By Wren Wilds
Chapter 1: Tex
My phone buzzes against the bar top like an angry wasp, and I already know it's bad. Nothing good ever comes through on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of hurricane season when the sky outside looks like God's holding a grudge.
I pick it up and read the alert twice. Then a third time, because sometimes you need to let bad news sink in properly before you start cussing at it.
MANDATORY EVACUATION ORDER — BAY COUNTY, FLORIDA. ZONE A (BEACH/COASTAL AREAS). HURRICANE PETER EXPECTED TO MAKE LANDFALL IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE WITHIN 36-48 HOURS. CATEGORY 4+ ANTICIPATED. ALL RESIDENTS IN ZONE A MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.
Hurricane Peter.
I set the phone down and stare at it.
"Peter," I say to Sheila, who is behind the bar drying glasses like the world isn't about to end. "They're sending a Category 4 Hurricane Peter to kill us. Not a Hurricane Razor. Not a Hurricane Blade. A Peter. I'm supposed to board up my windows and sandbag my doors for a storm named after my Uncle Pete, who once got his head stuck in a porch railing at a Fourth of July cookout."
Sheila doesn't look up from the glass she's polishing. "Are you done fussing?"
"No, I'm just saying. If a hurricane is going to wipe me off the map, I'd like it to sound a little more dignified in theobituary.'Big Tex, taken out by Peter.' Sounds like I lost a bar fight to an accountant."
Sheila sets the glass down and picks up another one. She's been bartending here since before I took over, and she has a gift for letting me talk myself out like a wind-up toy running down. She's somewhere north of sixty, with silver hair she keeps pinned up and a look that can make a three-hundred-pound biker apologize for breathing too loud. She's the mama of this bar and everybody in it, including me.
"Category 4 or higher," I say, reading the alert again.
The humor drains out of me like bathwater. I've been watching Peter on the weather models for a week, tracking that little swirl across the Gulf the way you'd watch a fist drawing back. The models kept wobbling, kept disagreeing. Maybe it goes east toward Apalachicola. Maybe it curves and hits Mobile. But as of this morning, every single spaghetti line on the map converged on Panama City like an arrow through a bullseye. And now there's an evacuation order on my phone and my bar sits directly on the Gulf of Mexico.
I've been through this before. Hurricane Michael, 2018. Category 5 when it came ashore, though they didn't figure that out until later. I remember thinking the world was ending. I remember the sound of it and what the building looked like after. I remember finding a fishing boat in the parking lot and seeing the toppled McDonald's sign that took a year to fix.
Some people go through a disaster like that and they leave. Pack up and move inland, swear they'll never live on the coast again. I rebuilt. Took us almost two years to get Big Tex's Roadhouse back to what it was, and in some ways it's better now. Three stories of poured concrete, steel-reinforced on the lower level after Michael taught me what storm surge can do to cinder block.
The first floor is the bar with a long mahogany bar top that Dad built with his own hands back when he opened this place thirty years ago. There are pool tables, a little stage for live music on weekends, and a gift shop near the entrance where tourists buy overpriced t-shirts and shot glasses with the bar's logo on them.
Second floor is storage and an event space I rent out for private parties and weddings. Third floor is mine. A small apartment with two bedrooms and one bathroom that's just big enough to turn around in. That's where I've lived since I took over.
My dad was the original Big Tex. He started this bar when I was a baby, built it from a concrete shell and a liquor license into one of the best-known biker bars on the Florida Panhandle. He was the kind of man who'd give you the shirt off his back and then apologize that it smelled like cigarette smoke. The cigarettes killed him two years ago. Lung cancer. Aggressive, fast, the way he did everything. He went from diagnosis to gone in four months, and when the dust settled, I was left to run the Roadhouse.
I don't say it out loud much because it sounds like a Hallmark movie, but keeping this bar alive is the only way I know how to keep him alive. Every board, every nail, every coat of paint is his legacy. The name on the sign is his. The regulars who've been coming here for decades are his. I'm just the son trying to fill his big boots.
So, yeah, I'm not leaving. Hurricane Peter can come and do his worst. I'll be right here with Dad's bar.
"Sheila." I look at her straight. "You need to go home."
She stops polishing. "Excuse me? What did you say?"
"Go home. Get your family together, get your house squared away, stock up on whatever you need. Do not come back here until this storm is past and I tell you it's safe."
"And what about you? What are your plans?"
"I'll be right here where I'm supposed to be."
She gives me a look that could strip paint off the walls. "You're staying here?"
"Yes ma'am."
"In a mandatory evacuation zone. During a Category 4 hurricane."
"That is correct."
"All by yourself? What if something bad happens?"
