A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [24]
Bridget stood guard at the cellar door as Cici crept down the stairs, her flashlight beam bouncing in the darkness. “Be careful!” Bridget called. There were some bumps, a small crash, and Cici swore. “Are you okay?”
“Wait. I think I found it.”
Bridget sprang back from the door as the whole house was filled with a terrible rattling, thumping noise. Lindsay came around the corner, her hands over her ears. “Is it supposed to do that?” She had to shout to be heard.
“It’s just air in the pipes,” Cici said, brushing cobwebs out of her hair as she came up from the cellar. Already the noise was beginning to subside. “But that should do it. Let’s check the faucet.”
They pushed through the swinging door of the kitchen to the sound of an ominous rumbling that seemed to be coming from the sink. Without another warning, the faucet suddenly exploded into the air. Metal handles, screws, and fixtures flew in four different directions. Bridget screamed. All of them ducked. A geyser of water erupted into the air, splashing off the ceiling and running like a river across the brick floor.
Their horrified paralysis lasted only a moment, and then they rushed forward, slipping and splashing, to the sink. Bridget and Lindsay flung themselves on the geyser, trying to stem the flow with their hands. Cici dropped to the floor and flung open the cabinet beneath the sink, pulling herself underneath. She found the cutoff valve, wrenched it with both hands, and slowly, inevitably the fountain dropped from the ceiling, to a three foot pulse, to a gurgle, and then a drip. Cici crawled out from under the sink, and pulled herself to her feet.
The three women looked at each other, gasping. Their hair hung in dripping strands around their faces, their shirts were soaked through, and they were standing in water that covered their shoes. When she was able, Cici said, “Pressure valve.”
Lindsay said, “I think I wet my pants.”
Bridget just looked at her, a shell-shocked expression on her face. “How can you tell?”
And they went in search of towels.
Fortunately, the kitchen explosion seemed to have relieved the pressure in the pipes, and water was flowing freely to all other outlets—including the water heater, where it immediately flowed out again, creating another lake in the laundry room to match the one in the kitchen. Cici turned off the valve to the water heater and added “water heater” to the grocery list that Bridget had tacked up on the pantry wall. They spent the next four hours mopping, scrubbing, disinfecting, and polishing. They swept up twelve dustpans filled with ladybugs and two trash bags of leaves. They washed and wiped and polished the windows until they glittered with sparks of sunlight. Two o’clock came and went, but the movers did not. They scrubbed toilets and bleached grout. They ate banana bread with peanut butter from Lindsay’s stash. They wore out two mops on the floors, and poured out twelve buckets of muddy water. No power company truck pulled into the driveway.
At six o’clock, Cici trudged out onto the porch with Maggie’s gift bottle of wine in one hand and a cordless drill in the other. She sank to the top step, shoulders slumped, the wine bottle dangling between her knees, too tired to move another inch. After a time, she became aware that Lindsay had come out to sit beside her.
Lindsay’s ponytail was straggling, her cheek was smudged, her shirt torn. There was a Band-Aid on her index finger, and she was rubbing a blister on her thumb. She said, “Bridget found rat poop behind the stove.”
With a deliberate effort, Cici said, “I . . . don’t . . . care.” She lifted her arm and brushed away a ladybug that was crawling on Lindsay’s collar, and let it drop heavily again.
A silence, while they both seemed to gather their strength for further conversation. Lindsay said, “I guess we’ll be going back to the Holiday Inn tonight.”
“I guess.”
The mere thought of getting back into a car, any car, and driving an hour for a room seemed almost to defeat them both.
In a moment,