"I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't."
I stare at him. He's got the mop handle in both hands and the corner of his mouth is twitching. I realize that he's messing with me. He's giving me a hard time. I love it. This scared, silent kid who wouldn't speak three days ago is standing in my wrecked bar, making a joke at my expense.
"Stormy," I say. "Was that sass? Did you just sass me? In my own bar? During a natural disaster?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You absolutely do. That was sass. Sheila's going to be thrilled. She's been waiting for backup. It's been her versus me for years and she's been winning but she's tired, Stormy. She needs a tag team partner. You two are going to destroy me andI'm going to deserve every second of it. Oh yeah, she's going to love you."
Hope flickers across his face at "she's going to love you." It's quick and gone.
We work through the afternoon. The heat is relentless. I stripped my shirt off hours ago and Stormy rolled his sleeves up, which is apparently his version of the same thing. We drink warm water from the containers we stored upstairs and eat sandwiches standing up. Then we go right back to it.
He talks more. Not a lot. Not like me. But more than yesterday, more than the day before. He asks questions about the bar. Practical questions, task-oriented, the kind of questions a person asks when they're invested in the outcome. When they care about what happens to a place.
"The pool tables might be okay," I tell him, examining one that's been shoved against the wall. "The slate tops are heavy enough that the water couldn't flip them all the way over. If the felt is ruined, we can re-felt them. The frames are solid oak. They'll need to dry out but they'll survive."
"Your dad picked these out?" Stormy asks, running his hand along the rail of the overturned table.
I look at him. He's never asked me about my dad before. He's never asked me about anything personal.
"Yeah. He drove to Pensacola to pick them up from a bar that was closing down. Got both of them for five hundred bucks and drove them back in a borrowed flatbed. They barely fit. He had to take the doors off to get them inside, and Sheila said if he scratched her new paint job on the doorframe, she'd kill him. He scratched the doorframe. She didn't kill him. But she made him repaint it twice."
Stormy's hand is still on the table rail. He's touching the wood the way I touched the bar top this morning.
"We can fix them," he says.
We.
I turn away and pick up a crowbar and go back to pulling floorboards because I don't want him to see how happy that makes me.
By late afternoon, we've cleared most of the standing water, pulled up the worst of the buckled flooring, and opened every door and window that isn't boarded up. The cross breeze is helping, pulling the damp air out and replacing it with hot, salty air that's barely better but at least it's moving. The radio has been playing for hours and we've worked through classic rock, country, and are now deep into an oldies station playing Motown.
I'm stacking ruined floorboards in the parking lot when I look back into the bar through the open doors. Stormy is sweeping again. Same broom, same steady strokes, same careful, methodical rhythm. But he's different. His shoulders are lower. His grip on the broom is loose, not white-knuckled. His head bobs, just barely, to the Temptations song coming through the radio.
He looks up and catches me watching. I expect him to freeze, to go blank, to pull the armor back on. He doesn't. He holds my gaze for a second, and the corner of his mouth lifts, and then he goes back to sweeping.
I stand in the parking lot in the sun, surrounded by wreckage, and I think about the weeks and months of work ahead of us to rebuild.
And I think about the kid inside my bar, sweeping the floors, bobbing his head to Motown, looking like he belongs there.
We can rebuild. It might take a while, but we'll do it.
Because the most important thing in this building made it through the storm.
Chapter 6: Stormy
I wake up and the light is wrong.
It takes me a second to understand why, and then it hits me. The sun is up and angled through the window in a way that means I've been asleep for hours. My hand is under the pillow on the knife, but my grip is loose and my body is heavy.
I sit up and check the door. The chair is still wedged under the knob. Nobody moved it. Nobody tried. Another dark night in this apartment with a man who could break down that door with one shove, and the door stayed closed.
My brain tells me he's waiting. It says the longer he waits, the worse it'll be. This is how they get you comfortable, this is how they make you stop watching, and then the door opens when you least expect it and you weren't ready.
But there's a new thought forming. It's small and I don't trust it, but it's there. The new part says he's taking care of you.
