Chapter 11
Tyson pulled open the door to the physical therapy clinic, his anticipation for today’s appointment already off the charts. He hadn’t seen Winnie in a professional capacity since before Christmas, and he hadn’t seen her in a personal capacity since their Sunday picnic at Eagle Bear Lake.
They’d been texting a lot, but with the holidays over and the vacation schedules at the ranches and orchard where he worked done, Ty had returned to Lone Star on Monday, and was working with his crew at the orchard on Tuesday.
Classes had resumed at Signs for Success yesterday, though Winnie’s first beginning sign language class actually started tonight. Ty had gone ahead and signed up for that one as well, knowing he needed to do a lot more work to be proficient in ASL.
A new receptionist waited at the desk when Ty arrived, and he said, “I’m Tyson Greene. I have an appointment with Winnie Landry at eleven-fifteen.”
The girl, who seemed to be about fifteen, looked up at him with wide blue eyes. “Did you not get our message, Mister Greene?”
“No,” he said, pausing though he’d already picked up the pen to sign in. “What message?”
“Miss Landry is out today,” she said. “I called a couple of hours ago and wondered if we might reschedule you with Melissa Ryher? If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to reschedule you with Winnie next week.”
“Winnie’s out today?”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said. “Yesterday, too. She’s not feeling well.”
Ty immediately wanted to leave the clinic, find her favorite Chinese food, and go see what she needed. He’d texted with her last night, and she had not mentioned that she’d stayed home from work, nor had she told him that she would not be at their appointment today.
He signed his name and pulled out his phone to text Winnie. You’re sick? Can I bring you lunch?
“So are you okay with Melissa?” the receptionist asked, and Ty nodded absently, watching his phone and willing Winnie to respond. She didn’t.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, already calculating how long it would be before he could get to Winnie’s house to see how she was doing.
Melissa spent half of his appointment reviewing his notes and making him show her things that he’d been doing for months. Then she told him to continue to do those things, and said he should come see Winnie next week.
“Glad I paid for that,” he grumbled as he stepped onto the elevator and left the clinic.
It had started to rain while he’d been inside, and he hurried to his truck and got it started so the heater would begin to blow. Then he pulled out his phone and checked his notes, because he couldn’t remember the name of the Chinese restaurant Winnie had given him exactly a week ago now.
“Wok This Way,” he said. “That’s right. Chicken teriyaki rice bowl.”
He texted Winnie again: I’m getting lunch and stopping by. Tell me now if it’s a bad time.
She still didn’t answer, and Ty didn’t want to wait for her permission anyway. She was sick, and he wanted to make her life easier if he could.
So he looked up the restaurant and navigated to what old-time Three Rivers residents called New Downtown, which was a series of high-rise buildings filled with various companies, offices, and yes, restaurants.
In fact, one of the buildings housed several restaurants on the top floor or the roof, providing amazing views of Three Rivers and the surrounding Texas Panhandle.
Wok This Way stood at street level, but Ty had to park down the block and make the walk to get there. He found a lunchtime crowd waiting in line and a complicated menu board that he thankfully had time to figure out before it was his turn to order.
He thought about all the things he would like in a teriyaki chicken bowl, and then ordered the opposite of that for Winnie.
He got a noodle bowl with steak and wok sauce, water chestnuts, and sugar snap peas—something he would take a picture of and send to his mother, just to prove to her that he ate vegetables from time to time.
With everything finally in his possession, he limped back to his truck and aimed himself toward Winnie’s house.
She always pulled all the way into her garage and closed the door before she got out of the car, something Tyson had witnessed her doing after church a few days ago.
When he’d asked her about it, she told him it simply made her feel safe, and she couldn’t imagine getting out of her car with the door still open.
He couldn’t tell if she was home or not, but her quaint little cottage made him smile. He collected their lunch and texted her for a third time.
Okay, I’ve got lunch and I’m at your house. You haven’t answered, and I’m a little bit worried that you might be asleep.
He waited a couple of minutes and still didn’t get a response.
He looked at the rice bowl, the empty-for-now front porch next door, and then Winnie’s front door and made a decision. He once again hurried through the rain and up Winnie’s front steps, his hip twinging with pain and reminding him that Thursday was supposed to be his day off.
He didn’t work at Lone Star or the orchards, and he only had to go to Signs for Success for a couple of hours to work with Mitch and the hearing dogs.
The rest of the day was his, and Ty could admit that he often took a nap on Thursday afternoons and sometimes meal-prepped for the coming weeks if he was feeling strong enough.
He bypassed the doorbell and instead knocked on the front door, leaning close to where it sat shut against the frame. “Winnie,” he called. “It’s Tyson.”
He heard nothing, not the sound of footsteps or anyone saying they were coming.
He didn’t hear a cat meowing and, in fact, the Panhandle wind rushed across his face, stealing any sound he may have heard.
He didn’t think for a moment Winnie would leave her front door unlocked, but his fingers twined around the knob and he twisted. To his great surprise, it opened.
“Winnie,” he called again, his heart suddenly pounding in the back of his throat. “It’s Ty. I heard you were sick, and I brought lunch.”
Still nothing.
He tilted his head toward the house, and he heard the soft padding of tiny feet on the carpet.
In the next moment, a gray-and-white cat appeared at the mouth of the hallway about fifteen feet into the house.
Ty had been inside before, of course, and his eyes swept the couch to his left, the TV on the credenza in front of that where Winnie usually kept her purse, and the little bit of the kitchen he could see.
He didn’t find Winnie or her second cat, but he did see her bag sitting next to the TV and the whole house in silence.
“Is she home?” he asked the cat, as if it would answer.
He would have to consult his notes if this was Rocky or Salmon, though he suspected Rocky, because Winnie had said Salmon liked to hide out by himself even when she was home.
“Meow,” Rocky said, and Ty made another decision.
He stepped into the house and gently closed the door behind him. Her furnace blew, and there was no reason to make it work overtime.
Something beyond the scent of the Chinese food met his nose, growing stronger as he moved into the kitchen and set the plastic bag of food on Winnie’s kitchen counter.
Her trash overflowed, and he took a couple more steps and found her sink full of dishes.
The neat freak inside of him frowned, but mostly because this was evidence that Winnie had been sick for a while. Why hadn’t she told him?
He turned and faced the cat who’d followed him into the kitchen. “Have you guys had breakfast?” he asked, though the second feline had not made an appearance.
Ty looked around and found the cat bowls against the wall behind the small dining room table.
They did not look like they had been refreshed that morning, and, by balancing himself with one hand on the back of a kitchen chair, he managed to bend over and pick them up.
He washed them out and refilled one with fresh water.
Winnie wasn’t exactly messy, and he only had to open two cupboards to find the cat food. The dry kibble actually sat in a plastic container labeled with masking tape, and he sprinkled some of that into the bowl, then opened one of the wet cat food containers and mixed it all together.
That must have been a siren’s call for the felines, because when he turned around, he not only had her gray-and-white cat staring at him, but her black cat too.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “You must be Salmon.”
“Meow,” Rocky said, and Ty moved to put down the bowl of food. Both cats moved over to it and started to eat.
Ty didn’t know how many bedrooms this house had, though from the outside he was guessing at least three. Not many people had basements in Three Rivers, and Winnie’s house only stood one story tall.
He flipped on her hot water and opened her dishwasher, finding it half-full of dirty dishes. He filled it with the dishes from the sink, washing any that didn’t fit and setting them to dry on a dish towel. He started the appliance and wiped down all the counters.
By then, the cats had finished their lunch, and he found them curled into the beanbag in the corner of the living room.
“Is she asleep?” he asked them. When neither feline answered yet again, he returned to the kitchen and emptied the trash, taking it out the side door and into the garage. He didn’t find the big outdoor can there, and he opened the garage door and found it on the side of the house.
Back inside with all the doors securely closed, he paused at the sliding back door and looked out over her deck, half-expecting to see Winnie sitting there, sipping her tea, the way she’d told him she did on weekend mornings.
He didn’t, and he reached into his back pocket to text her that he’d brought lunch and he’d leave it for her on the counter.
“What are you doing here?”
Ty spun at the sound of Winnie’s voice. She stood there in an oversized T-shirt with a pair of cartoon dogs on the front. If she wore shorts, he couldn’t see them, and the T-shirt skimmed the top of her knees.
“Hey,” he said. “I brought lunch, because the girl at the clinic said you were sick.” He took a couple of steps and stopped on the other side of the peninsula from her. “Why didn’t you text me and tell me you were sick?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she did sound a little bit stuffed up. “It just started yesterday, and I didn’t think it would be too bad.” She moved over to the plastic bags containing their food. “You went to Wok This Way.”
She looked at him, and a smile tugged up the corners of her mouth. “Thank you.” She glanced over to the kitchen sink, and then along the counters. “You’ve cleaned my house.” Her eyes came back to his. “How long have you been here?”
“Maybe twenty minutes,” he said. “The front door was unlocked, and no cops have arrived, so I don’t think your neighbor called nine-one-one.”
Winnie giggled, which quickly turned into a cough. “I don’t feel good,” she said miserably, and she was so stinking cute Ty couldn’t help his smile.
“Let’s get you back to bed,” he said. “I’ll bring you something to drink and some medicine. I fed the cats, so they’re happy.”
Winnie looked down at her feet and along the seam where the kitchen met the living room. “Oh, where are they?”
“They’re snoozing in the beanbag,” he said.
“That’s where I want to be,” she said.
“All right.” He moved around the end of the counter and took her hand. “Come lay in the beanbag then, sweetheart.”
She looked pretty pathetic as she went with him, and she collapsed next to the cats, both of whom meowed their displeasure about being displaced to the couch while Ty tucked her in with a fluffy blue blanket. Then they returned to her lap, and he returned to the kitchen to get her lunch.
He poured the teriyaki rice bowl into a big bowl he found in the cupboard, opened a couple of drawers to find a fork, and then took everything out to her.
“I had some Gatorade delivered last night,” she said. “There should be a green one in the fridge.”
“Green Gatorade,” he said. “And where’s your apothecary?”
She blinked at him. “My what?”
He grinned at her. “My momma used to have a cupboard full of pills,” he said. “Band-Aids, medical wraps, vitamins, you know. Stuff like that. She called it the apothecary.”
Winnie blinked at him. “I have a couple boxes of cold medicine next to the toaster.”
He grinned at her and returned to the kitchen to get her meds and a drink.
Her hair flowed loose and wild around her face, and Ty realized for maybe the first time just how much of it she had. He took a moment to admire her as he crossed the living room, and he recognized the fondness he felt for this woman as it flowed through him.
He handed her the box of cold medication and the bottle of Gatorade, then sat on the end of the couch beside the beanbag.
“Thank you so much, Ty,” she said, and she looked and sounded truly grateful.
“What else do you need from me?” He turned more toward her, since she was sitting on his left. She reached over, and Ty fumbled for a moment but managed to slide his fingers between hers.
She squeezed, and smiled, and said, “Just you, cowboy.”
The words echoed in his head. Just you, cowboy.
“What do you have going on today?”
“Nothing until tonight,” he said, trying to get her words to not sound so sweet inside his head. “It’s your first class…or did you call out sick?”
Just you, cowboy rang through his ears and filled his head and slithered straight into his heart. While he wished it didn’t mean so much to him, it did. Yeah, it really did.
“No, I’m going to go,” she said. “If I take some meds now, I can take some more right before class and make it through.”
Ty nodded. “I can drive you.”
“So you’ll stay with me this afternoon?” She wore an expression of pure hope on her face, and Ty nodded.
“Yeah, I can stay.”
“Perfect,” she said. When she released his hand so that she could continue eating, Ty went to get his noodle bowl.
As he rejoined Winnie and her cats in the living room, he felt like his life finally held some purpose, because he’d been able to help Winnie in a world where she didn’t have anyone but him.
And he wanted to be that man for her more than anything, and gratitude filled his heart that he had the time and means to be sitting with Winnie, in her house, in the middle of the day, eating her favorite Chinese food.