My mother started calling me at two-hour intervals yesterday, worried about the storm that was heading toward Savannah. Her fear of technology does not extend to Doppler radar, and from her land line, she phoned repeatedly to warn me of the projected path of the storm. Mom was not the only one who worried yesterday, for city schools announced that they would be closed today, and our office building locked the doors and battened the hatches. This left me scrambling yesterday afternoon, e-mailing myself various projects and grabbing files so that I could work from home all day today.

The rain started last night around 10, heavy but not torrential, its insistent drumming making for near-perfect sleep. As I started to drowse off, I allowed that I could stay in bed until 9 a.m. this morning — practically the middle of the day! — and I thought happily of a glut of sleep in my very near future. Fortunately, a dog’s stomach (and bladder) keep very fine time indeed, and I woke instead at 7 a.m. to the sound of Buddy’s heavy breathing and the smell of his swampy breath and his own insistent drumming, tail whacking the nightstand, nails clacking the floor. And so my day began.

An hour and one-half later,  I — my own belly full, my limbs tired from exercise — climbed back into bed. How could I not? For the rain had continued; the air had a peculiar quality about it; and the wind had picked up. Bed felt safe, and bed certainly felt warm, and bed had next to it a 620 page book that I was dangerously close to finishing.

Selecting a book is always a tricky business. For one thing, you cannot judge it by its cover. (Ha!) But if you are cheap, like I am, and prefer used books, like I do, the market becomes limited, for you are confronted with fewer choices. At the airport a few weeks ago, I perused the “Read and Return” half-price book rack and saw “We Are Not Ourselves” by Matthew Thomas. The cover touted “#1 International Bestseller” and bore a sticker “100 NOTABLE BOOKS The New York Times Book Review 2014.” So ignoring the old chestnut, and happy that my $8 would buy a heck of a lot of book, I gave it a try.

The book follows the protagonist, Eileen Leary, from her childhood to her marriage to the heart-breaking illness and death of her husband at the age of 58. I knew that I would end up crying as soon as I read the epigraph:

Darling, do you remember/the man you married? Touch me,/remind me who I am.

— Stanley Kunitz

The first four hundred pages of the book were curiously slow. And then the book found its steam and the last two hundred twenty pages flew by. (Its pacing reminded me of life, the endless days of childhood giving way to the blink-and-you-miss-it days of older adulthood.) The protagonist is both likable and unlikable, caring and selfish, striving and accepting.

The writing is beautiful. After announcing the death of her husband on page 569, the author writes this:

. . . This was life: you went down with the ship. Who was to say that wasn’t a love story?

She slept on his side. She didn’t like his side particularly, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep on her old one. Whenever she did, she lay there thinking of all the nights she’d slept facing away from him, and she wanted one of them back — a single one would be enough — so she could turn her body toward his.

And with that, the floodgates opened for the next 51 pages, and as my pillowcase became more and more damp, I finished the book. I liked it so much that I read an additional few pages — “A Conversation with Matthew Thomas” — and learned that the author spent ten years writing the book. He noted that writing a novel was “more often like long-haul trucking than some ineffable mystical experience.”

When I shut the book, it was 12:30. Half my day was gone. Why work now? Why not play hooky on a rainy day with the office closed and a long weekend looming? So Chris and I ate lunch, and I went alone to a movie, “Southside with You,” a fictionalized account of the first date of Barack and Michelle Obama. (I have read that the Obamas have wondered why the movie was even made, and by the end, the why did not matter much to me at all.) It evoked so well the heady experience of meeting someone you really liked, the probing cross-examination for details, the drinking water from a fire hydrant feeling of learning all about the beloved, the discovery of common ground.

After the movie, I waited outside the theater for Chris to pick me up. As I watched rain blow sideways, I thought about the trajectory of love. About our first date, almost 31 years ago. The chance meeting through a mutual friend in a college lunchroom. Goggle imprints on his face. The falling away of the rest of the world. The sudden, surprising, and sure realization that I was going to marry him. And then I thought about the times that I had turned away, and I wondered about how woefully easy it was to get angry at the person who shares your daily life, to snap and to harp, to treat the person you love best the worst. I thought about the description of writing as more long-haul trucking, less an act of magic, and I thought that it applies to love, too:  a careful stewardship of cargo that one must navigate along many roads and obstacles from beginning to end. I thought about the week I had had, from mourning the tragic death of a loved one’s dog to celebrating our son’s making his college rowing team, and I thought of the constant in that week: Chris. Steady Chris.

As I waited for him to pull up, my phone rang. It was my mother. Before I could say anything, she told me that she had not slept all night due to her worry about the storm. I could not get a word in edge-wise as she told me everything that she had seen on TV, 10 hours away. Mom, I finally said. Mom, I’m fine.  And I told her the truth — that some limbs had fallen, that some people had lost power, and that my little corner of the world was riding it out in air-conditioned comfort at home, at the mall, at the movies — and I searched for how I could comfort her. Mom, I said, interrupting her again. Mom. Here is what my friend John says. So I told her. The Weather Channel sent a reporter to Savannah to begin storm coverage at 5 a.m. today. That reporter was not Jim Cantore, the guy that they send to the worst spots. Unless the Weather Channel sends Jim Cantore, we don’t need to worry very much.This successfully comforted my mother, my very own Weather Channel superfan. She brightened immediately, and then she volunteered, You sound good. I can hear it in your voice.

She was right, of course. She is my mother, after all. As she yammered on, all happy and relaxed, I caught sight of my beloved, coming out in the storm to take me home.

ALC