she saw every day that kept her from accepting what few invitations came her way. This was way out there. He was a survivalist / conspiracy theorist. No fine ass or muscled, tattooed arms or even pretty eyes could make up for that fault.
“Get all the cash you can,” he continued, his reluctance so obvious it was as if he was having to push the words out. “Stock up on staples, canned goods, batteries.” Then he’d evidently had enough because he ended with an impatient, “Just Google it.”
The back door opened and behind them Aunt Carol called out a friendly “Hello.” Jernigan’s gaze flashed to her and evidently that was his cue to leave, two people being one too many, because he pushed through the front door and headed for his truck.
Well, that had been weird.
Carol glanced through the front window as Jernigan stowed his groceries in the truck cab then began pumping his allotment of gas. “Man, I just missed the hottie. I shouldn’t have taken so much time with my hair.” She flicked her fingertips at her short bleached blond locks that were highlighted with a streak of cotton candy pink, and batted her blue eyes. And then she laughed. Carol had a fantastic laugh, rollicking and infectious; she put everything she had into it.
Sela cleared her throat. “He just told me we’re about to get hit with a solar storm that might knock the power out for months.” It sounded just as ridiculous coming out of her mouth as it had coming out of his. And she didn’t refer to him as “the hottie” even though she agreed with the description, because that would only spur Aunt Carol to start prodding her to ask him out, as if she’d ever asked out a man in her life.
Carol made a snorting sound as she retrieved a broom from the utility closet. She helped out at the store on occasion, usually early in the day before Olivia, the fifteen-year-old granddaughter she’d raised from the age of five, got out of school. As she began to sweep, she sighed. “Damn it. Why are all the good-looking men nuts? I should have known he was one of those when he bought that old place on Cove Mountain. Who wants to live in such an isolated place alone? Why? And then he trucked up all those solar panels, and I hear he has a ham radio.” She glanced up at Sela. “Don’t judge me. I’m not a horrible gossip, but people talk. And I listen.”
Sela wasn’t sure when having a ham radio had become a sign of being a nut; she knew at least one other person in the valley who owned one. The thing was, Jernigan had never seemed like a nut to her—the opposite, in fact. He struck her as a man who had dealt with some hard realities.
She leaned on the front counter while she tried to square her instincts with her doubts. What if—? “What if he’s right?” It was an alarming idea, one she hesitated to voice. Immediately she had to fight down a sense of panic, because she couldn’t even imagine what life would be like without electricity for months.
Carol stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom. She wasn’t much wider than that broom, truth be told. She rolled her eyes and made a face. “I still have my Y2K windup radio. You were a kid when the calendar went from 1999 to 2000, so you might not have paid any attention to all the hysteria, but seriously, there were people who thought the same thing would happen when computers tried and failed to make the switch. Banks would collapse. Power plants would go offline. Chaos! Pfft.” She started sweeping again. “Nothing happened. I’d stocked up on enough toilet paper I didn’t have to buy any for a year. And I have a nifty windup radio for emergencies, not that I’ve ever needed it.”
Maybe Carol was right, and nothing would happen.
Then again . . . what if it did? She’d be silly if she acted on the warning of a man she barely knew and nothing happened, but if she didn’t act and his warning was right on target, then she was stupid.
She’d rather be silly than stupid. Silly was embarrassing at worst, while stupid could be deadly. That wasn’t a chance she was willing to take.
She grabbed a shopping basket and started filling it with a few essentials. She wouldn’t clean off the shelves, wouldn’t