The Mechanics of Mistletoe - Liz Isaacson Page 0,19
my mother and my aunt. And a whole network of cowboys on the surrounding ranches. We’ll get everything cleaned up in no time.”
“Is that who would come help if I needed it?”
“Yes,” Bear said, clearing his throat. “Do you think you need it?”
“My parents do,” Sammy admitted. “My dad…he won’t like it, but he needs the help.”
“I can let them know,” Bear said. “I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.”
Silence fell between them, and Sammy’s worry started in earnest. “I’m scared of what I’ll find at the shop,” she admitted, and it felt amazing to share her burden with someone else. She’d been carrying everything for so long that she almost wept.
“No matter what we find,” Bear said. “We’ll fix it up. Okay, Sammy?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice pitching up. How could she explain to him how nice it was to have his calls and texts on her phone? “Listen, Bear,” she said, her voice still wobbly and wrong. She found she didn’t care. “Thank you for caring enough to call.”
He didn’t say anything, and Sammy’s heartbeat went into a tailspin.
“I mean, I just feel like I have no one to help me,” she said, the dam breaking wide open. “My parents are older, and I have to be the strong one with everything. Sometimes I just feel….” She couldn’t continue, because there weren’t adequate words to explain the depth of her exhaustion sometimes.
“I understand,” Bear said, his voice slightly on the gruff side. “I do care about you, Sammy, and you can always call me when you need help. Always.” He cleared his throat, and Sammy smiled at the nerves she felt through the line.
“I’m at the shop,” she said, turning the last corner. “I have to go. I’ll see you in a minute?”
“I’m about ten away still,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, glad her voice had returned to normal. “Bye, Bear.”
She let him disconnect the call as her eyes swept everything they could, trying to see everything at once.
She saw two trucks in front of the shop—Logan and Jason. They both came out onto the road as she pulled in beside Jason’s vehicle. She turned off the engine and got out in one movement, saying, “What do we have?”
“Not too terrible,” Logan said, already moving toward the shop. “We’ve un-boarded the windows, and we didn’t lose any of those.”
“Good news,” Sammy said, and she could use a lot more of that. She glanced right down the street to the pet salon. Lisa Gilroy owned that, and her car sat out front. Her windows hadn’t fared as well, and sadness crept through Sammy.
“We lost the sign,” Jason said. “Everyone on the block did.” He indicated up and down the street, and Sammy saw what he meant. There was nothing taller than the buildings left. No telephone poles; no signs. The roofs had taken the most damage, almost like the twisters hadn’t quite touched down here, but had simply kissed this part of town with the bottoms of their funnels, sucking away the tallest items.
“Inside?” she asked, facing the double glass doors that led into her shop.
“Nothing too bad,” Jason said, leading the way. Sammy followed him, instantly smelling more antifreeze than she’d like.
“Something’s leaking,” she said, hurrying around the counter and into the back of the shop, where the bays were.
The cars they’d been working on still sat there, and Sammy couldn’t find any difference between the scene now and what she’d left yesterday. “You can smell that, right?” she asked Logan.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s inspect everything.”
They split up, and Sammy let her nose lead her to the back doors of the shop, which raised like a garage door. They usually operated on electricity, but with that out, she was able to lift them manually.
“Here it is,” she called to the others. Logan and Jason joined her, and they faced the wall of cars that had been pushed right up against the corner of the building.
“Another foot on that diesel, and we wouldn’t have been able to open the door,” Jason said.
Sammy agreed, and she stepped outside, crouching down at the edge of the pool of antifreeze that had come from one of the displaced vehicles. These were cars and trucks and even a tractor she hadn’t gotten to yet, and she didn’t want to call their owners and say they’d been damaged.
She sighed as she stood up, her heart heavy.
“Sammy?” Bear called, and that made everything in her life lighter.