The Mechanics of Mistletoe - Liz Isaacson Page 0,34

until tomorrow to find out.

Chapter Eleven

At eleven-thirty the next morning, Bear met Ranger’s eyes and nodded. “Go on,” Ranger said. “Tell Sammy hi.”

“And Lincoln,” Bear said. For some reason, he didn’t want his cousins or any of his brothers to think he was shirking around Seven Sons Ranch so he could sneak off and kiss his girlfriend.

He had been thinking about kissing Sammy, but that prospect seemed so far off that it was a distant dot on the horizon. They’d held hands a few times. He hadn’t even shared a meal with her that wasn’t full of awkwardness and nerves. Today wouldn’t be a candlelit, romantic experience, just like taking tacos to her family hadn’t been.

He’d had a good time, though, because Sammy’s parents were kind, and they’d expressed so much gratitude for his help on their house.

He’d told them over and over that it wasn’t just him. That all five of his brothers had come, and all three of his cousins. Skyler, Micah, Liam, Tripp, and Rhett Walker had too. Wade Rhinehart and his adult son, as well as Tammy and her husband. It really hadn’t taken long to re-stack some wood and pile debris and garbage along the road.

Now the roof, Bear had spent some time on. He’d done the rest of the demo the tornado had left behind and prepped it so whoever Sammy could hire would be ready to start. She’d gotten Micah to agree to do it, and when Bear had texted him last night, he’d learned that Micah just needed the supplies to come in.

Trucks arrived daily in Three Rivers, some with food and water, some with backup generators for those in hospitals or who needed electricity to keep medicines cold. Some brought construction supplies and animal feed, and some brought clothing and household items. Bear hadn’t had a need for any of it yet, but he knew Sammy went to get water for her family every morning. When he’d asked her if they had food, she’d said, “Loads. My mother liked to stock up during case lot sales.”

Food out of a can was better than no food at all, and Bear had seen the volunteers passing out freeze-dried packets of food that morning. Anything was better than that, in his opinion, and he was grateful his parents had taught him to always have a store of food and water at the ranch. He hadn’t understood why growing up. They’d never used it that he knew of, and he remembered Mother making a “pantry feast” a couple times a year to clear out the about-to-expire food in their cellar.

He’d hated the pantry feast, because it seemed like a lot of mushy food combined into one dish. His father had kept the chest freezer in the cellar full of meat and bread, and as Bear and Ranger had taken over the ranch, they’d added some of the more convenient boxed and bagged freezer foods too.

They had a lot of mouths to feed at Shiloh Ridge, but Ace had been taking care of the food, and he said they had enough for another month at least.

The grocery stores were open during the daylight hours, as none of the three in town had suffered terrible damage. But the lines were long as goods had to be rung up by hand, the totals calculated by hand, and people could only use cash to pay.

Bear had plenty of that on-hand too—another lesson from his ancestors. His grandmother had lived through the Great Depression, and before she’d died, she’d patted Bear’s hand and told him stories of her father giving her a five-dollar bill and telling her to go buy milk, eggs, and bread.

“He walked behind me,” Grandmother had said in her old, shaking voice. “The whole way to the store. Once there, I slipped inside while a wall of men blocked him. They held his arms and searched his pockets, looking for money.”

The moral of the story was that those that had cash money were able to buy what they needed. She’d told Bear to keep cash in “every cupboard and closet you can, my teddy. You never know where you’ll be when you need it.”

Bear had taken her advice to heart, and when he’d had to pack everything he owned to move out of the homestead to raze it, he’d found Altoid tins with a few bills and coins in them. He’d found envelopes stuffed with fifties. He’d found a miniature safe he’d completely forgotten about—with ten thousand