She stood at the nightstand and picked up the phone and dialed three digits.

“Yes, I need—”

I wrapped myself in the hanging clothes and barged out through the closet door, and my mother screamed and dropped the phone. I sprinted from the room and still clenched most of the clothes to my body, and I ran out the front door and into the pouring rain. The longer I ran the heavier the clothes became, the cotton and polyester and wool of my grandmother’s jackets and shirts and pants absorbing the rainwater. When I was on the wooded path I heaved the clothes off me and they plopped in the muddy wet of the earth, and I kept on going until the path ended. I had to cross the street to reach the other path, and I did so just in time. Sirens whirred and whined right past, and I crouched and ducked in a thicket of pines until dark.

. . .

Fellis found me down in the silo that night, and I thought he was the police coming for me. He stayed standing on the ladder and shone the hand-crank flashlight in my face.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked.

I told him what happened.

“That was you?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Anyone call you looking for me?”

“Your mom did,” he said. “You think if it rains enough we’ll drown down here?”

The water pooling at the bottom of the silo had soaked through my shoes hours ago.

“What did she say?” I said.

“She was looking for you.”

“What’d you say?”

“That you went home.”

“And what’d she say?”

“‘When was that?’”

“And you said?”

“I don’t fucking know,” he said. “I can’t remember.” He hopped off the ladder and splashed water. “It’s not as deep as I thought.”

“You got a smoke?” I asked.

He lit one and handed it to me. “What are you going to do? Hide down here all night in the rain?”

“I wonder if she saw me,” I said.

“She didn’t,” Fellis said.

“How do you know?”

“Because she wouldn’t have said to me, ‘If you see him tell him to call me. Someone broke into his grandmother’s house.’”

“She said that?” I asked.

“Something close to it, yeah.”

Fellis flashed his light around the silo, and I smoked that smoke down to the filter.

“Let’s go to my place,” Fellis said. “My feet are wet.”

If the cigarette hissed out when it hit the water, I didn’t hear it.

. . .

I called my mother when I got to Fellis’s.

“Yeah, he told me,” I said.

“I’m all right,” she said, and in detail she recapped what happened, which was exactly as it did happen. “Why would someone rob an old woman’s home?” my mother asked.

“You said they didn’t take nothing?” I looked at the key in my hand.