by Liz Isaacson
He looked up from his phone and said, “We’re going to be busy for a bit, everyone.” He continued to fill them in on the plans he’d made with the other ranchers in the area, and everyone agreed they could go help on other lands in order to have theirs cleaned up and operational in literally three days’ time.
With that all settled, Ranger met his eyes. “Well, should we try to get a few things done today? Or just wait it out?”
“Animals for sure,” Bear said. “They need to be rounded up, examined, and fed. I’m going to call in to town and see if there’s someone who needs immediate help there. A lot of us could be useful somewhere else today.”
“I like that idea,” Preacher said, and others agreed too.
Bear nodded and tapped until he got to Sammy’s name. He dialed and lifted his phone to his ear, a silent prayer that she wouldn’t need too much help filling his heart and mind.
Chapter Six
Sammy barely knew which way to turn once she’d emerged from the storm shelter. She kept Lincoln pressed against her left side and her right hand gripping Momma’s. Daddy didn’t go too far either, because danger existed everywhere.
This was the middle of Three Rivers, and all Sammy could see were downed trees, damaged houses, and limp power lines.
What would her shop look like? It sat on the edge of town, ripe for the brunt of the tornadoes that had touched down in the Panhandle.
Loud panic pounded through her, and she couldn’t move. How could they clean this up? Her father was nearing eighty, and though he’d always been the one up on the roof fixing the shingles and servicing the swamp cooler, he’d slowed down a lot in the past five years.
Since Heather’s death, really, but his new blood pressure medication left him with little energy and less drive to get things done. The acre and a half they owned had already started to fall into disrepair, and that was before the tornadoes.
Momma was younger, but also more frail, especially since she’d lost Heather.
Sammy squared her shoulders. It would be up to her to get this cleaned up. “Let’s go look at my house,” she said, eyeing the home where she’d grown up. “You guys might be able to stay there, but the roof looks pretty torn up.”
No one else said anything, and no one moved until Sammy took the first step. “Make a line,” she said, nudging Lincoln behind her. “Link, help Grandpa if he needs it, okay?”
“Okay, Sammy.” The little boy never called her Mom, and that was okay with Sammy. She’d been twenty-five when she’d gotten custody of Lincoln, and she’d only adopted him to make things easier for both of them. Things like registering for school and getting medical care didn’t require so many answers to questions Sammy would rather not be asked. She had nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of but speaking about her sister’s and brother-in-law’s deaths was hard on her.
Most people around Three Rivers knew already, and Sammy’s life almost felt normal again.
She picked her way around debris, most of it smaller items like cut-up firewood, roof tiles, a wheelbarrow, old pavers her dad hadn’t put in the path he’d done from the deck to the fire pit, and a couple of bike tires.
The oak tree that stood sentinel on the edge of Sammy’s back yard looked whipped and bruised, but it was still standing. Relief hit her for some reason, though she didn’t have a clear view of the little cottage where she and Lincoln lived.
A few more steps, and the house came into view. The rain gutter on the back corner was gone, the roof looked a little chewed up, and the screen door that allowed her to open the back door and let in a fresh evening breeze without getting the bugs hung sideways on its hinges. Other than that, Sammy didn’t see any broken windows or any terrible damage.
“Doesn’t look bad,” she said, tugging Lincoln to her side again. “You guys okay?” She turned to find Daddy picking his way past the oak tree, his eyes trained on the ground. She waited until both of her parents stood next to her, all of them gazing at the house.
Dread hung like a necklace, making her shoulders tight with the weight of it. Sammy closed her eyes and prayed for a miracle. She quickly amended her demands on the Lord to, Just a place to stay dry and safe from the elements would be nice.
She didn’t need Him to make everything magically better. She just needed one room where she and her family could stay until she could get their property livable again.
“Let’s go,” she said, infusing as much hope and cheer into her voice as she could. She kept Lincoln by her side as she crossed the grass, noting that there was considerably less debris here.
The house had a back porch where she normally kept a patio table with two chairs, all of which was gone. But the deck seemed to be in good shape still, and none of the steps softened under her feet as she climbed up to the back door.
The knob turned easily, and she took a deep breath before stepping inside. The house held dead air, because the power was off and therefore so was the air conditioning. She couldn’t smell anything rotten or moldy though, not that it would be in just a night’s time.
“Not bad,” she said, glancing around. The kitchen she’d entered felt almost normal, though a few of the dishes she’d left on the counter had fallen to the ground. One had broken; the others were fine.
She picked up the whole pieces and said, “Be careful here.”
The kitchen flowed into a dining room of sorts, which held a table with a few chairs. Beyond that, the living room showed hardly any damage at all. Upstairs, she found the three bedrooms and two bathrooms equally intact.
“Okay,” she said. “We can all stay here until I can get Momma and Daddy’s place fixed up.” She’d left her parents downstairs with Lincoln. “The house looks good. I’ll need to repair a few things, but we can live without a gutter for a while.” She looked around, but her purse was still in her truck, which she’d parked at her parents’ house.
“I’m going to go look at your place, Daddy,” she said without looking at him. “And drive down to my shop, if I can. Will you guys stay here with Lincoln?”
“Yes,” Momma said, getting up. “I’ll see what you’ve got in the fridge that we should eat before it goes bad. We’ll be fine here.” She flashed Sammy a smile that held worry along the edges.
“I’ll try not to be gone long,” Sammy said, her need to get to her shop doubling. She hesitated another moment and grabbed her mom in a hug. “I love you, Momma.”
“Love you too, Samantha.” She stepped away a moment later, a sniffle sounding as she went into the kitchen. Sammy hugged her father and then Lincoln, pressing her forehead to the child’s.
“Go get your books from your room,” she said. “You can read to Grandpa. Or set up that folding table we have under the stairs and do a puzzle. You guys will be okay here, okay?”
“Okay, Sammy.”
She watched him go upstairs, and she met her father’s eyes.
“Go,” he said. “We’ll be fine here.”
“Don’t go outside and try to do anything, Dad. Promise me.”
“I won’t,” he said, but he didn’t promise. Sammy had to accept that, because her father didn’t want to fade quietly into death, and she understood that more than she’d like.
“Okay.” She took another big breath and headed out of the house the same way she’d come in. She moved faster from her house to her parents’, and they’d lost all their gutters, part of the roof, and nearly every shingle on it. Out front, Sammy’s truck sat in the front yard, not the driveway where she’d left it. The tailgate was bent from where it had pressed into the tree it currently rested against, but Sammy was able to move the truck an inch forward just by leaning her weight into it, so the two items weren’t fused together.
Windows along the front of the house were broken, but only on the northwest corner. “Interesting,” Sammy said to herself, though there were plenty of people out in their yards, some already picking through things. She didn’t want to touch anything until she wore a proper pair of glov
es, because she knew that heat and sharp edges could pop up literally anywhere.
Inside the house, bits of sunlight filtered down from the holes in the roof, and Sammy sincerely hoped it didn’t rain until she could fix that. With almost twenty thousand people in Three Rivers now, she knew she wouldn’t be at the top of the list for such repairs, and a sigh of frustration moved through her.
At least it wasn’t desperation.
In the kitchen, which sat at the back of the house, there was very little damage other than the roof. If she could get that and the gutters fixed, her parents could move back in here. Then it was just windows in the front bedroom that her parents didn’t use anyway, and the bathroom they did.
It felt doable, and Sammy rolled her neck and shoulders and said, “Thank you, Lord.”
She pulled out her phone to send a text to her mom and saw she’d missed a few phone calls and more than a few texts. Her phone had been off all night to preserve the battery, and when she’d turned it on this morning, it had been on silent.
Her heartbeat bounced right into the back of her throat when she saw all three missed calls were from Bear Glover.
Four of the texts were too.
Hey, Sammy, call me when you can.
I’m worried about you and how hard you and your family were hit.
I have people who can come help. All you have to do is let me know if you need us.
I’m driving to town to check on you. Are you home or at the shop?
The last text had come in two minutes ago, and Sammy’s smile felt foreign and familiar at the same time. “Bear Glover,” she whispered, because the man was as close to a saint as Sammy had ever known. How sweet of him to be so concerned about her.
She tapped the phone icon to dial him as she headed back out the front door to her truck.
“Sammy,” he said, his voice filled with disbelief and relief. “You’re okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. She explained quickly about her phone as she got behind the wheel and started her truck. Then she said, “My house isn’t too bad. I left Lincoln and my parents there. My parents need a new roof and gutters and windows.”
She pulled over the sidewalk and curb to the road. Debris littered it too, but she went slow over the wood and managed to maneuver between other objects she didn’t want to hit. “I’m headed to the shop now,” she said. “I have no idea what it’ll be like.”
“The reports I’ve seen and from people I’ve talked to, it seems like the northern parts of the town were hit hardest. Maybe the shop won’t be too bad.”
“How’s your ranch?” she asked.
“Not terrible,” he said. “My mother’s house has a tree down in the middle of it. That’s the worst of it.”
“Oh, wow,” Sammy said, her eyebrows going up.
“I’ve got nine brothers and cousins,” he said. “Three women to help with my mother and my aunt. And a whole network of cowboys on the surrounding ranches. We’ll get everything cleaned up in no time.”
“Is that who would come help if I needed it?”
“Yes,” Bear said, clearing his throat. “Do you think you need it?”
“My parents do,” Sammy admitted. “My dad…he won’t like it, but he needs the help.”
“I can let them know,” Bear said. “I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.”
Silence fell between them, and Sammy’s worry started in earnest. “I’m scared of what I’ll find at the shop,” she admitted, and it felt amazing to share her burden with someone else. She’d been carrying everything for so long that she almost wept.
“No matter what we find,” Bear said. “We’ll fix it up. Okay, Sammy?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice pitching up. How could she explain to him how nice it was to have his calls and texts on her phone? “Listen, Bear,” she said, her voice still wobbly and wrong. She found she didn’t care. “Thank you for caring enough to call.”
He didn’t say anything, and Sammy’s heartbeat went into a tailspin.
“I mean, I just feel like I have no one to help me,” she said, the dam breaking wide open. “My parents are older, and I have to be the strong one with everything. Sometimes I just feel….” She couldn’t continue, because there weren’t adequate words to explain the depth of her exhaustion sometimes.
“I understand,” Bear said, his voice slightly on the gruff side. “I do care about you, Sammy, and you can always call me when you need help. Always.” He cleared his throat, and Sammy smiled at the nerves she felt through the line.
“I’m at the shop,” she said, turning the last corner. “I have to go. I’ll see you in a minute?”
“I’m about ten away still,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, glad her voice had returned to normal. “Bye, Bear.”
She let him disconnect the call as her eyes swept everything they could, trying to see everything at once.
She saw two trucks in front of the shop—Logan and Jason. They both came out onto the road as she pulled in beside Jason’s vehicle. She turned off the engine and got out in one movement, saying, “What do we have?”
“Not too terrible,” Logan said, already moving toward the shop. “We’ve un-boarded the windows, and we didn’t lose any of those.”
“Good news,” Sammy said, and she could use a lot more of that. She glanced right down the street to the pet salon. Lisa Gilroy owned that, and her car sat out front. Her windows hadn’t fared as well, and sadness crept through Sammy.
“We lost the sign,” Jason said. “Everyone on the block did.” He indicated up and down the street, and Sammy saw what he meant. There was nothing taller than the buildings left. No telephone poles; no signs. The roofs had taken the most damage, almost like the twisters hadn’t quite touched down here, but had simply kissed this part of town with the bottoms of their funnels, sucking away the tallest items.
“Inside?” she asked, facing the double glass doors that led into her shop.
“Nothing too bad,” Jason said, leading the way. Sammy followed him, instantly smelling more antifreeze than she’d like.
“Something’s leaking,” she said, hurrying around the counter and into the back of the shop, where the bays were.
The cars they’d been working on still sat there, and Sammy couldn’t find any difference between the scene now and what she’d left yesterday. “You can smell that, right?” she asked Logan.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s inspect everything.”
They split up, and Sammy let her nose lead her to the back doors of the shop, which raised like a garage door. They usually operated on electricity, but with that out, she was able to lift them manually.
“Here it is,” she called to the others. Logan and Jason joined her, and they faced the wall of cars that had been pushed right up against the corner of the building.
“Another foot on that diesel, and we wouldn’t have been able to open the door,” Jason said.
Sammy agreed, and she stepped outside, crouching down at the edge of the pool of antifreeze that had come from one of the displaced vehicles. These were cars and trucks and even a tractor she hadn’t gotten to yet, and she didn’t want to call their owners and say they’d been damaged.
She sighed as she stood up, her heart heavy.
“Sammy?” Bear called, and that made everything in her life lighter.
“Bear’s here,” she said. “Excuse me.”
“Bear?” Jason said, but Sammy ignored him as she jogged through her shop and burst through the door and into the front where the counter and waiting area was.
Bear stood there, a gloriously dark cowboy hat on his head and strength pouring from him. He could help her. He could fix anything, including the broken mess her life had become.
“Bear.” She smiled and continued forward and right into his arms.
He grunted as she arrived, but she didn’t care. She just held on tight, hoping she could get her voice to work when she once again needed to tell him how she felt that h
e’d come.
Chapter Seven
Bear sure did like holding Sammy. She hadn’t showered, and she smelled like dust and antifreeze and that floral perfume that made his male side perk up in interest. “Hey,” he finally said softly. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling away. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked him straight in the eye.
“Things look okay here,” he said. “A few things, but nothing that will keep you from opening up again.”
“Almost,” she said. “We’ve got a pile-up in the back.”
“Ah.” He nodded to the door she’d come through. “Want to show me?”
A smile bloomed on her face. “Can you handle meeting my mechanics?”
Bear blinked, wondering why he wouldn’t be able to handle such a thing. “Of course,” he said.
“Great.” Sammy reached for him, and Bear dumbly extended his hand toward hers. Her fingers filled the empty spaces between his, the empty space in his whole life, and he stared at their joined hands. “I’m really sorry about this week. I should’ve called you.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” Bear said, not quite able to meet her eyes. “I have a phone that works too.”
“Our date was just…I don’t know where my head was.” Sammy smiled, and she literally looked like an angel straight from heaven with that radiance streaming from her face.
Bear didn’t know what to say. He wanted to ask her out again, but he didn’t want to put her in that same head space again. He met her gaze, and they simply looked at one another. The moment was sweet and tender, and yet charged in a way Bear had never felt with another woman. He sure hoped Sammy could feel it too, and it wasn’t just him and his messed up, middle-aged hormones.
“Come on,” she said, leading him around the counter and through the door that led back into the area where she worked on cars.
Bear looked around as he went, noting the shelving units with neatly organized boxes and parts. They were labeled, and that screamed of a female touch. “This doesn’t look bad at all,” he said.
