Chapter 6 Stormy #2
"I'm giving you access to the knife drawer. There's a difference. Pick the one you want. Take your time. If you pick one and change your mind later, you know where the knife drawer is."
I turn back to the drawer. My hands are shaking. I sort through the collection, picking up knives and putting them down, testing the weight, the grip, the balance. Some are too big. Some are cheap and flimsy. Some are nice but the wrong shape.
My hand closes around a switchblade near the bottom.
It's mid-sized, maybe four inches closed, with a black handle that's smooth and warm from sitting in the drawer.
I press the release and the blade snaps out with a clean, sharp sound that fills the quiet bar like a finger snap.
The blade is bright and straight and when I test the edge against my thumb, it's sharp. Really sharp.
"Oh yeah, that's a good one," Tex says. He's watching me but not hovering.
Keeping his distance the way he always does, like he knows exactly how much space I need and gives me a few extra inches on top of it.
"Spring-loaded. Italian-made. Took that one off a guy from Pensacola who pulled it during a poker game because he thought Diamond was cheating.
She wasn't. She doesn't have to. She's just better than everybody at everything, which some men have trouble accepting. "
I close the blade. Open it. Close it. The action is smooth and fast and the click of it locking into place is solid. It feels real in my hand.
"Keep your old one," Tex says. "A man can never have too many knives. But at least now you've got one that won't fold up on you when it counts."
I put the switchblade in my pocket. It's heavier than my pocketknife, and I can feel the weight of it against my thigh.
He just armed me. He looked at the pathetic knife I carry for protection and instead of taking it away, instead of laughing at it, he opened a drawer full of better options and told me to pick one.
People have taken things away from me and called it protection. Nobody has ever handed me a weapon and said, "Here, this is yours now. Use it if you need to."
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Thank the idiot from Pensacola who couldn't handle losing to a woman at poker.
His loss is your gain." He pushes off the wall.
"Now come on. Those gift shop t-shirts aren't going to sort themselves.
Although if they did, that would be a hell of a tourist attraction.
Self-sorting merchandise. We'd make millions. "
I go back to the gift shop. The switchblade is in my pocket and my hand keeps finding it. Touching the smooth black handle through the fabric of my sweatpants, and every time I do, the tension in me loosens a little more.
The day goes on. The heat builds into the high nineties.
Tex strips his shirt off by ten and I roll my sleeves up.
We work in the thick, wet air with the radio playing and the sun pouring through the open doors.
God, it's hot as hell. I finish the gift shop by early afternoon, everything sorted.
The dry merchandise is organized on the higher shelves.
The wet stuff is hanging on a makeshift clothesline Tex helped me string up across the shop, dripping onto the concrete floor.
The ruined stuff is in garbage bags near the door.
When I show Tex, he walks through the shop and nods at each section and then turns to me and says, "This is better organized than it was before the hurricane."
"It wasn't hard. You didn't have a system before."
"I had a system. The system was to put stuff where there's space. It worked fine."
"That's not a system. That's a pile with aspirations."
He stares at me. Then he laughs, this big, booming laugh that bounces off the concrete walls and sounds like it belongs in this bar. As if the building was designed to hold the sound of it.
"A pile with aspirations," he repeats. "Who knew you had jokes? Stormy, where have you been my whole life?"
I don't answer that. He doesn't expect me to. But the question hangs in the air, and I hold onto it the way I hold onto the knife in my pocket. Carefully.
We work through the afternoon. I help Tex pull more flooring, then we tackle the pool tables together, righting them, checking the frames, pulling off the waterlogged felt.
Tex examines each table with the attention of a surgeon, running his hands over the wood, checking for cracks, testing the joints.
"These are going to make it," he says, and the relief in his voice is real and deep. "They need to dry out and they'll need new felt and some refinishing, but the frames are solid. Dad picked good wood."
"He sounds like he knew what he was doing."
"He knew what he was doing with everything except his lungs.
The man could build a bar from scratch, rebuild it after a hurricane, cook a burger that makes grown men cry.
But you could not convince him that cigarettes were going to kill him.
My mama tried. Sheila tried. I tried. He'd just light one up and say, 'I've survived worse than a Marlboro. '"
Tex pauses. His hand is on the pool table rail, and his eyes go somewhere else for a second, somewhere I can't follow.
"He hadn't, though," Tex says, quieter. "He hadn't survived worse."
I don't say anything. I don't say I'm sorry, because people say that and it never helps and it never means what you want it to mean. I just stand there with him and let the silence be what it is, which is two people in a wrecked bar thinking about the things that break people.
After a minute, he clears his throat and pats the pool table twice, the way you'd pat a dog.
"When we get these fixed up, we're going to play," he says, his voice back to normal, or his version of normal, which is booming. "Fair warning, I'm terrible. Sheila beats me every single time and she doesn't even try."
"I've never played."
"Never? Not even once?"
"Never."
"Well, that's just tragic. We're fixing that as soon as the felt is replaced. I'll teach you everything I know, which, based on my track record, will make you almost good enough to lose gracefully."
"That doesn't sound like a great sales pitch."
"It's not. But honesty is one of my few virtues and I'm committed to it.
" He picks up a piece of ruined felt and drops it in a garbage bag.
"Most people have five or six virtues. I got three and a beard.
The beard does a lot of heavy lifting, personality-wise.
Without it, I'm just a large man who talks too much and overcooks bacon.
With it, I'm a large man who does that but looks rugged doing it.
My other virtues are burger-making and talking.
That's the complete list. Three virtues. I peaked early."
I almost make a comment to correct him. It's right there, forming in the back of my throat, this thing I want to say that isn't about the bar or the work or the cleanup.
You have more than three.
You're kind. I don't know what to do with kind, because kind has always been a trick and you're making it look like it's not. I slept on your shoulder during a hurricane and you didn't move and nobody has ever held still to let me sleep.
I don't say any of it. But I think it, and the thinking feels like a door opening a crack, and I don't slam it shut the way I usually do. I just leave it. A crack. Just enough light to see by.
By late afternoon, the worst of the cleanup is done. Not finished, not even close, but the water is gone and the ruined materials are pulled. The building is breathing again, with hot air flowing through the open doors and starting to dry what's left.
"Tomorrow, we'll start on the exterior, clearing debris from the parking lot and pulling the plywood off the windows that survived," Tex says. "We've done enough for today. Come on."
He grabs two beers from a case he brought down from the second floor earlier.
They're warm. He doesn't seem to care. He hands me one and I take it.
The glass is smooth and room-temperature in my hand, and I realize this is the first time he's offered me alcohol.
The off-limits rule, broken by the man who made it.
"I said you had to ask me first," he says, reading my face. "Consider this as me asking you. You want a beer?"
"Yeah, thanks. I'd love a beer."
"Good answer."
We go upstairs. Past the second floor, past the apartment on the third floor, to a door at the end of the hallway that opens onto a narrow staircase. It leads to the roof.
The roof of Big Tex's Roadhouse is flat concrete with a low wall around the edge, and it's the highest point on this stretch of beach. When we step out into the evening air, the Gulf of Mexico is right there, filling the entire western horizon, massive and flat.
The sun is going down to the right of us.
It's sinking into the Gulf like a coin into a wishing well, slow and deliberate, and the water catches the light and scatters it in every direction.
The sky is on fire. Orange, pink, gold, purple at the edges, colors stacked on top of each other in layers so vivid they look painted.
After two days of gray skies and rain and destruction, the world is showing off. Making up for lost time.
Below us, in both directions, the coastline is wrecked. I can see the debris, the damaged buildings, the sand pushed into places sand doesn't belong.
Tex leans on the wall and looks out at the water.
The beer is open in his hand and the sunset is painting his face in warm tones and he looks tired.
Exhausted really, for the first time since I've known him.
The nonstop energy, constant talking, and the relentless optimism have been running on pure adrenaline, and it's wearing down.
I can see it in his shoulders, the way they're lower than usual, and in his eyes, the way the crinkles look deeper, less like smile lines and more like the lines you get from carrying things.
He's been carrying a lot. The bar, the storm, the rebuild.
Me.
"I sure am glad you're hanging around to help me with the rebuild," he says.
He's looking at the water, not at me. His voice is quieter than usual.
"Don't know how I'd do it without you. What a mess I'd be in, if I was here by myself trying to do all this.
Not to mention the prep we did before the hurricane. "
I take a drink of the warm beer. It's flat and body-temperature and tastes like it's been sitting in a non-air-conditioned building for three days, which it has. It's the best beer I've ever had.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say.
I don't know where it comes from. I didn't plan it. I don't make promises because promises are things people hold over you, leverage they store up for later, weapons disguised as gifts. But the words come out of my mouth and they feel true. And I don't take them back.
Tex turns to look at me. The sunset is behind him, and his face is half gold and half shadow. His brown eyes are tired and grateful. For one second, he doesn't say anything. Tex, who always has plenty to say, who fills every silence like it's a personal challenge, just looks at me and says nothing.
Then he smiles at me.
"I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear that, Stormy."
We stand on the roof, drink our warm beers, and watch the sun disappear into the water. When the sun dips below the surface, Tex hands me his beer.
"Hold my beer," he says, then he starts clapping.
"Why are you clapping?"
He shrugs. "The tourists always do it when the sunset is over. Feels right, you know. Being able to come out here on my roof, anytime I want and watch the sunset is a gift. Clapping is a way to show appreciation."
I nod at him. He's right.
Standing here watching the sunset with him does feel like a gift.