realized we hadn’t said a single word.
“Where’s Millie?” I asked as I stepped inside and he followed suit.
He grinned. “You’re stranded here, and you’re worried about the cat?”
“It’s storming.”
“She’s with my mom. She needs to be bottle fed every two to three hours and you know my mom’s all over baby duty.”
“What about the rest of the animals?”
His grin widened, seemingly amused at my concern. “It’s all hands on deck. Everyone is safe and accounted for.”
“How did you know where I was?” My voice was too thin, brittle.