CABIN CREEK, W.Va. (AP) - How is life like a pizza? You can assemble the most delicious ingredients, gather the best cheese and the tastiest sauce, have the directions right there in front of you.
And you still don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.
“Oh, man,” said Steve Slack with a laugh.
How else to sum up everything he and his family have been through?
“It’s been rough,” he said, the laughter fading.
It’s a tale that spans more than one devastating loss, the comfort of family, new-found love. And hope.
At the center of it all: Up Da Hollor, the long-dreamed-of pizza joint he and his wife, Jeannie Slack, opened - of all days - on Dec. 24.
“Let me tell you about that,” he said, laughing again.
OPENING DAY
After months of renovating a run-down building with the help of a friend, Steve and Jeannie Slack quit their jobs and planned to open their new Cabin Creek business the day after Christmas.
“We got everything done, we’re ready to go, we got to the 23rd and my oldest son, Steven, was like, ‘Let’s open up tomorrow.’ And I was like, ‘You’re goofy, opening up on Christmas Eve. Ain’t nobody wants pizza on Christmas Eve.’”
“I said, ‘You’d be surprised,’” chimed in Jeannie, who took on the role of step-mom to four of his boys when they got married four years ago.
Steve figured it would be a good chance to get everybody trained and up to speed on a slow day. They called a handful of workers and posted the news on Facebook.
“I said, ‘We ain’t really gonna push it. We’ll just go with the flow and see what happens.’ Well, by George, it was slammin’ through the wall,” Steve said, shaking his head.
At one point, there was a two-hour wait.
“These tables were packed. We had calls coming in left and right. We probably put out a hundred pizzas that day,” said Jeannie, waving her hand around the sports-themed dining room.
It stayed that way even after the holiday.
“A couple days of doing that, I looked at her and said, ‘We can’t keep doing this. We’re going to have to hire five, six people,’” he said.
They both called their mothers in to help. Things didn’t slow down for weeks.
Until they got some unexpected news.
THE PHONE CALL
With one son in college and another who’d just left for Marine Corps boot camp, there were two boys living at home, 16-year-old Josh and 12-year-old Ethan. Things were busy, but manageable.
“That’s when we get the phone call about my sister being in the hospital, Feb. 13,” Steve said.
Stephanie Ann Hamilton was 44 and generally healthy, but had sudden, unexplained breathing problems and a high temperature.
“I said, ‘Mom, it’ll be fine. She’s at the hospital. She’ll get some treatment, no big deal,’” he remembered.
“Then she called back and said, ‘It’s bad,’ and the nurse was in the background and she said, ‘Y’all really need to get down here now.’ So we jumped in the car,” Jeannie said.
They had been at the Charleston Area Medical Center’s General Hospital for about three hours when they got the shocking word that Stephanie - who’d tested negative for the flu - had died.
“It was like, what are we gonna do?” he said.
“One of the guys on the respiratory team … said he was 100 percent sure it was one of the first cases of COVID,” said Steven Slack the second, 21, Steve’s oldest son.
The Kanawha Charleston Health Department health director, Dr. Sherri Young, said because of the lack of available tests there probably were COVID-19 cases in the area before they were detected, but added that commenting on any one case would be speculative.
Whatever her specific cause of death, Stephanie Ann Hamilton left behind four children, two of them underage - 17-year-old Michael and his sister, 11-year-old Hope.
Michael remembers her great sense of fun, her constant laugh. Hope remembers the coupon queen who took her on shopping sprees and hunted for bargains.
Her sudden passing was hard on everyone. But for Jeannie Slack, it also conjured up hard memories of another unexpected loss.
JEANNIE
It was February 2000. Cadi McCormick, 8, and Chelsea McCormick, 10, were cheerleaders and elementary school students.
“They were like salt and pepper, day and night, but they were sisters and they loved each other,” said Jeannie, their mother.
They were walking along the side of W.Va. 94 with their dad just outside of Hernshaw when the load shifted on a coal truck rounding a curve. Both girls were killed just a few hundred feet from the family home where Jeannie was waiting.
It happened on Feb. 17, different years but the same date that Stephanie Hamilton was buried.
“I went down the wrong road,” Jeannie said. “I did drugs for 11 years.”
For a while, the meth she turned to eased the pain - or at least blurred it.
She went through every bit of a substantial settlement and then one day, she woke up.
“I realized the rampage I was bringing in and out of people’s lives, my mom’s life, my sister’s life. And my baby sister was in Florida and I called her and told her I needed help,” she said.
That was Oct. 16, 2011. She went into treatment, and eventually began working at the facility.
Five years later, with an ailing mom, she decided to return to West Virginia. On the way home, she and Steve, who had dated before, began talking once again.
They got married in 2016.
Even now, “I wouldn’t try to change this life. There’s days I get up and it’s harder than I ever imagined, but I just know now that God’s doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
“I look at everything, the way everything went in my life and think, this is where I’m supposed to be. Everything with Hope and Michael, it’s taught me how to love again, in a way I thought I’d never feel again.”
REDEFINING FAMILY
The grim task of telling Stephanie’s children about her passing fell to Steve. The older two already had other living arrangements but things weren’t so clear for the younger two.
“We asked them both, ‘Who do y’all want to come stay with?’ And they both said with us,” he said. Pointing to tall, lanky Michael who towers over him, he added, “This one right here about made me cry because he looked up and said, ‘Well, if it’s OK with you, I’d like to stay with you.’”
It was more than OK.
For one thing, “it kind of gives my wife her motherhood back,” Steve said.
Though it certainly did complicate things.
For starters, the family had lost “pretty much everything” to a fire in 2018. They’d been squeezed into a three-bedroom home ever since - and with one son now in the Marine Corps and another in college, they were finally starting to breathe a little.
Steve and Jeannie became legal guardians for Hope and Michael around the time COVID-19 hit and schools shut down.
Two new family members put the home back at max capacity.
“So now we’re saving to add on another room,” said Steve, “so Hope can have her own space.”
One thing that wasn’t an option: slowing down the pizza business.
“No, we couldn’t. I quit my job to do this, so there was no way we could just stop doing this because of everything that happened - it’s our income now. I had to make sure this business lasted,” he said.
They applied for and received a forgivable loan through the Kanawha County Commission’s Ukan program to help pay for a new HVAC system.
And the business continues to thrive.
All of the kids help here and there, Steve added, even Hope.
“I got a little costume. She’ll stand out with a pizza outfit on, pizza hat, holding her sign a little bit,” he grins at the description.
It is funny, he added, how everyone’s definition of family has changed.
“I think family is anybody you can put all your trust into and know that they will always be behind you no matter what you do,” Michael said. “People that will take care of you without asking anything in return.”
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