I Was Just Trying to Help, Act II

Here is what happened next:

I awoke the next morning to find Mom nursing what is now a full-blown case of the flu, which, as you know, basically inverts your ordinary sense of life and death such that instead of fearing death in all its forms, you curse it for not just taking you away immediately.

Torrents of rain the likes of which I have never seen were battering the house. I literally could not see out the front window because a solid sheet of water was pouring past it. M's surprise party began at 1:30, and it was going to take me at least an hour to get into the city, so I headed for the shower and discovered there was no hot water.

I yelled, "Mom there's no hot water."

In response, my mother screamed my name three times. Actually SCREAMED. Still in my pajamas, I careened downstairs to the living room. No Mom. She screamed again and I realized she was in the basement. I bounded down the basement stairs...and splashed into water past my ankles. The entire basement could have comfortably housed a school of koi. My mother was standing in the middle of this lake, wearing her pajamas and a pair of ski boots. She looked like she was about to cry.

The sight of my poor flu-ridden mom about to cry prodded me into immediate, thoughtless action. I looked around crazily for anything I could save from ruin by picking it up off the floor. For reasons no one will ever understand, I chose an electrical cord...that was plugged in. Somehow, the ensuing electrical shock did not transfer to the 6 inches of water in which I was standing and kill me. Which is good, because, y'know, my mom was right there.

I asked, "Mom, do you have a wet-dry vac?" (In case you've never lived someplace with a basement, this is not that weird a request--basements flood a lot.)

She waded over to what was once my grandfather's workbench and re-emerged with a small beige canister to which a limp, scarred hose was attached. I am pretty sure it pre-dated the Harding administration--it would have not surprised me in the least to discovered it ran via hand crank. We'd have been better off with two plastic milk containers.

I begged my mother to get out of the wet basement and told her I would drive to the hardware store to buy her a wet/dry vac designed to handle more water than a birdbath. Though I had not contrived to stupidly bring about my untimely death again, I was still in hyper-frenzied ACTION MODE. I did manage to change out of my pjs, but the only shoes I had with me were some cute leather ballet flats, so I shoved my size 9.5s into a pair of my mom's 7.5s and waded out into the weather.

The weather...was bad. Really, really bad. It was dangerous to be walking outside, let alone driving. I was in the hardware store's parking lot, but I couldn't see the building from the car because it was raining so hard. I was also having trouble walking in those very, very small shoes. But I got into the store and I bought the heaviest-duty wet/dry vac they had. The box noted that it's "contractor-grade," and it has a built-in pump, so you don't need to empty it, you can just keep vacuuming water away from where it shouldn't be and pumping it out the other end of a hose to where you'd rather it was. It cost $130 with a 1-year warranty. Considering the circumstances, I considered this to be a pretty good deal.

Then, I took the box out to the parking lot.