Page 47 of No Judgements

“That’s the rule!” Nevaeh smirked. “We don’t have different rules for guests. No cell phones at the table.”

Guiltily, I dropped my phone in my lap and tried to ignore Nevaeh’s and Katie’s giggles... as well as the strange sense of disappointment I felt, realizing it would be a while before I’d be able to check for Drew’s reply.

What did I care, anyway?

Unbidden, a memory of how Drew had looked, gently cradling Gary in his arms, came back to me.

And then an entirely different memory—how he’d looked earlier that day outside my apartment door, shirtless.

Anything else I can do for you, Fresh Water?

Oh my God. Maybe Ididlike him. Maybe I more than liked him. Why else was I so worried about him?

No. No, it wasn’t possible.

But then why else was I shoveling the food Mrs. Hartwell had so lovingly prepared into my mouth so quickly? I hardly tasted it.

And then why else did I excuse myself to go to the bathroom while everyone else was midway through their meal, only so I could check my phone to see what he’d written back to me?

And then why else did I feel such a crushing sense of disappointment in the bathroom when I saw that the text bubbles had disappeared, and that Drew hadn’t written back after all? In fact, I’d received no messages at all, not even from my mother, which was odd, considering she’d been texting me approximately once an hour. All that was written on my screen was...

“No service!” Nevaeh’s voice was a panic-filled shriek.

The wind was gusting more strongly than ever. On the radio—which Ed had insisted on keeping on throughout our meal—Wayne and Fred said their anemometer had broken, torn off by one of the gusts, so they now had no way of measuring how strong the winds were, aside from spitting.

“No service!” Nevaeh cried again dramatically. “I’m going to die!”

“You’re not going to die.” Dinner was over, and Mrs. Hartwell was calmly cutting slices of lemon pudding cake for dessert. “Go and get your bedding from upstairs. You and Katie are sleeping down here in the living room on the pullout couch, remember?”

“What’s the point?” Nevaeh accepted her slice of cake with an air of defeatism. “Without cable, we can’t even watch TV.”

“You can watch DVDs,” Mrs. Hartwell said. “You’ve still never seen the last season of thatSex and the Cityyou like so much.”

Nevaeh brightened. “Oh, yeah. Do you want to watch that with us, Bree?”

I had just taken a bite of the slice of lemon pudding cake. I suppose it tasted good, but I was so worried about Drew, I could have been eating sand and not known the difference.

“I’ve already seen it,” I said. “But after I help your aunt out with the dishes, I could join you guys for a little while, if you want.”

Nevaeh looked at me like I was crazy. “Uncle Ed does the dishes.”

Ed was too absorbed in his radio show to confirm this, but when I glanced at Mrs. Hartwell, she nodded. “On nights when I cook, Ed does the dishes. When he cooks, I do the dishes. That’s how we’ve managed to stay married for so long without killing each other.”

“Oh.” I smiled at her. “That makes sense.”

Relieved of dish duty, I went to check on Gary. He was curled up on the pink-silk-cushioned chair in the library, looking as if that was where he’d been sleeping his entire life.

He let out a pink, toothless yawn when he saw me, then stretched luxuriously, letting out a self-satisfied meow.

“No,” I said firmly, and removed him from the chair before his claws could snag the undoubtedly expensive antique cushion, depositing him on the air mattress.

Gary let out a little grunt of discontent—he clearly considered the air mattress unworthy of a cat of his breeding and intelligence—but eventually curled into a ball and went back to sleep.

Before joining the girls, I stopped by the window in the front door. Pushing back the lace curtain, I peered out. I could see very little because the power was out everywhere except the house in which I stood. The entire street had been plunged into the thickest, darkest night I’d ever seen.

But because of the light streaming from the hallway behind me, I could see a few things... and those things were disturbing. Rain was streaming diagonally, blown sideways by the wind. Leaves and branches were tossed across the front yard like confetti, some of them quite large. Beyond the picket fence, out in the street, a four-foot-tall trash can went sailing by, tossed by the wind as lightly as if it were a child’s beach pail.

The noise of the storm was disturbing as well. It sounded exactly as people always seemed to describe hurricanes on news footage—like a freight train, roaring relentlessly past, only never seeming to end.