No Judgments: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 1)

Emergency Disaster Survival Kit Basics—Home

First aid kit

Prescription medicines

Painkillers

Mosquito repellant

Watertight, easy-to-carry container to store essential documents such as cash and family records (birth certificates, proof of occupancy, important phone numbers in case your cell phone becomes inoperable, insurance documents, passports, bank and credit account numbers, etc.)

I reached home just before the heavens burst. I thought about poor Mrs. Hartwell’s party, and hoped they’d managed to save the brisket.

I texted Angela to tell her I’d made it home all right (I hadn’t seen another soul on the street), and asked her to let Mrs. Hartwell know, as well.

Angela texted back that she would, and also let me know that it was a shame I’d left the party early: after the rain started, everyone had moved inside to the dining room, where they’d pushed back the furniture and begun dancing to “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and other storm-related hits.

I figured I could live with the disappointment.

Gary was waiting for me just inside the door, as always. I don’t know how he always knew exactly when it was me coming through the courtyard gate, but somehow, he did, and managed to race from his usual perch at the end of my bed to the front door before I even managed to turn the key.

“Hey, big boy,” I said to him, as he launched a purring assault on my feet. “How have you been? What have you been up to while I was gone?”

The answer was: licked his food bowl clean, dragged every toy from his basket to the middle of the living room, and generally acted like a well-adjusted, well-loved cat.

After I was done texting Angela, I opened another can of food for him (chicken, his favorite, though I had to shred it a little with a fork before serving due to his lack of teeth), while listening to the eleven o’clock update from the storm hunters, which had just come on over the news.

No change in Hurricane Marilyn’s strength or direction, let alone the urgency in the voices of the meteorologists. Anyone in its path was doomed.

I should have known my mother would have been watching the same forecast. My phone rang, and the words Judge Justine flashed across the screen. I’d never been able to list her as Mom in my contacts. She’d always been Judge Justine.

I felt guilty because it had been so long since I’d last talked to her, and the forecasts were so frightening. She had to be going out of her mind.

“Things can’t get worse, right, big boy?” I asked Gary, whose only reply was a satisfied grunt. He was chowing down on his chicken medley as if he hadn’t eaten in days, when in fact it had been only a couple of hours.

I pressed Call.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“So you finally picked up,” rasped the voice enjoyed by millions of daily listeners. “You’d better be on your way out of there!”

“I’m not, Mom.” I slipped off my wedges and hauled a can of sparkling water from the fridge. This was going to be a long conversation. “I’m sure Caleb told you I’m staying put.”

“Sabrina.” How did she manage to inject so much disappointment into so few syllables? “Why? Why on earth would you do something so foolish? That’s not how your father and I raised you. Have you even seen what they’re saying on the news?”

“Yeah, I have, Mom.” I unclipped my bra, slipping it out from beneath my dress and letting it drop to the floor before settling down on the couch. “And I’m going to be fine. Lots of people here aren’t evacuating.”

“Oh,” she said, in her loftiest Judge Justine tone. “And have those people been through Category Five hurricanes before?”

“Mom.” I cracked open my soda. “Give it a rest.”

“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “Explain it to me, Sabrina. A very nice man—a man who wanted to marry you, by the way. That’s right, Caleb told me—offers to come rescue you from a Category Five hurricane in his private jet, and you tell him no?”

“He’s not that nice of a man.” I lifted the remote and changed the channel on the TV. But it was no good. Daniella and I had only basic cable, and storm coverage was on every station except PBS and the ones dedicated to sports and home shopping. And on PBS they were having a fund-raising drive.

“Why are you still blaming Caleb for Kyle’s actions?” Mom demanded.

“I don’t blame Caleb for Kyle’s actions. I blame Caleb for continuing to be friends with Kyle after I told him what Kyle did.”

“In my day,” Mom said, ignoring this, “we would have called what Kyle did a bad date.”

I rolled my eyes. She’d said this before.

“I know, Mom,” I said. “There are only two things wrong with that. One, I wasn’t dating Kyle. I was dating Caleb. And two, if that’s what they used to call a bad date in your day, I shudder to think what they’d call assault.”

“Oh, Sabrina,” my mother said, exhaling gustily into the phone. “What happened to you wasn’t sexual assault. If you talked to some of the women who call into my show, they could tell you about sexual assault.”

“I’m sure they could.” I’d had to learn patience over the years in order to be able to deal with some of the things that came out of my mother’s mouth. “I feel very badly for them. Do you make sure to tell them that the best thing for them to do is invest in gold, like it says during all the commercials on your show?”

Mom’s patience with me, on the other hand, was running out. I could tell by the clipped tone in her voice.

“That is neither here nor there,” she said. “And you know most of my audience don’t have so much as a savings account, let alone a 401(k). They could do worse than investing in a few gold coins.”

“Okay,” I said, as Gary, done with his evening meal, leaped onto the couch and came purring into my lap, ready for his nightly ear scratching. “Well, it’s been fun chatting with you, but I have to go to bed now. I’m working the breakfast shift tomorrow.”

“It’s not too late, you know,” my mother said in desperation, just before I moved to hang up. “If you won’t accept a ride from Caleb, I can still send a plane myself.”

“Mom, the airport here is closed.”

“To commercial traffic. But I talked to your uncle Steen”—her entertainment lawyer, and not my real uncle; my parents had no siblings—“and he says he knows one of the executives with NetJets, and they can have a jet fly down there to pick you up tomorrow morning, as a personal favor.”

“Mom.” The rain outside had stopped. I could no longer hear it beating on the metal shutters. All I could hear was Gary’s loud, staccato purring as he lay on me, his paws gently kneading my belly. He was blissfully unaware of the tension I was feeling. He wanted only for my fingers to continue stroking his furry gray ears. “That’s really nice of Uncle Steen. But I told you: I’m not leaving.”

My mother sighed again into the phone. “Well, you’ll call me when you change your mind. God willing it won’t be too late.”

I grinned. This was such a Judge Justine kind of statement.

“God willing,” I said. “Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, Sabrina. Remember, I love you.”

This was a new thing. We’d never been the sort of family that said “I love you.” Not that we hadn’t loved one another, we’d just never said it out loud . . . not until after Dad had died, and I’d found out that my mother and I weren’t actually related—not by blood, anyway.

“There just never seemed to be a good time to mention it,” Mom had said when I’d asked why she’d never told me about how I’d been conceived. “You were always such a serious, anxious little kid. I didn’t want to stress you out more than was necessary.”

So it was better for me to find out the truth in my twenties, from a commercial DNA testing kit, purchased by one of my best friends as a joke to cheer me up?

“I love you, too, Mom,” I said now, meaning it, and hung up.

I looked at Gary, snuggled up on my stomach, still furiously kneading my belly with his paws.

“I love you, too, little man,” I said, cupping his sweet face with my hands. “I love you more than anything in the whole wide world. And I promise to take the best, best care of you, and protect you since you can’t protect yourself.”

Gary responded by purring harder, then flexing his front claws and sinking them through the material of my dress.

“Ow, Jesus!” I cried, and rolled him onto the floor, where he meowed plaintively, not understanding why his petting session had come to such an abrupt end.

But that was often the way with males. It took some of them longer than others to learn not to play too rough.