Chapter 10 Stormy
Sheila arrives on a Tuesday morning in a pickup truck that might be older than I am.
I hear her before I see her. The truck engine cuts off in the parking lot, a door slams, and then there's her voice, loud and clear and carrying across the concrete like it was designed for projection.
"Tex, get your oversized behind out here right now."
Tex drops the sander he's holding, and his whole face changes.
I've seen him happy before, seen the smiles and the crinkles and the laughing-at-hurricanes version of happy, but this is different.
This is the face of a kid who just heard his substitute mama's voice, and he looks about twelve years old right now.
He's across the bar in four steps. Out the door. And then I hear it, this sound that's half laugh and half pure joy. I move to the doorway to see.
He's got her off the ground.
She's tiny. Maybe five foot nothing, silver hair pinned up, wearing jeans, and a blouse and sensible shoes. Tex has his arms wrapped around her and he's lifted her clean off the pavement, her feet dangling a good eight inches above the ground.
"Put me down, you giant fool," she says, but her arms are around his neck and she's not letting go either. "Put me down right now. I'm too old for this. My hip. My back. I have conditions."
"You don't have conditions. You're indestructible."
"I am sixty-three years old and I have been driving an hour on roads that look like the surface of the moon and if you don't put me down, I'm going to bite you."
He puts her down. She straightens her blouse, smooths her hair, and then reaches up and grabs his face with both hands.
"You're okay," she says. Not a question.
"I'm okay, Mama Sheila."
"The bar?"
"Standing. Beat up, but standing."
She nods once, sharp, and then she smacks him on the chest with her open palm.
"Don't you ever scare me like that again.
Every hour, you said. Every hour you'd call.
You missed four check-ins during the storm and I was on the phone with Mickey at two in the morning ready to drive back out here myself. "
"The cell towers went down. I couldn't get a signal."
"I don't care. Find a signal. Build a signal. Send a carrier pigeon. I don't care how you do it. You do not leave me sitting in my house not knowing if you're alive. Are we clear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
I'm standing in the doorway. Watching. My hands are at my sides and I've got that weird feeling again.
It's not jealousy this time, not the hot, tight feeling I had when I heard her voice on the phone.
It's hungrier. I'm watching those massive arms that just lifted a woman off the ground like she weighed nothing, and I'm thinking about what it would feel like.
To be held like that.
Not grabbed. Not restrained. Not pinned or trapped or held down. Held. The way Tex held Sheila, with her feet off the ground and his face buried in her shoulder and his whole body saying I'm so glad you're here.
What would that feel like? To be the person he picks up. To have those arms close around me and feel them tighten, not with force but with relief that I was there.
I think it would feel warm and solid. The way the building felt during the hurricane when the walls held and the foundation stayed.
The world came apart outside, but the inside was okay.
It might feel like something else. And I can't think about it because I'm standing in a doorway in broad daylight and now is not the time.
Sheila turns and sees me.
She goes still for about half a second, her eyes sweeping over me from head to feet. I feel it. I feel her taking in my scraggly blonde hair, the too-thin frame, the Big Tex's Roadhouse t-shirt and the way I'm hiding in the doorway.
Then she walks toward me.
"So, you're the famous Stormy," she says, stopping about three feet away.
Close enough to see me clearly, far enough that I don't feel cornered.
She did that on purpose. I'm almost sure she did that on purpose.
"This man has not shut up about you for two solid weeks.
Stormy this, Stormy that. Stormy organized the gift shop.
Stormy managed the cookout. Stormy can do math in his head faster than my phone calculator.
I was starting to think he made you up and was out here hallucinating from the heat. "
"He didn't make me up," I say, because it's the only thing I can think of to say.
"I can see that." Her eyes are sharp and they don't miss anything. She's reading me the way Tex reads me, except faster and with less subtlety. Tex watches. Sheila evaluates.
"Well," she says, and her voice drops from assessment mode into warmth.
"I'm Sheila. I've been bartending here since before this one's voice changed.
" She jerks her thumb at Tex. "I knew his daddy.
I helped change Tex's oil when he was sixteen and couldn't figure out where the drain plug was.
And I will be the one deciding whether the new hires are up to standard, so consider this your interview. "
"My interview?" Now I'm worried again.
"Yes, first question. Can you tolerate this man's talking for eight or more hours a day without losing your mind?"
I glance at Tex. He's leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, smiling at us.
"I've made it two weeks," I say. "So yeah, I think so."
"That's impressive. Most people tap out after three days. Next question. Do you know how to make a margarita?"
I shake my head. I've already failed her test. "No."
"Good. I'll teach you. Margaritas are my legacy.
I know it's a biker bar, but tourists want a margarita when they come to the beach.
Now for the last question." She steps one inch closer and lowers her voice like she's sharing a state secret.
"Are you going to take good care of this bar and this crazy man when I'm not here? "
The question lands hard. She's not asking about mopping floors or mixing drinks. She's asking something bigger, something that has to do with the way she looked at Tex when she grabbed his face and said you're okay. She's asking will I look after Tex.
"Yes," I say. "I will."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she nods.
"Then welcome to the family, baby. Lord, help you. I'm glad you're here."
She walks past me into the bar, and I hear her say "Oh, Tex. Oh no. Oh, honey, look at the floors," and then she's in full assessment mode, walking the wreckage, and Tex follows her. I stand in the doorway and breathe around the thing in my chest that's cracking wide open.
Baby.
She called me baby. Nobody has ever called me baby in a voice that sounded like that. Warm and given freely, like she decided I belong to her approximately ninety seconds after meeting me.
Over the next week, Sheila takes over. Not in a hostile way. In a maternal, efficient, don't-argue-with-me way that moves the entire operation forward at twice the speed. She assesses the damage, makes lists, prioritizes, assigns tasks.
Tex handles the heavy construction. I handle the organization and logistics. Sheila handles everything else, which turns out to be an astonishing amount of everything.
She also handles me.
I don't know how it happens. One minute I'm sorting supplies in the storage room, and the next she's standing next to me with a sandwich and a glass of sweet tea and a look that says eat this right now or I will stand here until you do.
She doesn't ask if I'm hungry. She doesn't wait for me to mention food.
She just appears with food and a stare. I eat because my nervous system is not capable of refusing Sheila.
"You're too thin," she tells me on the second day, watching me eat a plate of pasta she made on the bar's stove. "When's the last time someone fed you properly? Before Tex, I mean."
I can't answer that.
"Well," she says, "that's over now. You will eat three meals a day in this bar or I will come find you. And I will find you. I found a man who owed this bar a ninety-dollar tab hiding in a crawl space under a beach house in 2019. You don't want to test me."
She calls me baby, sugar, and honey in rotation, and every time she does it, I like it more.
She touches my shoulder when she walks past, light and brief, and the first time she does it, I flinch and she pulls her hand back and says "sorry, baby" and doesn't do it again for two days.
When she tries again, on the third day, her hand landing soft on my shoulder as she passes behind me at the bar, I don't flinch.
I feel it. I let it stay. Her hand is small and warm.
It lasts maybe one second and when it's gone, I can still feel the ghost of it, and it doesn't feel like a threat.
By the end of the week, Sheila has declared the interior of the bar a long-term project. The floors need to be fully replaced. The drywall needs to be finished. The electrical needs professional work. It's going to be months.
"But that doesn't mean we can't open," she says during a morning meeting at the bar top, which is how she describes the three of us standing around drinking coffee while she tells us what to do.
"We've got a parking lot the size of a football field.
We've got the grill. We've got a kitchen that works.
There's no reason we can't run this business outside while the inside gets fixed.
We've always been an open-air beach bar anyway. "
Tex looks at her and smiles. "Mama Sheila," he says, "you're a genius."
"I know. Now stop talking and start moving tables."
We spend two days setting it up. We drag tables and chairs from the event space on the second floor down to the parking lot.
We string Christmas lights, the ones Tex's dad put up years ago that survived the hurricane, across a framework of poles and rope that creates a canopy of warm white light over the seating area.
Tex hooks up the big speaker system from the bar to a generator and runs it outside.