Lenore wanted to dance around the room, the happiness inside her multiplying with every moment the rain continued to fall. Then, as the room darkened even further, she moved over and flipped on her lights, beyond grateful that she could do that.
The bulbs blazed to life, and she found her face hurt for how widely she smiled. Her next thought landed on Brandon, and she quickly returned to her charging phone to text him.
Come over to my house tonight. It’s raining and you’ll be in the dark.
Not only that, but the cabin definitely held a chill. Lenore set about making a fire in her pot-bellied stove, and she had to go outside to get more firewood. She stood there, protected by the roof and eaves, marveling at how good God had been to her these past few weeks.
“He’s always been good to you,” she murmured, because she had to believe that He didn’t only care about her during times of ease. He’d always been there; she just hadn’t been able to push past the negative things in her life to see Him, feel Him, know Him.
She collected the wood she needed and took it back into the house. Then she grabbed her phone and tapped on the flashlight as she went back down the hall and onto the porch. She walked right over to the corner where the railing met the house and shined her light toward the corner of the greenhouse.
The twenty-gallon tank had been attached there, with a tube going from the rain gutter into it. It sure seemed to be filling, and in fact, Lenore whooped when she saw it already held about one-quarter of its capacity.
“Five gallons,” she said, a joyous laugh following her words.
The wind kicked up, and Lenore rushed back inside to build her fire. She hadn’t heard from Brandon yet, and she hoped he’d be able to make it back to the homestead safely in this storm.Sometimes they got snow and tornadoes in the Panhandle, but Lenore had looked up the weather, and this was supposed to just dump rain.
She’d take it.
With the fire crackling merrily, Lenore readied her ten-gallon tanks. She didn’t have another fitting for the top, but she could unscrew the one on the twenty-gallon tank and affix it to a new container.
If only she knew how long to wait. She didn’t, so she went back outside to check the tank again. The water level didn’t seem to have moved at all, and she either needed a bigger tank or some sort of alarm that would tell her when the one she had was reaching its capacity.
She set an alarm for twenty minutes on her phone, determined not to be crazy about checking the container. When the alarm went off, she went outside.
“Oh, wow,” she said, because the twenty-gallon container was very nearly full. She darted back inside, grabbed three of the ten-gallon bottles and boogied back outside. The moment she stepped off the back porch, she knew she should’ve put on a raincoat.
As it was, she got soaked in a matter of seconds, and she grumbled as she ducked past the wood pile to the greenhouse. She had to get up on a step-ladder to reach the container, and in the darkness, with the rain pelting down, Lenore cursed into the sky.
“I need a better way to change this,” she yelled to the lightning. The thunder boomed back, and Lenore managed to get the lid off the twenty-gallon container and fitted onto the ten-gallon one. She balanced that on the top step of the ladder and reached for the full container.
And totally forgot the twenty gallons of water weigheda lot.
Like, a-lot-a-lot.
She bobbled it, desperate to hold onto it. Some sloshed over the edge, and Lenore cried out as she felt herself tipping sideways off the ladder. It was only a couple of steps up, and yet she felt like she’d be falling down the Grand Canyon if she lost her balance.
By wrapping both arms around the bottle, she managed to keep it from tipping too badly, and she stumbled down the steps and under the two-foot overhang of the roof. Her hands shook, but she managed to get the bottle on solid ground.
The ten-gallon container had started to fill nicely, and Lenore ran back into the rain, then the house, and collected all the bottles. She’d stand out here all night if it meant she could have eighty gallons of water at the end of it.
Eighty. Gallons.
She glanced at the five-thousand-gallon tank, dismay pulling sharply through her. She shouldn’t have rejected Colt’s idea of fixing the leak, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with something unclean, where she’d have to treat everything with chemicals, any of it. The idea of doing that had felt too big, too unwieldy, and she’d told him not to come last week.
And he hadn’t. She still had the tank, so she could text him and see if he could fix it before the next storm. She reminded herself that the big rainfall months weren’t until summertime, and she didn’t need five thousand gallons right now.
Heck, eighty felt like a miracle.
By the time the rain started to lessen and then dry up, Lenore had filled four of her six ten-gallon bottles. With the fifth attached and not even close to being full, she finally went back into the house.
All she wanted was a long, hot shower—and she had no way to get it. She huddled in front of the stove, her fingers tingling as the warmth hit them. A violent shiver wracked her body, and her stomach growled.
Then, as if God Himself had arrived in her cabin, an unexplained warmth flowed over Lenore, like someone had put a blanket directly from the dryer over her shoulders.
Her head swam, and she pressed her eyes closed. If she could just?—
26
