Rachel's Accident by Barbara Peters

the lock and showed Jess the eviction notice the first thing she opened the door. Then we tried calling the new owners, but their secretary would only tell us that the company’s owner wasn’t available, but we would get this month’s rent back since it had already been paid in advance.
    There was nothing we could do about it now except to pack our bags and move out. Jess made a call ahead to her relatives, where she would stay for the time being. Me, though…I had nowhere to go. I sat there on the couch staring into space, contemplating what I should do.
    Suddenly something pushed me from the side and I fell to my side. I looked up. Jess was standing over me, glaring down at me.
    “Are you listening now?” She asked angrily.
    She must have been speaking for a while, if she had realized that I hadn’t been listening. Usually, she could go on forever while she did a hundred other things. Right now, though, her attention was solely on me. I nodded in answer.
    “I said , you need to call Ethan.”
    “What for?”
    “You at least have to tell him about this and that you may not be able to come to work for a while because of that.”
    “I can’t do that. He burned his hands again because of me and now I have to help him get around with work and everything. It’s just like before, but at least this time he won’t be as drugged by his pain meds.”
    “Do you mean you remember everything?” She looked at me with the same expression Ethan had given me earlier accompanied by that question.
    I nodded, smiling at her. She beamed and threw her arms around me. If I hadn’t already been lying on the couch, she would have knocked me over with her sheer momentum. She definitely knocked the air out of me. I coughed a little, trying to regain my breathing.
    “Wait, doesn’t that mean you need to stay with him to take care of him?” She asked.
    At the repeated bob of my head she beamed at me. “I was just coming back here to get some clothes, so I didn’t have to borrow from him again.”
    “See, your problem is solved.” She was really excited for me.
    “Yeah, but now I have to tell him that I’ll be moving in for longer than the two weeks it would take for him to recuperate.”
    “Right, you need to call him.” She paused. “Is he even able to pick up the phone?”
    “We’ll just have to find that out, won’t we?”
    I dialed Ethan’s number on my cell phone. It rang and rang and I was just about to hang up again when I heard his voice come over the speaker.
    “Hello?”
    “Oh, hey, Ethan. It’s Rachel.”
    “Yes, I saw your number on the screen. Is there a problem?”
    “Yeah, well, kind of.”
    I told him about the eviction notice and asked him if I could stay at his place a while longer than planned.
    “Just until me and Jess can find another place,” I tried to persuade him.
    To my surprise he didn’t even pause before he agreed.
    “Sure, of course,” he said. “That’s no problem at all. You know there is more than enough room here.”
    “I just don’t want to intrude.”
    “Oh, please, you would never be an intruder, always a guest. Just come over and tomorrow we can go pack your things and move it all here.”
    “One more thing. How did you pick up your phone?” I asked with intrigued curiosity.
    He laughed. “I used my nose. It was a little tricky, so it took me a while, but I managed.”
    I was still laughing when I hung up and told Jess. Then we were laughing together and everything seemed okay again. We packed as much of our stuff as we could and loaded them into the Mustang I had driven over here to transport my clothes and be back for Ethan as fast as possible. Our deadline to move out was a week from now, so we still had a little time, but not much.
    I threw the clothes I had packed in a duffel bag onto the back seat and thanked Jess for her help. I then got into the car and drove back to Ethan’s.
    We didn’t even bother to make a new schedule again. It was changing regularly