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 nextdoor, 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 toSigns for Successfor 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.
