Part 5 – Morning After
Thomas woke to the smell of burnt coffee and the shuffle of feet on hardwood.
The gym was already alive—volunteers in bright vests moving between cots, handing out paper cups, children weaving through the maze of blankets, their laughter soft as if they knew this wasn’t quite the place for it.
Kathleen was gone from the cot. Her folded coat lay across the end, the afghan draped neatly over the shoebox. For a moment, panic rose in him—how easy it would be to lose her again in the space of a night.
Then he saw her by the cafeteria doors, talking to a young man in a sheriff’s jacket. Her hands moved when she spoke, the same way Evelyn’s used to when she was making a point she cared about.
When she came back, she held a foam cup out to him. “It’s terrible,” she said. “But it’s hot.”
He sipped, grimaced, and nodded. “Terrible’s fine.”
They sat side by side again, watching the light from the high windows shift as the morning took hold. Outside, the rain had stopped. A pale, washed-out sun was trying to make itself seen through the haze.
“They say the river crested overnight,” she told him. “Water should start going down by this afternoon.”
“That fast?”
She shrugged. “Fast to some. Not fast enough to others.”
Her voice carried a weight he recognized—something more than weather. He set the cup down. “You staying in Chattanooga for a while?”
“I can,” she said. “If you want me to.”
He wanted to say Yes without hesitation. But a part of him, old and stubborn, feared what might follow—small arguments that could turn into old wounds, silences that could stretch too long.
Instead he said, “We’ll see.”
She didn’t look hurt. Just nodded, as if she understood.
A volunteer came over with a clipboard. “Mr. Callahan? Someone dropped off mail at the shelter for you.”
Thomas frowned. “Mail?”
The man handed him a large brown envelope, the paper soft from damp. No return address, just his name in looping handwriting he hadn’t seen in years.
He opened it slowly, his fingers remembering each curve of that script. Inside was a single folded sheet of paper and a photograph—Evelyn, standing in the backyard with a laundry basket on her hip, smiling at someone out of frame.
The letter was short:
Tom,
Found this while cleaning out my garage. Figured it should be yours.
—Bill
Bill Howard. His old neighbor from the seventies. A man who’d moved away twenty years ago and never written a word since.
Thomas stared at the photo. Evelyn’s hair was backlit, a halo of gold. She looked alive in a way that caught him off guard—like she might walk right out of the frame and ask why he was standing there with his mouth open.
Kathleen leaned over to see. “She was so young,” she whispered.
“She was always young,” he said.
For a long moment, they both just looked at the picture. Then he slid it into the shoebox, careful not to bend the corners.
Later that morning, the sheriff’s deputy announced that some residents could return to their homes to assess damage. Thomas’s street was still under two feet of water, but they’d be allowed to walk in with waders if they wanted.
Kathleen looked at him. “Do you want to go?”
He nodded. “I need to see it.”
The shelter lent them a pair of rubber boots each. Walking back through town felt like stepping into a memory someone had left out in the rain. Lawns were streaked with mud, cars sat crooked where the water had shoved them, and every porch seemed to hold something that didn’t belong there—a dresser drawer, a lawn chair from two blocks over, a child’s teddy bear.
When they reached his house, Thomas stopped at the edge of the yard. The porch steps were slick with silt, the railing tangled with river weeds. Inside, the waterline painted the walls a murky brown three feet high.
They walked through slowly, saying nothing. The place smelled like wet plaster and loss. His recliner was tipped on its side. The rug in the living room had rolled in on itself, heavy with water.
In the kitchen, Kathleen picked up a coffee mug from the counter and set it upright, as if that might help.
In the living room, Thomas found the wind chimes. They’d been ripped from their hook, the strings still tangled, but the metal tubes were intact. He untangled them gently, the way you’d fix a child’s hair after a fall.
“I’ll put them back,” he said.
“Good,” Kathleen replied.
They ended up in her old room. The water hadn’t reached the dresser, and the music box still sat where he’d taken it yesterday. The bedspread was damp at the edges, smelling faintly of the cedar chest he’d kept it in before she left.
Kathleen ran her hand over the desk. “You kept it the same.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he admitted.
She looked at him then—not past him, not through him, but at him. “Maybe now we can figure it out.”
He wanted to answer, but the words caught in his throat.
Instead, he wound the music box. The same three broken notes, then the one perfect note. It echoed in the ruined room, clean and defiant.
Part 6 – Clearing the Silt
They started with the front room.
Kathleen rolled up her sleeves and dragged the waterlogged rug toward the porch, grunting with the effort. Thomas followed with a dining chair that had swelled so much it left streaks on the floor. Every movement stirred the smell of mud and old river—earthy, metallic, with a sour edge that clung to the skin.
The silence between them wasn’t sharp now; it was the kind of quiet that comes when two people are working toward the same end.
Outside, neighbors were doing the same—hauling couches, stacking ruined boxes, tossing what couldn’t be saved into heaps by the curb. The street sounded like a hundred small grunts of labor, punctuated by the thud of something hitting wet earth.
Thomas caught Kathleen glancing at him as he worked. “What?” he asked.
“You’re moving better than I expected,” she said.
He smirked. “Still got a little gas in the tank.”
They cleared the living room first, setting aside anything that might dry without warping. The shoebox stayed on the kitchen counter, well above the watermark. He checked it more often than he realized, just to make sure it hadn’t walked off with the current.
By midday, they took a break on the porch. Someone up the block had a generator running, and the faint hum mixed with the smell of hot dogs cooking somewhere. Kathleen handed him a bottle of water.
“Remember Mrs. Langley?” she asked.
“The one with the canary that sang at night?”
“That’s the one. She stopped me on the sidewalk this morning. Said she still has the drawing I gave her when I was ten. The one of her bird in a little crown.”
He laughed, surprised by the sound. “You were always drawing something. House was covered in tape marks from where you hung your ‘masterpieces.’”
Her smile softened. “You never complained about that.”
“I liked having something to look at besides the news,” he said.
Her eyes dropped to her water bottle. “Then why…” She stopped, twisting the cap. “Why were you so hard on me about New York?”
The question came like a wave from deep water—inevitable, but still enough to take the breath.
He set the bottle down. “Because I was scared. The world felt too big. And I didn’t know how to let you go without feeling like I’d lose you forever.”
“You did lose me,” she said.
“I know.”
The words sat there, heavy as the mud in the yard.
They went back inside without saying much more, but the air between them felt changed—less like stone, more like clay.
In her old room, Kathleen opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a stack of construction paper drawings, edges curling. “You kept these?”
He shrugged. “Couldn’t throw them out. Even the one where you gave me purple hair.”
“That was your punishment for not letting me go to the movies that night,” she said, grinning.
“Fair enough.”
They found more—her old softball glove, a chipped snow globe from a trip to Gatlinburg, a bundle of birthday cards from grandparents long gone. Each item was a thread pulling them back into the same fabric.
When they reached the bottom of the closet, Thomas found an old shoe box—not the one from the kitchen, but another, covered in dust and forgotten. Inside was a Polaroid of Kathleen and Evelyn sitting on the hood of the pickup, hair tangled in the wind, both laughing at something out of frame.
He handed it to her.
She traced the edge of the photo with her thumb. “I don’t even remember this day.”
“I do,” he said. “We’d gone fishing. Didn’t catch a thing. Evelyn made sandwiches in the bed of the truck, and you dropped yours in the water. You laughed until you cried.”
Kathleen smiled, but her eyes stayed on the picture a long time.
They worked until the light outside shifted toward late afternoon. The house wasn’t clean—not yet—but it was theirs again, in the way a place feels yours when you’ve fought to keep it.
As they stood in the doorway, surveying the cleared living room, Thomas said, “We should hang the wind chimes back up.”
Kathleen nodded. “Let’s do it now.”
They stepped onto the porch. The river had pulled back enough to reveal the street again, still slick, but walkable. He fixed the chimes to their old hook by the door.
When the first breeze came through, the tubes sang—soft at first, then stronger, finding their voice.
Kathleen tilted her head. “That’s the sound I remember falling asleep to.”
He looked at her, then back at the house. “Me too.”
