Chapter 7 Tex #2
I work the grill. The heat and humidity are brutal. Big Bertha throws off waves of it that mix with the July sun and the humidity until the air around me feels solid.
Sweat runs down my back and my chest in rivers, and my face is so close to the grill for so long that my beard smells like hickory and my eyebrows feel singed.
I don't care. This is what I was built for.
My dad used to say the Roadhouse wasn't a bar, it was a living room with a liquor license, and today the living room is a parking lot and the liquor is ribs.
I introduce Stormy to everyone. Every single person who walks up for a plate gets the same treatment.
"This is Stormy. Been working his tail off on the rebuild."
"Have you met Stormy? This man right here saved half my bar stock during the storm. I'd have lost twice as much without him."
"Stormy, come here. This is Ray and Donna from down the road. Ray, Donna, this is Stormy. Best thing that's happened to this bar in years."
I mean every word. But I'm also watching what it does to him. He stands taller and carries himself differently.
It's incremental. It happens in stages over the course of the morning.
The first few introductions, he's stiff and quiet, barely making eye contact, letting me do all the talking.
By the tenth introduction, he's looking people in the face.
By the twentieth, he's saying "nice to meet you" without prompting. By noon, he's having conversations.
Not long conversations. Not Tex-style conversations that last thirty minutes and involve a dramatic reenactment.
But real conversations. A power lineman asks him how bad the damage is to the bar, and Stormy tells him about the surge and the flooring and the pool tables.
A woman with two kids asks him if there's any more chicken, and Stormy says, "Let me check.
How old are your kids? We've got hot dogs too if they'd rather have those. "
An elderly man sits down on an overturned bucket near the serving table and doesn't say anything, just sits, and Stormy brings him a plate without being asked and sets it in front of him and says, "Ribs are the best thing on the menu. Don't tell Tex I said that, he thinks it's the burgers."
I hear him say that and I almost drop the tongs into the fire. Not because of what he said about the ribs. Because he made a joke. To a stranger. Unprompted. A joke that included my name spoken with the familiarity of someone who belongs here.
God, that lights up my big old heart.
The old man smiles and takes the plate. Stormy moves on to the next person. I stand at the grill and flip burgers and blink hard a couple of times because the smoke is getting in my eyes. That's my story. The smoke.
Mickey shows up around one o'clock, still in uniform, cruiser parked at the end of the lot. He looks wrecked. Dark circles under his eyes, uniform wrinkled, the kind of exhaustion that goes deeper than sleep can fix. He's been running disaster response for going on four days now and it shows.
"Tell me that's real," he says, walking up to the grill. "Tell me I'm not hallucinating barbecue."
"Mickey, if this were a hallucination, you'd be hallucinating a room with air conditioning. Sit down before you fall down. I'll make you a plate."
"You'll make me three plates. I haven't eaten real food since Tuesday."
I load Mickey up with ribs and a burger, chicken and enough fries to fill a shoebox, and he sits on the tailgate of a truck someone abandoned in the lot. He eats like a man who's been rescued. Stormy brings him a water bottle without being asked.
Mickey looks at Stormy and then glances at me. Takes a bite of burger and chews slowly.
"How's the rebuild going?" he asks me. But he's looking at Stormy, who's already back at the serving table, handing a plate to a woman in scrubs.
"Better than expected. Stormy's been invaluable."
"Seems like it." Mickey watches Stormy arrange plates on the table, making sure every plate has equal portions, tucking extra napkins in for the people with kids. "He's good with people."
"He is."
"You know anything more about him yet? Where he came from?"
"No," I say. "And I'm not asking. Don't you ask either. Got it? He'll tell me when he's ready."
Mickey nods. He doesn't push. That's the thing about Mickey.
He's a cop. He's thorough and his instincts are always running, but he also trusts mine.
If I say I'm not asking, he hears what I'm not saying.
This kid is scared and I'm sure as hell not going to be one more person who makes him feel cornered.
"He's good people," I say. "I trust him."
Mickey takes another bite. "Yeah," he says, watching Stormy hand a plate to a little girl and crouch down to her level to make her smile. "I can see that."
He finishes his food and heads back out. At the cruiser, he stops and turns.
"You're doing a good thing here, Tex," he calls across the lot. "Your dad would be proud."
I wave my tongs at him and don't say anything because the smoke is in my eyes again. Dammit, the smoke is killing me today.
The afternoon wears on. The food holds out longer than I expected, partly because Stormy's system of cooking by priority means we're always putting fresh food out instead of letting things pile up and go cold.
And partly because he's quietly been rationing.
I catch him pulling smaller portions when the line gets long, stretching the supply, making sure there's enough for the people who haven't come yet.
Nobody notices because he does it so smoothly, and by the time I catch on, he's already extended our capacity by probably twenty or thirty plates.
"You're rationing," I say to him during a lull.
"We've got six pounds of ground beef left and the line hasn't stopped. If I keep serving full portions, we run out by four. If I drop the patties by two ounces each, we make it to six."
I stare at him. "You calculated that in your head?"
"It's just math."
"It's not just math. It's supply chain management and you're doing it in your head while simultaneously running a serving line. That's not just math, that's a skill."
He looks away. His ears go pink at the tips. It's the first time I've seen him react to a compliment with anything other than blankness. The pink tips of his ears are so human, so normal, that I want to grab him and kiss him, but of course I don't.
"I just don't want anyone to show up and there not be any left," he says quietly. "I know what that feels like."
He says it like it's nothing. But I hear what's under it and it's not nothing. It's a kid who has been hungry and shown up to empty tables. He's learned to make things stretch because nobody was going to stretch them for him.
I don't say anything. I just go back to the grill and make the patties two ounces smaller like he told me to.
We feed the last plate before six. The grill is scraped clean.
The cooler is empty. The folding tables are bare except for a few scattered napkins and a squeeze bottle of ketchup that's been in the sun so long it's basically warm tomato soup.
By my count, we fed somewhere around a hundred and twenty people today.
A hundred and twenty plates. Every piece of food that was going to spoil in my walk-in cooler, turned into meals for power crews and first responders and families and neighbors and strangers.
We clean up in the hot late-afternoon light.
Stormy breaks down the folding tables and stacks them against the building.
I scrape Big Bertha clean and cover her with a tarp.
We don't talk much. Not because things are tense or awkward but because we're tired in the good way, the bone-deep way that comes from work that matters.
"Hey, Stormy."
He looks up from the table he's folding.
"You know how many people we fed today?"
"Hundred and twenty, give or take. I was counting."
"I knew you were." I lean against Big Bertha and cross my arms. "A hundred and twenty people, and you knew every single one of them by the time they left.
You remembered the woman in scrubs liked extra sauce.
You remembered the old guy on the bucket wanted ribs.
You remembered that little girl didn't like pickles. How do you do that?"
He shrugs. The one-shoulder shrug. "I pay attention."
"You do more than pay attention. You made people feel like they mattered today. That's not a small thing, especially right now when most people feel like everything they had just got washed away. You handed them a plate and you treated them as if they were somebody. That matters."
He's standing very still. The folding table is half-collapsed in his hands, and he's looking at me. There's an expression on his face that I've never seen before. It's raw and unguarded and it looks as though it hurts, the way new things hurt when you're not used to feeling them.
"I've never done anything like this before," he says. "I've never been part of something like this."
"Like what?"
He looks at the empty parking lot. The bare tables. Big Bertha cooling under her tarp. The bar behind us, wrecked and gutted and still standing.
"Something that mattered," he says. "Something worthwhile."
The sunset is starting behind us, painting the sky in those ridiculous colors that look like God hired a painter who doesn't know when to stop.
I put my hand on Big Bertha's lid and I look at this kid standing in my parking lot.
He's holding a folding table, wearing my bar's name across his chest, and I think about how he calculated portions in his head so nobody would show up hungry to an empty table.
I think about how he brought a plate to an old man who didn't ask for one.
I think about how he crouched down to a little girl's level and remembered she didn't like pickles.
I think about what Mickey said. Your dad would be proud. He would be. Not just of me. Of Stormy too.
Of whatever this is becoming.
And oh, God, I sure as hell hope it's becoming a thing with us.
I'll wait for it, if it is. I'll wait forever if I need to. I've got nothing but time.
"Come on," I say. "Let's get cleaned up. We've got another big day tomorrow."
"What's tomorrow?"
"Same thing as today. Rebuilding this place. You and me."
He finishes collapsing the table and stacks it with the others. The last of the light is catching his hair, turning the blonde almost gold. He's standing in the middle of a destroyed parking lot surrounded by hurricane debris, and he looks like he belongs here.
"You and me," he says. Like he's testing the words. Feeling the weight of them.
"Yeah, that's right."
He nods. And for the first time, when he turns to walk back into the bar, he doesn't check the exits first.