By Alaa Elassar, CNN
(CNN) — Months after moving to Kerrville, Texas, John Melendrez stood in a neighborhood deli with a sandwich he just realized he couldn’t pay for. His only credit card was declined, and as he apologized to the owner, Chong Chin, embarrassment washed over him.
The two men had never met. But as Melendrez turned to leave empty-handed, Chin looked up from behind the counter, smiled, and waved him back. “Don’t worry about it,” Melendrez remembers Chin saying. “We need you to eat.”
It was a small act of grace, but one that lingered long after the meal.
Six years later, their roles have reversed.
After sweeping floodwater swallowed Greengrocers – Chin’s gourmet grocery story – Melendrez is now helping his neighbor, cutting drywall and gathering volunteers to haul trash bags stuffed with mud-caked debris, ruined furniture and waterlogged memories.
For the second year in a row, this quiet Hill Country town is digging itself out of a catastrophe that has mercilessly taken a community trying to heal and set them back on the path of mourning.
About a year’s worth of rain fell in parts of southern Texas last week and authorities said “a large and deadly flood wave” moved down the Guadalupe River, before it crested at nearly 38 feet in Center Point Thursday morning. A river gauge downstream from there in Comfort rose 25 feet in a single hour.
A year ago, historic flooding in Hill Country killed more than 130 people, including 25 young girls attending summer camp and two camp counselors. Their deaths shattered families across Texas and far beyond.
This year, two people were killed. The heartbreak was just as devastating.
Jennie Steward was away visiting family when the flood struck. For a few agonizing hours, first responders desperately searched for her husband, John Mark Steward. Their home had been ripped from its foundation and swept into floodwaters with him still inside.
“Wherever you are, my love, I am going to search high and low for you,” she wrote on Facebook, pleading for anyone who might have seen her husband, known affectionately as Mark to nearly everyone in Kerrville. “My best friend, my confidant. I love you like crazy.”
But hours later, she confirmed he had been found dead. Their third wedding anniversary was just one day earlier.
“Mark was such a loving soul to everyone around him. He made you feel seen and loved, no matter who you were,” Steward told CNN. “He completed me and I completed him.”
Mark, a stepfather to her children, had recently embraced a new title: grandfather.
“Our Ellie had his heart wrapped around her finger, literally and figuratively,” she told CNN. “She was his whole world. We got to spend Father’s Day together this year and it was the most beautiful day.”
Now Steward is grieving not only the loss of her husband, but also the loss of the home they built together. Friends, neighbors and her church have rallied around her, raising money and helping her navigate the unimaginable. Their support, she says, is the one steady thing left to hold onto.
“Our garden, our memories, everything material is gone but we have our friends, our church and our community,” she said. “I could not be in a better place for this to ha