5
Ty gave his phone a glare as it blared out his mother’s ringtone. He’d already interrupted his conversation with Winnie to talk on the phone with his brother, Bryan. Maybe he hadn’t exactly been enthusiastic to help his younger brother propose to his girlfriend.
“On Saturday afternoon, theone timeI have a date,” he grumbled as he wiped his hands on a dish towel and reached for his phone as it started to shriek for the third time. His momma was not an easy woman to put off, though Ty had tried many times in the past. He swiped on the call, tapped the speaker button, and moved the phone closer to the stove.
“I’m cooking dinner, Momma,” he said.
A beat of silence came through the line, and then she said, “Dinner? You just got soup from me a couple of hours ago.”
“Yeah, and I ate it. Then Jacob brought home some steaks that Mitch got from his daddy up at Shiloh Ridge.”
“Oh, well, you can’t beat steak from Shiloh Ridge.”
Ty smiled at the obvious happiness in his mother’s voice. “You sure can’t.” He glanced over to his roommate, who looked up as ifsensing Tyson’s gaze. Jacob raised his eyebrows, and Ty simply shook his head. He didn’t say anything else, because his momma had called him, and Ty already knew why.
“Bryan said you were...short about coming out to Three Rivers on Saturday.”
“Yeah, Momma, it’s a long drive,” he said.
“Your brother is proposing to his girlfriend,” his mother said, as if no more important thing in the world could be done on Saturday.
“Yeah, I heard,” Ty said. “I don’t know why I have to be there.”
“He needs you, Ty, to get the table all set up out in the fields.”
Ty could have made any excuse about how he wouldn’t be able to make the drive fromSigns for Successin time, and Bryan had already told him he would time it according to Tyson’s schedule. “I don’t know why you and Daddy can’t do that.”
“Because we have to act like it’s a regular workday,” she said. “And I’ve got two clients coming on Saturday.”
“Well, maybe Saturday’s not a real great day to do it,” Ty barked out. “Did he ever think of that?” He held the tongs in his hand and watched as the steaks sizzled in the pan, his grumpy attitude about his younger brother getting engaged flowing through him and infecting every cell in his body.
“What’s really going on?” Momma asked.
Ty sighed and let the irritation he had allowed in seep away. “It’s nothing,” Ty said. “I’ll reschedule.”
“What do you have to reschedule?” Momma asked.
“I just said it was nothing,” he said, because he wasn’t ready to tell anyone that he’d actually asked Winnie out to lunch.
I’d call it a date, ma’am.
The words rang through his head, and he liked that she hadn’t been upset with him for calling her ma’am,and she hadn’t balked at their lunch on Saturday being called a date, either.
Ty’s face heated. He put his hand on the towel over the handle of the cast iron skillet and gave it a little shake. The steak didn’t move, which meant it wasn’t ready to turn. He could be patient, and heglanced at the clock, knowing he had less than sixty seconds to flip this thing and keep it at a medium temperature.
“Is this why you’re calling?” he asked. “To make sure I have a good attitude on Saturday?”
“It would be nice,” Momma said. “It’s not like your brother’s going to get engaged every weekend or anything.”
Ty rolled his neck and wanted to blast her with a grumpy sigh. He repressed it and said, “You know, I’m allowed to be upset if I have to change my plans to accommodate him with less than forty-eight hours’ notice.”
“He acknowledged that,” Momma said. “Did he not, Ty?”
“Yeah, he did,” Ty admitted. “He said he could do it anytime that worked for me.”
“So if you have plans, you just need to say,” Momma said.
“I already told him it was nothing that can’t change,” Ty said. “But I don’t get done at Signs for Success until eleven-thirty and I gotta have time to eat.”
