“Then we will meet her at the Dairy Queen,” Anna Rose answered. “It’s all just stuff that can be replaced, if we have to.”
Taryn shot a sideways glance over at Clinton and shrugged. If the trailer and the shop were demolished, then she was going to take it as a sure sign that she shouldn’t stay in Shamrock. A tornado blowing away her place of business would be sad, but it would also definitely be an omen.
Taryn thought of the possibility of an era passing in the twenty to thirty minutes it took a tornado to sweep through the panhandle of Texas. She’d practically been raised in the flower shop. The basement room had looked bigger back when she’d rocked her baby dolls in the old wooden rocking chairs and played school with her cousins. Since she was the oldest, she always got to be the teacher, and they were the students. She wondered if they remembered those days as clearly as she did.
The noise above them finally died down, but another ten minutes passed before they heard the all-clear siren.
“We should have a moment before we go out there,” Jorja whispered and bowed her head.
“Not me,” Anna Rose declared as she started up the stairs. “I’m going to see if we’ve got a place to live and, more importantly, to make waffles. That’s what I want for breakfast this morning.”
Jorja raised her head after saying what appeared to have been a quick prayer, then followed her cousin. When she reached the top of the stairs, she shouted, “The shop is still standing! Not even any broken glass. Going out now to check on our vehicles and the trailer.”
Taryn wasn’t aware she’d been holding her breath until it all came out in a whoosh. “Thank God!” she whispered as she stood up with Zoe still in her arms. “You’ve been such a good baby, darlin’ girl.”
Clinton got to his feet, reached up, and pulled the wooden thread spool hanging from a length of cord and sent the basement into semidarkness. A shaft of light from the open door lit up the stairway enough that they could make their way to the top. “We should have realized that we were okay when the electricity down here didn’t go out. I try to be patient, but I’m not so good at waiting. All kinds of things ran through my mind in this last half hour. Could Rebecca find us if everything got destroyed? What if all my files were blown away? I have them backed up in the cloud, but I like hard copies.”
Taryn stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Me too. The storm brought back some good memories for me, of all weird things—thetimes when all three of us cousins played or took naps in this basement. I want Zoe to have good memories like that. But I also half hoped that her mama couldn’t find us so we wouldn’t have to give Zoe back to her. It’s not fair, I know.”
Clinton wrapped his arms around her with the baby between them. “No, I know that, too, and I sure don’t want her put into foster care, but my fear is that Rebecca is too fragile to raise her.”
Taryn looked up into his brown eyes. “I’m here to help with her as long as you need me.”
She barely had time to moisten her lips before his found hers in a kiss that stopped the world from turning. There were no more tornadoes, no past or future—just the here and now, and that kiss.
“Hey, what are y’all waiting on?” Anna Rose yelled.
Clinton took a step backward and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that for days, and it was even better than I dreamed about.”
“We’re on our way,” Taryn said, raising her voice for Anna Rose before she turned back to Clinton. “Me too, but we’d better go see what’s going on right now.”
“Talk later?” he asked.
“Yes, definitely,” she answered with a smile.
Anna Rose was already out in the yard, standing in the bed of her truck in pouring-down rain, checking out the trailer’s roof. “Looks like we’re good from out here.”
Jorja opened the trailer door and shouted across the parking lot. “No leaks inside. We got lucky. Our throwing tree lost some limbs, and the scrub oak out back has been uprooted. Nana Irene called and said they’re both good, and everything looks good, too. They’re back in the house now.”
“I need to go check my apartment, but I don’t want to climb those slippery steps with the baby in my arms,” Clinton said.
“Go!” Taryn motioned with her free hand. “We’ll be fine right here in the shop until the rain slows down; then I’ll take her to the trailer. You go on and make sure everything in your apartment is safe.”
“Thank you,” Clinton said. “Not only for this but for everything you’ve done since Zoe ...” He paused. “Well, you know.”
She smiled up at him. “It’s totally been my pleasure. I’ve fallen in love with this child.”
“Me too,” Clinton said and then darted out into the rain.
Taryn put the baby in her playpen and started the mobile. Zoe’s chubby little cheeks broke out in a smile, and she kicked her legs.
“You’re going to be a dancer, aren’t you?” Taryn pulled a barstool over close. “Are you going to like jazz, tap, or ballet better? Or maybe you’ll be like Anna Rose and enjoy line dancing or two-stepping best of all.”
Tears filled Taryn’s eyes when the baby cooed up at her and kicked even harder. “Oh, baby girl, I can’t even think about you going away, but I want you to have a good life with your mama.”
She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the T-shirt she’d slept in the night before and walked over to the door to see if the rain had let up enough to run across the lot to the trailer. Her mind hopped from the kiss she’d shared with Clinton to the idea of all three cousins staying in Shamrock past the end of summer.
She jumped when her phone rang, and thinking it was Clinton, she answered it without even looking at the caller ID. “Hello, is everything all right up there? Is the roof leaking?”
