Let me tell you about the penny first; otherwise it won't make sense later. I was the only girl taking metal shop one year in middle school, and I found this penny. Someone had been practicing using the metal shop tools, and had sawed a piece off it, and drilled three little holes in it on the drill press, bent it, hammered it, put a brass rivet through it, and a lot of other abuse. Being a girl, I felt kind of sorry for it, so I decided to make it into jewelry. I put a jump ring through one of the holes and threaded it onto a steel ball chain, and wore it as a necklace. The next day, I got asked out by a boy I had liked for a long time, and I attributed this stroke of luck to the penny. From then on, I called it my lucky penny, and wore it whenever I wanted some extra luck.
Well, there was this tornado. I know what you're going to say, but hear me out, this does get better. It was pretty soon after I graduated college. I was in a strange town, and I was driving back to my hotel from a job interview on a stormy afternoon when I saw the tornado, so I pulled off the road into a shopping center parking lot and ran into the only store that was open, a Toys R Us. I told the store manager that I had seen a tornado outside, and right then the tornado siren started to sound outside, so she announced over the PA system that everyone had to get to the fitting rooms in the center part of the store and huddle together. So that's what we all did. And it was during this terrifying experience that I ran into the guy.
I guess to most people he was about average-looking, but to me, handsome is as handsome does. He was a young guy, tall, kind of thin, with dark, almost black, hair and heavy eyebrows over dark eyes. His jaw was strongly square-shaped, chin cleft. He had large, bony hands with long fingers, but they were clean, the nails trimmed. He was right next to me in the huddle. Our eyes met, and he smiled reassuringly at me. Then the power went out.
Now that the muzak was off, and the fluorescent lights had quit buzzing, all we could hear was the tornado siren and the hammering of the hail that had begun to come down. A little kid next to me began to cry; a boy about seven or eight. I picked him up into my lap and wrapped my arms around him protectively. Then I felt strong, warm arms wrap around me in a similar fashion, from behind, and legs stretch out on either side of my hips on the floor. I felt breath on my ear, a heartbeat, rapid, anxious. It had to be him, he was the closest man to me in the crowd; and whoever was holding me was definitely a man. I could feel his uneasy sex shift half-hard in his pants, just at my lower back.
The wind and rain outside whipped the roof more and more violently. There was thunder and lightning. There was a deep, ominous rumble, shaking the ground; "like a freight train" doesn't quite describe it. Maybe like a freight train, times a hundred. Then there was all this crashing and banging against the outside of the building, crunch of glass and metal. Cars, unmistakably. It was in the parking lot. It would come for us next. I started to pray, not for myself, but for the little kid in my arms. I know that sounds cheesy. This next part is even worse. All I could think of was that line from the Lord of the Rings movie that Arwen says when Frodo is about to die: "What grace is given me, let it pass to him." So I thought that over and over and over.
It must have worked, because the tornado passed us over and dissipated soon afterward. We didn't know that's what happened; we just heard the rumbling fade and go away, and the rain continued like nothing had happened. Outside there was the siren, and car alarms. Inside there was anxious silence.
A sweaty, fidgety half-hour or so later, the siren stopped, which people took as their cue that it was safe to go outside and see what the damage was. I gave the little kid back to his mother, from whom he had been separated in the confusion of the huddle. We all looked outside and saw what turned out to be eight cars piled up against the side of the store, one of them mine. I went outside to call triple-A on my cell phone, but there was no signal. I learned later that the tornado had taken out the only two cellular towers for a hundred miles.
"Do you need a ride somewhere?" A guy said from behind me. I turned and looked, and it was the same guy who had wrapped his arms around me in the store.
"Yeah," I said. I told him the name of my hotel.
"That's my van." He pointed out a blue-green Honda minivan, dimpled all over from the hail. "It's unlocked, you can go ahead and get inside out of the rain. I'm going to see if anyone else needs a lift."
