3. Ava
THREE
AVA
I’m sweating by the time I pull into the back lot of the farm supply store. The heat is killing me today, and getting a popped tire didn’t help in the slightest. My bike screeches to a stop in the delivery bay, and I hop off, removing my suffocating helmet. I’m already late for my shift, but Scott should be grateful I made it here at all after the day I’ve been having. Hanging my helmet on my handlebar, I grab my empty water bottle and head inside.
“Shit—” I stop mid-step. I forgot to call the house to check in. I always call after Mavey’s noon nap to make sure she doesn’t need anything. Swinging my messenger bag around, I hunt for my phone. When my screen lights up, another emergency alert is waiting to be read, but I swipe it away. I have a missed call too, but it isn’t from Mavey or hospice.
Julio’s name fades from my screen as I debate whether to listen now or when I get off work, but I call my voicemail before I can talk myself out of it.
“Ava.” His hesitant voice is gruff. “It’s been a while, and I wanted to make sure you are okay...And see how Mavey’s doing. I know you don’t plan on coming this way, but with the direction things are headed, I hope you reconsider.” He pauses. “I worry about you, kid. I know you’re busy and you don’t want my help, but...” Julio sighs, and after another pause, he continues, “I’m here. You always have a place with me if you need it. And I want to help if you’ll let me.” Then my uncle hangs up the phone.
Damn. I hadn’t expected the ever-present knot in my stomach to worsen upon hearing his voice. Then again, there’s a reason we don’t talk much.
Forgetting about Mavey, I shove the phone into my pocket and pull open the back entrance to the store. The air-conditioned interior is blissful as I hurry into the stockroom, through the swinging door, and onto the shop floor. The warehouse is large, but having worked here for three years, I know it like the back of my hand.
“Ava, you’re late!” Scott calls from the corner of the store. I hurry to the checkout counter, fighting the cloud of exhaustion that’s lingered since my episode this morning.
“I know, sorry. I got a flat.” I flash a smile at the customer standing at the counter, waiting to be helped, while Scott assists someone else. I cram my stuff between the trash can and a box of extra bags at my feet and straighten. The rubber pad beneath my boots alleviates some of the pressure on my tired feet, and I sigh. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Things happen,” the older man says. The wrinkles around his eyes crinkle with a kind smile. “I hope you got it all sorted.”
I huff a laugh. “Luckily, I always carry a spare tube. Learned that lesson years ago.”
He chuckles, exposing coffee-stained teeth, and tosses a pack of jerky on top of a pair of leather work gloves, a package of bungee cords, and the batteries he’s already set on the counter. “I’m also picking up three fifty-pound bags of chicken feed,” he adds.
“You got it.” My fingers clack the buttons swiftly. “Did you need help loading the chicken feed?”
The man shakes his head. “I can manage.”
“All right then. Your total is $143.76, please.”
The man already has his wallet open, and while he inserts his credit card, I bag up his odds and ends for him. Like most of the ranchers around here, his hands are tanned and calloused, his nail beds dirty, and he smells like a mixture of earth and sweat with a subtle hint of aftershave.
“I’ve heard a dozen stories about goats getting polio in my time,” Scott says to the customers in the back. “Not steers, though.”
As the receipt prints for the man in front of me, I strain to listen.
“I thought it was rabies at first,” a familiar, lighthearted voice replies. “But the boss knew right away what it was.” Tony always comes in to buy supplies for the Bennett’s ranch, so it’s no surprise that he’s here. I’ve known Tony most of my life. He and Knox were older than me in school, but always on the periphery. And we used to have Sunday school together at church. After seeing Mitch earlier, though, thinking about any of them makes my pulse quicken.
“Knox had to put four of them down this morning.” Tony grunts like he’s heaving something onto one of the loading carts.
His words are...shocking. I’ve heard of polio in hoofed livestock, a brain-altering disease that makes them act a bit loopy from lack of vitamins in their bodies or some such thing. But it’s curable if you catch it early enough.
I smile at the customer in front of me. “Here’s your receipt.” I offer it, waiting patiently as he takes his bag. “Thank you for coming in. You can grab your chicken feed on the way out.”
The older man dips his head, all southern and polite. “Have a good day,” he says, then walks out the door.
I allow myself another sigh as I catch my breath from rushing to get here, settling into my six-hour shift. I pull my apron out from the cupboard below the dewormers and spermicides on the wall behind me and slip it over my head. While this apron might not be covered in dried ketchup and jam, it’s just as dirty, with bits of straw and smeared grease all over it. I welcome it, though. I’m not sure why I love the smell of the farm store, but something about it is comforting. The aroma of leather and wood and grease all mixed together.
Tying my apron behind my back, I eye a bag of Southwest-flavored pretzels hanging on the rack beside me and decide that will have to be my dinner since I didn’t have time to pack anything. I ate a few bites at the diner anyway.
“Thiamine injections are behind the counter. Ava will grab what we have in stock and ring you up,” Scott says from the back. “We’ll get this loaded for you.” The loading bay doors swish open and the sound of the squeaking cart wheels disappear outside.
Anticipating Tony, I turn around and scan the vitamin supplements on the wall for Thiamine. Two brands, two different prices, and three quantities of each. Unsure which one Tony will prefer, I grab both. As his cowboy boots clomp on the cement floor, I turn around. I’m not met with Tony’s kind and smiling brown eyes, but Knox’s hard hazel ones, fixed directly on me.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The words escape my lips before I can stop them, and I clamp my mouth shut, praying nothing else mortifying comes out of it.
Knox’s eyebrow lifts slightly as he stops at the counter. The scent of sunshine and leather rushes off him, and a hint of something enticing and crisp, like his deodorant, maybe?
I swallow and silently chide myself because it doesn’t matter in the slightest what his deodorant smells like. Knox’s expression, on the other hand, does matter, and that tightly set jaw of his and broad, squared shoulders say he’s none too happy to see me either.
“Thiamine,” I prompt, pushing the two brands toward him. “I’m not sure which one you want.”
“All of them,” he says without bothering to look at the boxes. He tosses a pen of crazy glue from the rack next to him onto the pile.
“All—both kinds?”
He looks at me in answer. He’s just as unnerving and maddening as his father. And yet, I find I can’t detest him quite as much, even if he’s trying to eviscerate me with his stare. I can’t hate Knox because I know what it’s like to lose a mother, and somehow I’m the lucky one because I don’t have reminders of her death every time I see him.
The scanner beeps over each box as I move through them, and Knox pulls out his wallet. “They’re loading two rolls of barbed wire, twelve and a half gauge. Plus two hundred-gallon troughs.”
I nod and enter the item numbers into the register. Working at one of the few farm supply stores that serve this area, we sell to everyone in a two-county radius, and I know most SKU codes better than my phone number. “Anything else?”
Knox shakes his head, and I can feel his eyes on me as I total his purchase out, pretending not to notice. “It comes to $531.92,” I tell him. Opening a bag for the meds, I set them carefully inside and add the tube of crazy glue. “I’m sorry to hear about your cattle,” I say honestly, surprising myself. Not because I don’t care but because I’ve never been one for small talk. Knox must be surprised too, because his brow twitches ever so slightly as our eyes meet.
His jaw clenches under his five o’clock shadow—more golden than brown in the sunlight—and as expected, Knox Bennett says nothing else as I drop his receipt into the bag. He slides his wallet into the back pocket of his Wranglers and, leveling a final hard look at me, he curtly dips his head because it’s the polite thing to do, grabs his purchase, and strides out of the store, leaving me a tightly wound mess in his wake.
Once Knox is outside the sliding door, his shoulders deflate a little, if I’m not mistaken, and he removes his Stetson. His short hair is slightly matted from his hat and he makes his way toward his truck.
Tony hollers something, and when I hear the tailgate slam shut, I hurry to the window. I tell myself it’s to see Tony and perhaps give him a wave if he happens to look in my direction. But that’s a bald-faced lie because my eyes don’t leave Knox as he hands Tony the med bag and opens the driver’s side door of the F-250.
Knox sets his hat inside and turns to Scott. Whatever Knox says is too low to hear, but it doesn’t matter anyway. I wouldn’t have heard him. Not when all I can think is I’ve known Knox my entire life, and he’s hated me for a better part of it.
He shakes Scott’s hand, and not for the first time, I appreciate what hard work on the ranch has done to Knox’s arms. I lie to myself again, as if I might actually believe that checking him out is totally natural due to the lack of men in this town who are my age and still have their teeth. But there’s always been something about Knox that’s drawn me to him, even if I wish there wasn’t.
A faraway memory niggles up from beneath the persistent darkness, and I think of him at church again when we were little. He always wore his dark jeans, t-shirt, and shit stompers, just like he is now. Only back then, he smiled. And he talked to me. More than that, he and Tony stood up for me when they saw Lars bullying me.
Now, Knox doesn’t talk to me at all, and I’m not sure what’s worse—his silence and the unfading animosity in his eyes, or the wistful hope that if he’d simply tell me off and get it out in the open, I would feel a thousand times better. Holding my breath and waiting around for him to detonate is torturous.
As his truck rumbles to life, Scott heads back inside. The automatic doors open for him and he looks at me, startled to find me standing by the window. “How did his cattle get polio?” I ask, watching the truck pull out of the lot onto the main road.
“Sulfur poisoning from that pond of theirs. He’s already lost a dozen of them.”
I frown. “That’s...scary.” And it is, especially knowing there are over two hundred now-active volcanoes throughout Texas. Large or small makes no difference. They cause the ground to shake, and now they could be poisoning the water?
Scott grabs a discarded clipboard on the other side of the counter. He’s all hard edges and seriousness to look at, but Scott’s a softy with one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever met.
A brown curl falls into his face as he flips a page over with a huff. “Here.” Scott shoves the clipboard at me, and his cheeks lift in a facetious, dimpled smile bearing slightly crooked teeth. “Time for inventory.”
I groan. “That’s what I’ve been doing all week. Where’s Martin?”
“He’s in New Orleans.”
“What?” Counting inventory might be easy, but everything eventually blurs together; I actually miss manual labor at this point.
“Martin’s parents retired there last year,” Scott explains. “Now that everyone is being relocated along the Gulf Coast, he has to move them back here.”
“That’s...rough. I know his father hasn’t been doing well either.” An unsettling thought strikes me. “Hey, Scott?”
“Hmm?” He lifts one of the boxes stacked beside the counter and sets it on top.
“You follow all of this Moonie stuff more than I do.”
He huffs a laugh. “Moonie stuff?”
“You know, preparedness and survival stuff.” Being ex-military, it runs in his blood. Scott’s eyes meet mine and I consider how much I don’t want to know the answer to my question. “Should we be worried about this relocation? I mean, we’re not that far from the coast. It’s only a few hours away. We’d be safe from a tsunami, right?” I think about bedridden Mavey. Of how screwed I’d be if we had to leave with no money and only one option of where we might be able to go. Not to mention how we’d even get there.
“It’s something I’ve thought about,” Scott admits, and he starts tagging each individual pack of vegetable seeds. “But then I remind myself it’s the volcanoes we need to be worried about. If they ever do more than grumble, we’re not only screwed, we’re dead.” Though Scott says it lightly, it’s the truth, and his amusement quickly fades when he notices my expression. “If anything ever happens, I’ll help you and Mavey as much as I can, Ava,” he promises, his brown eyes softening with reassurance.
It’s then I realize Scott, nearly twenty years older than me, might be the closest thing I have to a friend in this place, and I flash him a watery but grateful smile. Though he hasn’t opened up much about his personal life over the years, I know his wife left him when he got out of the army, and this store has been his life ever since.
“All you need to worry about,” he continues, “is how many nuts and bolts I have in Hardware.” He winks at me.
“Yeah, yeah.” I groan for effect. “I’m going.”
“Thank you, Ava,” he singsongs.
“Yeah, yeah,” I repeat playfully. “You can pay me back by giving me Tuesday off.”
“And why would I do that?” His voice carries down the aisle.
“Because I have a doctor’s appointment in San Antonio. And with the way the bus runs, it will take me all day to get there and back.”
“Fine,” he says. “But you better bring me another jar of your pickled okra. A fresh batch, nothing you have shoved in the back of your fridge like last time.”
I smile to myself. “Deal. I’ll even?—”
A rumble, so low and deep it’s disorienting, emanates around me, and the earth begins to shake under my feet. It’s not a helicopter this time. The shelves creak. Glass shatters. Metal clanks against metal—and the windows rattle in a cacophony so deafening I have to clamp my hands over my ears as I run for the door.
Shelves cave in. Chains jangle against each other. Supplies tumble from the walls, and one of the halogen lights suspended overhead snaps loose, swinging back and forth.
When the rumbling ebbs and the shaking ceases, the squeaking, swinging lights are all that fill the sudden quiet.
Scott and I stare at one another, eyes wide and chests heaving. “Are you all right?” he rasps.
I nod, raking my fingers through my hair, swallowing thickly. “Yeah—yes. That’s the third time this week.”
“Only bigger,” Scott adds, and the look in his eyes is one of dread because we both know that’s not likely the last or biggest either.
With a curse, Scott peers around his store, now in complete shambles. He’s known for years it might only be a matter of time before Mother Earth decides to wreak havoc on our little sleepy town—we all have. But after all this time, it’s starting to feel more real than ever.
“Come on,” I say, bending down to pick up the cans of cat food that have fallen around my feet. I’m well aware it’s better to keep myself busy and my mind from spinning.
Until now, skepticism about what the future holds has been relatively easy, but it’s getting harder to ignore. The increased earthquakes. The water at the Bennett’s ranch. What’s next? I hastily stack can after can as panic nudges the edge of my mind, all the things I’m not prepared for taking shape.
“Ava.”
What about Mavey? I can’t move her. She’s too sick.
Julio’s call earlier resurfaces.
“Ava,” Scott says more firmly, and I stop, my arms full of Purina One, and look at him.
“Go home,” he says gently, peering down at me crouched on the floor.
“But...your store.”
“It will all be here tomorrow. You should go check on Mavey.”
My eyes widen. “Mavey.” I nod. Yes, of course, I should go check on Mavey. Rising to my feet, I run my sweaty hands down my apron. She’s probably terrified.
“Call me if you need anything,” he adds, and quickly, I untie my apron as I step over supplies strewn throughout the aisle. I’m already counting down the minutes in my mind that it will take me to ride home as I reach for my bag and phone under the counter.
Scott takes my arm. “Ava.”
I look at him, unaware he was even beside me.
“Be careful, okay?” Suddenly, Scott doesn’t look forty-two. He looks years older than that and beyond exhausted, as if he’s already lived through whatever comes next. He squeezes my arm like he might never see me again, and another wave of dread washes over me.
“You too,” I whisper. “I’ll check in when I can.”
Scott nods half-heartedly, and without another moment’s pause, I run for the back, heading for my bike, and pray Mavey is okay.