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Someone from the state emergency management agency had shown up. The TSP post was too crowded. Clay had redirected them to the library after a quick call to Jake.
Jake was good with that. He had completed two ten-hour shifts coordinating fire-and-rescue in the last two days. But he could still be useful somehow.
If the bureaucrats would shut up long enough to get things going. Of course, it didn’t help that Liam hadn’t been fed yet, and his son was no doubt wet.
Liam was not a patient baby. Jake did his best.
When Celia walked in, looking like the goddess she was, Jake finally felt like things were about to get back under control.
She took Liam without him having to ask. And like the experienced mother she was, she had him clean, dry, and fed within minutes.
And then she did something with a bolt of fabric he kept in the children’s section for dress-up time that had Liam secured to her chest, where the baby could watch everything going on around him.
And it left Celia’s hands free. Hands she told him were his, however he needed them.
At this point, their job was just to babysit the Department of Emergency Management workers, however they could.
“I have a list of names of people in our county reporting storm damage, ranging in severity,” Jake told the leader of the dozen or so DEM workers. “Our town lost two people. We had forty-two injured, most in the outlying areas. I’m not sure the numbers for Barrattville. They were hit with a lot of flooding.”
“We’ll need to see each report and visually inspect before we can offer aid, according to our charts.”
Jake had his opinions on that—but it didn’t matter. Value would take care of its people the way they needed taken care of.
They always did. They always would