Diane Yost, regional vice president of Verdance Home & Garden, began her Brand Walk at 2:01 p.m. She did it in silence.
She was fifty-eight, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a cord. She kept a pocketful of butterscotch candies and unwrapped them one at a time. She carried a notebook the size of a playing card and wrote in it with a pencil stub. In twenty minutes, she said exactly four words, and two of them were "Thank you."
Jace walked beside her, talking enough for both of them.
"So this is our lime lemonade station," he said. "Very refreshing energy. And here's the balloon arch, which really frames the brand moment. And the DJ is playing a curated playlist called Grow Vibes."
Diane looked at the DJ. The DJ was twenty-four and nervous. He was playing a song about sunshine while the western sky turned the color of an old bruise.
She wrote something in the notebook.
Then she reached the front doors, where the staff were lined up for the compliance check. Nine pressed polos, sleeves creased and tucked. Merle's crease went straight to the cuff now. Kenzie had ironed hers twice.
And at the end of the line was Hank, untucked and flawless, hands clasped behind his back.
Diane stopped in front of him. She looked at the level hem. She looked at the collar. She looked at the name on his badge, and then, for a long moment, at his face.
She wrote something else in the notebook. Nobody breathed.
Then the wind arrived.
It came across the parking lot all at once, like someone had opened a door to a much bigger room. The balloon arch bent sideways. Lemonade cups went skittering across the asphalt. The DJ's tent lifted one leg off the ground like a dog considering a hydrant.
Merle looked up. "Ten minutes," he said. "Maybe eight."
Jace laughed nervously. "My app says—"
"Ten minutes," Merle repeated.
Hank turned to me. He didn't turn to Diane, the most senior person in the parking lot. He didn't turn to Jace. He turned to me, because I was the store manager and this was my store.
"Ma'am," he said. "Request permission to set the Heavy Weather Bill."
I had forgotten, until that moment, that he would need to ask. He always asked. He knocked on open doors.
"Granted," I said.
Hank raised his voice. I had never heard him raise it before. It wasn't a shout. It was the voice of someone who had once given orders across a flight deck, and it carried to the back fence.
"Set the Heavy Weather Bill. All hands to your stations. This is not a drill."
And the store moved.
I had watched those quarterly drills for three years and rolled my eyes through every one of them. Kenzie had graded them. Merle had gone to lunch during one. I had never once thought about what they were for.
Now I watched fourteen people in lime polos go exactly where a laminated diagram had told them to go.
Merle was already on the forklift. He moved two pallets of topsoil against the open side of the shade house to block the wind. He did it in one smooth pass, like parallel parking.
Marco and Josie took down the hanging baskets, forty of them, and passed them hand to hand into the greenhouse. The Vukovich brothers rolled the benches of annuals under the steel roof of the loading dock. One of them pushed while the other one steered and complained.
Kenzie's station was Customer Muster. She went through the yard with her phone held up like a clipboard. She gathered every shopper in a calm, cheerful voice and walked them into the main building.
"Inside, please, there's a storm," she said. "Free lemonade. It's very refreshing. It has an energy."
She counted heads at the door. "Twenty-two customers," she called to Hank. "Twenty-two inside."
"Very well."
My station was the registers and the front doors. I stood there and watched the yard empty in under four minutes. From the doorway, the lime polos stood out against the gray like lit-up road signs.
"Say what you want about the color, ma'am," Hank said, as he passed me with a rack of seed packets. "I can see every one of them from the back fence."
It was the nicest thing anybody had said about Verdance Lime in two months.
The balloon arch went at 2:46.
It tore loose from its sandbags and rose up over the parking lot all at once, forty lime-green balloons in a long, startled curve. It hung there for a second over Route 9. Then it sailed east toward the county line, waving.
Jace ran after it. He actually ran, in his perfect polo, across the lot with his arms up, as if he could catch a thirty-foot arch with his hands.
"Mr. Ulrich," Hank called, without shouting. "Let it go. Get under cover."
Jace stopped. He watched the arch shrink over the trees. Then he turned and jogged back toward the dock just as the first hailstones hit the asphalt.
They were the size of peas, then the size of marbles. The noise on the steel roof of the dock was enormous, like a thousand people dropping cutlery at once. The lights in the store flickered once and went out. Every register went black.
The customers inside made the small collective noise that people make when the power goes out. A baby started crying. Somebody said, "Oh, come on."
Hank appeared at my elbow with a hardbound notebook and two pens.
"Hand ledger, ma'am," he said. "Item, price, total. Write it down. Ring it up when the power's back."
"You had this ready?"
"Page three of the Bill."
Kenzie and I sold seventeen bags of potting soil by flashlight. Nobody left. It turned out people will wait out a hailstorm happily if someone writes their receipt by hand. One man asked if he could keep his.
Near the windows, I spotted Bea Underwood. It was Thursday, tomato day.
She had come for her six seedlings and walked straight into a regional vice president and a hailstorm. She didn't seem bothered by either. She was moving down a bench of petunias with her pruning shears, deadheading them one by one.
"Keeps my hands busy, sugar," she told a frightened woman beside her. "You want to try? Snip right above the leaf."
By the end of the storm, four customers had learned how to deadhead petunias. The petunias had never looked better.
I didn't see Diane Yost at first. I thought she had gone to her car.
Then I saw her through the back windows. She was out at the greenhouse door in her gray suit, holding it shut against the wind with one shoulder. Hail was bouncing off her glasses. She was unwrapping a butterscotch.
Hank saw her too. He went out through the side door, crouched low, and crossed the yard to her.
I couldn't hear what they said. Later, Marco told me. He had been inside the greenhouse, holding the other side of that door.
"Ma'am," Hank had said. "That station's covered. I can take it."
"Then give me one that isn't," Diane had said.
Hank had thought for exactly one second. Then he had pointed to the wicker bins, which had blown over at the end of the hose aisle. Thirty tangled hoses lay in the rain like spilled spaghetti.
"Hoses, ma'am," he had said. "They'll kink if they freeze like that."
So the regional vice president of Verdance Home & Garden spent the next ten minutes in the rain, beside Hank, untangling garden hoses. He showed her how to flemish one. She got it right on the second try.
The storm passed at 3:14. The sky went from bruise to silver to an ordinary afternoon blue, as if nothing had happened.
Hank walked the whole yard and came back with his clipboard. He read the damage report to me at the front doors, standing at a kind of easy attention.
"Zero injuries, zero plants lost. One cracked terracotta pot, twelve-inch. One DJ tent, bent."
He paused. "Forty balloons, lost at sea. Lemonade, diluted."
Merle came around the corner on the forklift. He looked at the clearing sky.
"Dry till Sunday," he said.
Jace was standing next to me, dripping. His perfect polo was soaked through. It clung to him in wrinkles. He looked down at himself, and then at Hank.
Hank's polo was soaked too. But somehow, impossibly, it was still pressed. The hem still hung level. Even wet, it looked like it had shown up on purpose.
"How," Jace said quietly. "How is yours still—"
"Starch, sir," Hank said. "Laundry product. Not a modification."
Diane Yost walked up to us. Her suit was ruined. There was a small piece of hail melting in her hair. She was holding the laminated Heavy Weather Bill, which she must have taken from beside the register.
"Who wrote this?" she asked.
It was the first thing she had said to me all day.
"I did, ma'am," Hank said.
Diane looked at the page for a long time. She looked at the diagram and the legend. Then she wrote something in her small notebook and closed it.
"Mr. Varga," she said. "My hotel, tomorrow at 0800."
She tucked the notebook into her ruined jacket. "Wear whatever you consider your uniform."
She walked to her car without another word.
At 9:15 that night, my phone rang. It was Lorna.
"Sadie," she said. "I'm sorry to call so late. I need to tell somebody."
"Is he okay?"
"He's in the bedroom," she said. "He's been standing in front of the closet for an hour."
I didn't say anything. I knew what she meant.
"The last time he stood like that," Lorna said, "was the Saturday after he retired."
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