politely as he complained that he’d never make it as an artist because art dealers are arrogant and greedy, although I’ve never known him to actually make anything. So when I got the text, I wasn’t completely surprised, although I thought no way in hell are you moving in here. I replied no, that room is occupied, the guy who lives there is staying. This was in fact a lie, or I hoped it was; my girlfriend, who is the reason I was having lunch with this guy in the first place, is moving in, and whether the roommate stayed or went was a point of tension between us. I imagined a nest where the two of us could really settle in, but she was worried about money. So it was unclear how many of us would be living there come August. But I wasn’t about to let him know that. I thought that would have settled it, but I got another text a couple of hours later. “I thought you had three bedrooms in your house?” I thought it was a misunderstanding, but then I realized he wasn’t listening to me at all. The morning started with heavy rain. I lay in bed for a moment, picked up my phone. A notification popped up “flooding in the Hill Country. 27 missing from a girls’ camp on the Guadalupe.” I clicked on it, recognizing the name of the camp. I thought about the women I know who’d attended that camp, about my own children who went to camp on another river nearby. I was afraid. It was the 4th of July, a day of celebration, but the rain kept coming all day and into the next as the news got worse and worse. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, looking at my phone. Early on Saturday I read a headline about a 20 month old little boy who had died; I clicked, and recognized the name of the man who had lost his grandson. I knew him, a lawyer, and I knew his wife, not well, but I’d done business with both of them over the years. The story didn’t give many details, but said that seven members of the family had gathered at their river house to celebrate the holiday. My husband asked why just the little boy? And I thought, the circumstances must have been very bad to separate that little boy from his mother. I wept at the thought of it. The scale of what had occurred was hard to take in, is still hard. That beautiful place, that slow-moving green water I’d floated down in an inner tube so many times. That it had risen so quickly and so powerfully and in the middle of the night. My heart hurt. I went to work on Monday feeling heavy, sad. I wondered how my clients might respond. The first one started out by saying “my sister is really bugging me.”
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