“You don’t have allergies.”
“I have allergies today.” He clears his throat. “Let’s get you loaded.”
He loads the few things I have into the truck then he picks up George. He looks at Frankie in my lap.
“What’s the deal with the plants?”
“Benji brought them. They have names.”
“I figured,” Tex says.
He turns and walks toward the exit and I wheel behind him. The heat hits me in the parking lot. The sun is brutal and I tilt my face into it one last time because the sun has been the best part of every day here.
Tex pulls the truck up to the front entrance. He’s driving the truck he uses for bar supply runs, because the cab is high enough that the wheelchair fits in the back seat if you fold it right. He figured this out three days ago by practicing with a folding chair from the bar, which Stormy filmed and I’ve been forbidden from ever seeing.
“I timed it,” Tex says, getting out and coming around to my side. “Fourteen seconds to fold the chair and get it in the back seat. I practiced nine times. The first attempt took two minutes and I pinched my finger in the hinge so bad I said words that made Stormy leave the parking lot. By attempt nine I had it down to fourteen seconds. Stormy clocked me. He stood there with his phone timer like a very serious Nascar pit crew chief.”
The transfer from the wheelchair to the truck is the part I’ve been dreading. Leah walked me through it yesterday. Grab the handle above the door. Left hand on the seat. Push up, pivot, lower.
The truck sits higher than anything I’ve transferred to. Tex positions the chair, locks the brakes, and stands close. In the practice session with Leah, it took twelve seconds. In the parking lot with Tex standing behind me trying not to help because I told him not to help, it takes thirty.
I grip the door frame, press up, and swing. It’s ugly. My arms shake. My core fires. Tex’s hands hover six inches from my ribs the entire time. I get my ass on the seat and my legs follow because I swing them with my hands and arrange them the way Leah taught me.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Tex’s truck looking out through a windshield instead of a hospital window for the first time in weeks. The parking lot. The road. The sky, which is wider than any sky I’ve seen through a window. I didn’t realize how small my world had gotten until this moment. The room, the hallway, the gym, the patio. A map with four locations. Now the map is a highway and the highway goes home.
Tex folds the wheelchair. I hear him behind the truck counting under his breath. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi...” The back door opens and closes. He gets behind the wheel.
“Sixteen seconds,” he says. “Two over my personal best. I blame the parking lot surface. Asphalt is slower than the bar floor.”
He adjusts the mirror, slides on his sunglasses and turns to grin at me. “Ready to go home, buddy?”
Tears flood my eyes and I turn toward the window to blink them away. “Hell yes, Tex. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
He reaches into the back seat and pulls out a gallon jug of sweet tea and a paper grocery bag. “Provisions,” he says. “Sweet tea, obviously. Honey buns, two for each of us, because you need the calories. Beef jerky, the good kind from the gas station that Stormy researched on Yelp. And,” he reaches into the bag and pulls out a folded piece of paper, “the list.”
“What list?”
“The bathroom list.” He unfolds it carefully and hands it to me. “Stormy spent two days researching every restroom between Jacksonville and Panama City Beach on I-10. He rated them by cleanliness, accessibility, stall width, and something he called ‘grab bar reliability,’ which I never knew was a category until Stormy made it one. He cross-referenced Google reviews. He filtered for recent reviews only because, and I’m quoting him directly, ‘a review from 2019 is not a reliable indicator of current restroom conditions.’”
I stare at the paper. It’s handwritten in Stormy’s precise, small print. Each rest stop is listed with its mile marker, exit number, and a rating out of five. There are notes in the margins. The Tallahassee rest stop at mile marker 199 has a note that says “wide stall, bars both sides, reviewer said clean.” The one near Lake City has a note that says “avoid, reviewer reported wet floor and no paper towels, 2 stars.” A gas station in Madison has a star next to it with the note “best option between miles 220 and 260, Pilot station, reviewed March 2025, 4.5 stars, confirmed ADA.”
“I can’t believe he researched rest stop grab bars,” I say, shaking my head.
“He also called two of them. He called a Pilot gas station in Madison, Florida and asked the cashier to measurethe width of the accessible stall. The cashier asked why and Stormy said ‘my friend is coming home from the hospital and he needs to know if his wheelchair fits’ and the cashier apparently went in there with a tape measure and called him back twenty minutes later.”
“I can’t believe someone did that for him.”
“People do things for Stormy. He has this way of asking for things that makes you feel like the most important person in the world for being able to help. I don’t know how he does it. I can’t do it. When I ask for things, people say ‘shut the hell up, Tex.’ When Stormy asks for things, strangers run to the bathroom with a measuring tape.”
He turns the key and the truck rumbles.
“Alright,” he says. “Four and a half hours. Maybe five if we stop twice. You ready?”
“I’ve been ready for six weeks.”
“Then let’s hit the road. I’ve been saving up stories. I’ve got approximately four and a half hours of material and I’m not wasting a single minute of this drive on silence. Silence is for people who don’t have anything to say. I always have something to say. You know this about me. You’ve known this about me since seventh grade when I gave that oral report that was supposed to be five minutes and went forty-five and Mrs. Henderson had to physically turn off my microphone.”
“She didn’t turn it off, she unplugged it.”
