She looked past him, and her eyes were wide. He turned to see what she was looking at, and it was Barton’s. Or it used to be Barton’s. The grocery store was gone. What was left was twisted. Mangled. But there wasn’t much left.
“Is that the store?”
“Uh, no, thank God, no. My dad was in the hardware store. I wanted to go to The Mercantile.” She pointed to the hardware store down the street.
“I don’t think you should be walking by yourself, there’s lines down, there’s debris.”
“Yeah, right. I mean—what in the actual?”
This was his thought as well. Leave it to the kids to find the right phrase.What in the actual?
“Come on, I’ll drive you over there.” Slowly, he maneuvered his SUV toward the hardware store. They didn’t speak. It was all they could do to process what they were seeing. He helped her to the hardware store and even walked in with her, just to be sure.
There was so much havoc and chaos. Completing this small thing helped him make sense of it. Just make sure this kid is safe. As they walked in, Jared Pawlak—he knew Jared was J.J.’s brother—came running out.
“Daryl, she’s here! Oh, man, we were freaking out.”
Daryl was apparently the girl’s dad. The man looked like he’d been through hell and back. “Brittany Nicole!” he exclaimed. “You scared the crap out of me. Where the heck?—?”
“I got caught in the street. This man helped me.”
Stone nodded, and Daryl put a hand on his shoulder.
“Thanks, man, thanks.”
“Sure, of course, it happened fast, you know?”
Stone watched the relieved dad hug his daughter. He felt his own relief. This was a happy ending.
He also felt a lot of regret. He had a daughter too.Where is she right now? Does she know that I’d be there for her in a storm? Or for anything?
She was grown, not a little girl anymore. He’d let her mother be the main parent. He was the afterthought, at best.
That was no one’s fault but his own. He knew that.
All this stuff came up, right there in the hardware store, kicked up like the wind of the tornado. He stood there and evaluated his life and his relationships.
Watching the father and daughter and, earlier, seeing Dean Tucker walk through a tornado to get to his wife, those things opened Stone’s eyes. There were connections between people here that he did not have in his life.
Once his eyes were open, watching the town come together after the tragedy of the tornado changed him to his core.
First, it was the chainsaws. Everyone with one got it out and started cutting limbs out of the way of roads and driveways.
There was the frantic effort to save Ned Barton, though it was for naught; everyone in town helped the fire rescue do what they could.
After the rescue turned into recovery, Stone watched the love and care each member of Irish Hills gave to one another.
Even people he knew to be at odds with each other, not even friends, seemed to be family to each other at that moment.
He didn’t have a chainsaw. But he had other things.
The grocery store. The insurance company. Even water. He could get water here for everyone helping in the cleanup. So, he did that. This time, he didn’t have a man or an assistant do it. He did it himself.
He made calls. Rented trucks. He loaded and unloaded. He drove things back and forth and even got a thank-you hug or two.
This was new. This getting your hands in there and helping other people. He’d never once seen things like this in action. He’d never once had “boots on the ground,” as they say. His life had insulated him from it. And in the end, that had made his life less. He saw that now.
Stone had a lot of ground to cover, but he understood that he needed real connections. He needed real community.
