CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It rained all day Monday and Tuesday and got serious Wednesday with lots of thunder and lightning thrown in. They’d had so many cancellations that the only two occupied cabins belonged to Harper and Tawny. No one was interested in spending time at the lake when the only thing to do was run through the rain three times a day to get something to eat at the café.
At noon a single fellow braved the weather to eat at the café, and Zed hurried back to the kitchen when he saw the man hang his raincoat on the back of a chair. Harper didn’t recognize the guy, so she raised an eyebrow toward Dana.
“Zedekiah Williamson!” The man followed him across the floor and through the swinging doors. “You cannot run from me. You missed your appointment this morning and there’s no excuse for it.”
All three sisters slid back their chairs and crowded into the kitchen. The stranger had a rim of gray hair, beady little blue eyes set in a big, round baby face, and a paunchy gut that hung out over his belt.
“Who are you?” Harper asked.
“Dr. Glenn Tipton. Zedekiah did not make his appointment this morning. I’ve been his and Annie’s doctor for thirty years. Why didn’t he even call to cancel? I thought maybe he’d died.” The doctor’s eyes shifted from one sister to the other and then came back to settle on Harper.
“We’re Annie’s granddaughters,” she explained. “Is it too late to get Uncle Zed in to see you today? I’ll bring him myself.”
“I ain’t dead and I can drive myself. I didn’t want to get out in this rain,” Zed fussed.
The doctor handed a card to Harper. “Friday afternoon at three o’clock. You’ll have him there, right?”
“I don’t need a chauffeur. I’ll be there. Now the bunch of you get out of my kitchen and let me make this man a cheeseburger,” Zed grumbled as he pointed toward the door.
“Is Uncle Zed sick?” Tawny asked outright when she took a glass of water to the doctor’s table.
Harper’s chest tightened at that thought. “Is this just a routine checkup, or is it something that he’ll need a driver to bring him home?”
“Are you doing tests?” Dana asked bluntly.
“Just a checkup, ladies. And I’ll have the biggest glass you got back there of sweet tea to go with my lunch. So y’all are the granddaughters that Annie talked about so often?”
“Harper.” She raised a hand.
“Dana.” She nodded.
“Tawny. And you would tell us if Uncle Zed had something wrong with him, right?”
Zed set a basket filled with sweet potato fries and a plate with a huge double-meat, double-cheese burger in front of the doctor. “He’s bound by some of them new privacy laws to keep his mouth shut, but I’m tellin’ all of you that this is just my three-month checkup. Last time me and Annie went, we was together for the checkup. Besides the rain, I just didn’t want to go without her. That’s all there is to it.”
Harper had lived on the edge long enough to smell a rat when there was one present, and Zed was not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If she made him place his hand on the Bible and raise the other toward heaven and swear that he was fit as a freshly tuned fiddle, she’d bet dollars to dead fish that there was something more to be said. Doctors didn’t check on patients in the pouring-down rain.
She touched each sister on the arm and nodded toward the outside. “I’m in the mood for a candy bar. Y’all want to go with me to the store?”
“There’s a whole stand full of umbrellas in the kitchen. Me and Annie got them when we had to close up the door between the store and the café,” Zed said.
Harper laid a hand on Zed’s shoulder. “Call me if we get a big rush?”
“Ain’t damn likely,” he said gruffly.
The rain had slowed considerably, so the umbrellas kept them from being drenched when they reached the store. They ducked inside and Harper went straight for the candy rack, picked up three of the biggest bars, and laid them on the counter.
Harper felt like she had a stone in her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. “I’m treating today. Put these on my bill, and be honest. Do either of y’all think Uncle Zed is sick? A doctor coming to the café? It don’t sound good.”
Tawny peeled back the wrapper and took a big bite of the chocolate. She held up a finger, which meant she needed time to think, and when she finally spoke, her voice cracked. “He’s lost weight and he’s coughing more and more. Oh, Lord, what would we ever do without him?”
Dana hiked a hip on the old wooden stool behind the counter and reached for her candy. “We’ll take care of him if he is, but I can’t imagine runnin’ this place without him. It was tough losing Flora, but Uncle Zed is the cornerstone now.” She blinked several times to keep the tears at bay.
“He said it was just a checkup and he’s never lied to us, so . . .” Tawny gulped twice. “I need a cup of coffee to go with this. You can put three cups on my bill and I’ll get us each one.”
“I’d rather have a bottle of milk,” Harper said.
“Lord love a duck!” Dana laughed. “I never thought I’d hear you say that you wanted to drink milk.”
“Or that Tawny wanted coffee over Pepsi or beer.” Harper tore the wrapper back from her candy.
Tawny went to the back of the store and brought back a pint of milk, then drew up two cups of coffee. “I’ve decided to quit drinkin’ anything alcoholic. So coffee, sweet tea, and soft drinks are the future.”
“Nick got something to do with that?” Dana asked.
“A lot.” Tawny nodded. “He said he didn’t have the courage to call until last night. He’d planned to go fishing on Monday evening and stop by my porch to see if I might be sitting outside. But it was raining. I done figured that my clumsiness and inability to say the right things scared him away.”
“And?” Harper asked.
Tawny smiled. “We talked for an hour about everything and I didn’t want to hang up, but he said he’d call again.” The smile faded. “But that’s not the issue here today. Uncle Zed is. I overheard him talking to Granny Annie last night when I had the window open in my cabin. Do you think there was anything between them other than friendship? He called her Annie darlin’ when he was talkin’ to her.”
“He calls us darlin’ all the time. It’s just an expression,” Dana said. “The cough comes from him smokin’ like a chimney, but . . .” She sighed.
“But what?” Tawny asked.
“But we need to know what’s wrong. Or if anything is,” Dana answered.
“He’ll tell us when the time is right,” Harper said.
Tawny picked up her coffee and candy and said, “See y’all later. I’m going to go get completely caught up on my book work. If the sun comes out, we’ll have a full house starting tomorrow and through the weekend, so I’ll be busy cleaning and doing laundry.”
The doctor’s vehicle was gone when she passed the café, and Zed had taken up his usual place on the bench with a cigarette in his hand. “Glad to see the sun. Rain makes my old bones ache,” he said.
She stopped and really looked at him. His face had always been thin and now it was wrinkled, but Tawny couldn’t see that his eyes were yellowed or that his hands were shaking any more than usual.
“Me too,” she said. “How often does it get this slow around here?”
“Couple or three times a year. Annie hated it. She was a real busy bee.” Zed crushed the cigarette butt on his heel. “She hated for me to smoke. I started over there in Vietnam, and when I got home, I tried all that stuff to quit—the gum and patches and pills—but I just couldn’t break the habit.”
“Shhh . . .” She put her finger over her lips. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m addicted to cherry sours.”
“That a drink?” Zed asked.
“No, it’s those little round sour candies that are two packs for a dollar in most convenience stores. I’d buy two on payday and make them last all week when I was working in the coffee shop. Being poor and not having anything I wanted was a real test, Uncle Zed. But the worst one was having the willpower to only eat my daily allotment and leave the rest alone,” she told him.
“Better than whiskey, I guess,” Zed chuckled. “I hear a couple of cars turning this way. I’d best get on inside.”
She watched him closely as he got up. He didn’t seem a bit slower than usual, and he wasn’t shuffling like some old people who used to come into the coffee shop every morning. Maybe it was just a plain old checkup.
On Thursday there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—not even a wispy little white one up there like a big long string of cotton candy. Harper kept a close eye on Zed, though nothing seemed unusual. He had a coughing fit that morning, but it sounded dry, like those that smokers get, not rattling like someone who was sick. He wasn’t as spry as he’d been when she was a little girl, but who was?
In the middle of the afternoon, she left him alone and headed out to the laundry, where Tawny was sitting in a folding chair reading a book. She hopped up on the folding table, her legs dangling while the small oscillating fan whipped her ponytail from side to side.
Tawny laid her book to the side. “I’ll be glad when tomorrow gets here. Cabins have been cleaned and my book work is caught up. I’m bored.”
“Been slow in the café, too, but it picked up a lot today. We ran out of the meat loaf special at two o’clock. Brook will be here soon. Maybe she’ll cheer you up,” Harper said.
“Johnny is riding home with her on the bus, and they’re going to study for some big test they’ve got tomorrow. But . . .” Tawny’s eyes twinkled. “That means Nick is coming to get him this evening. And that reminds me, how are things with Wyatt?”
Harper sighed. “Haven’t seen him this week at all. He’s been helping his friend’s widow take care of all the business involved. I wonder why we didn’t have more when Granny went.”
“Uncle Zed took care of it for us,” Tawny said. “So is this going to get serious between y’all?”
“Might be,” Harper answered. “Time will tell. I’m not rushing anything. And you and Nick?”
“Not rushing anything, either, but there’s definitely a spark like I’ve never felt before. What if we all do get serious? What happens to this place?”
Harper raised a shoulder. “We run it like always. We just have someone to keep us warm in the evenings. I’d better get back in case some of the folks checking in want to stop in the café for burgers.”
Friday was so busy that Zed tried his best to reschedule his appointment, but Harper wouldn’t have any part of it. She said that she could make burgers and that Tawny would come in from the laundry to help her if she got into a bind. So there he was sitting in the waiting room looking at a magazine and wishing to hell he was anywhere else in the world.
“Mr. Williamson.” The nurse finally called his name, and he followed her back down a hallway to a corner where they kept the scale. “First we get your weight. Put your feet on the marked places.”
He held his breath and waited for the digital number to pop up. Dammit! He’d lost another eight pounds since he’d been here last, but he hadn’t had much appetite since Annie had died. Besides, he’d worn his good shoes this time, not his combat boots that weighed at least five pounds.
She tapped the end of her pen against a tablet and motioned him into a room. “Sit right here, and we’ll get your blood pressure and temperature.” She busied herself with the blood pressure cuff and thermometer and recorded the measurements.
“Doctor will be in shortly,” she said when she finished and took her fancy-shmancy tablet out the door with her.
They had always put him and Annie in a room that offered an assortment of brochures about constipation and diarrhea or about arthritis and rheumatism. He chuckled and pointed to the one about heart failure.
“That’s the one I need to tuck into my pocket, Annie. I didn’t mind coming here when we did our appointments together. This ain’t fun,” he grumbled. “Damned old doctor, anyway. Why don’t he just leave me alone and let me die when the good Lord is willin’ to shuffle me off this spinnin’ pile of dirt? He didn’t need to be comin’ to the café and upsettin’ our girls.”
“Who are you talking to?” Dr. Tipton asked as he carried another of those abominable devices into the room.
“Myself. I’m goin’ batshit crazy. Shoot me up with a double dose of tranquilizers and send me home,” Zed said. “What happened to pen and paper? What’re you goin’ to do if all that technological crap fails?”
“Took me a long time to get used to this, but it does help keep things in order better than all that paper. How are you feelin’? Your blood pressure is elevated. You been takin’ your medication?”
“When I remember it,” Zed said.
“Been watchin’ the salt?”
“Watchin’ it go right in my mouth. I ain’t goin’ to stop eatin’ bacon. I’d just as soon not eat if I can’t salt my food. Why don’t you just let me eat what I want and die when I’m supposed to?”
“Zedekiah, I’m tryin’ to take care of you like Annie told me to the last time y’all came in here. But you are not makin’ it easy,” Dr. Tipton fussed at him. “Don’t you want to spend more time with the granddaughters?”
“Much as God gives me, but I’d rather spend eternity with Annie,” Zed declared.
“You are one stubborn old coot.”
“That I am. Can I go home now?”
“Let me listen to your lungs and heart.” The doctor pressed a stethoscope on his chest. “Promise me you won’t miss your diuretics.”
“I won’t miss them a bit when I’m dead.”
“Your heart is continuing to get weaker, and your lungs are shot. It won’t be long until you are going to need oxygen.” The doctor took a step back.
Zed hopped down off the table. “I’m not haulin’ around one of them tanks, but the news about my heart is the best I’ve had in weeks. Any use in making an appointment for another three months?”
“Four weeks.” Dr. Tipton wrote on his pad. “Definitely no more than six weeks or I’ll come back to the café and tell those girls exactly what condition you are in.”
“I hear you.” Zed hopped off the table and walked out without even hesitating at the office window.
Black clouds were boiling up from the southwest, and he didn’t want to be caught out in a tornado. They hadn’t had a bad one in more than five years now, but the last one had picked up debris from half the state of Texas and dumped it in the lake, then sucked up enough water to baptize the beer joint up the road with it. Folks inside got sobered up real quick when the roof went flying off and the flood came down on top of them. Zed had heard that the church was packed the next day.
He was still chuckling about that when he got home. No cars in the café parking lot or in front of the store, so he wasn’t a bit surprised to find all the sisters, plus Brook, waiting in the café. And just as he figured, it was Harper who asked the first question, which was no surprise, either. “So what did the doctor say?”
“He said that if I quit eatin’ bacon, quit smokin’, and quit havin’ a shot of whiskey or a glass of wine when I want it, that I might live to be a hundred.”
“And what did you tell him?” Tawny asked.
“That if I did all that I’d be in hell and I’d always intended on spending eternity in heaven,” Zed joked, and then his expression went serious. “You girls don’t worry about me. You’ve got your own lives to live. Now let’s get out a half gallon of chocolate ice cream and celebrate.”
“What are we celebrating?” Brook asked.
“New friends, old times, and a sweet life,” he said.
The clouds had passed over the resort with only a few claps of thunder and raindrops but nothing major that afternoon. But now a strong wind was pushing another big bunch their way, stirring up the lake until the whitecaps looked like that frosting that Granny used to put on the tops of cupcakes. Tawny loved to watch her use the back of the spoon to make little peaks. They were so sticky that Tawny never did master eating one without getting it all over her fingers and face.
“Hey, it looks like it might brew something up out there. Those clouds look angry.” Nick stepped around the end of the cabin.
Her pulse jacked up about fifty percent, and her heart threw in an extra beat. “Never know. We got a pass earlier today, so we might have to pay for it tonight.”
“Mind if I sit?”
“Help yourself to all the porch that you want.” Tawny smiled.
“That’s pretty generous, giving me that much room.”
“I’m willin’ to share if I like you.”
If she liked him? Now that was the understatement of the year. He almost made her believe in love at first sight.
“If not?” He caught her gaze and held it.
She recognized flirting when she saw or heard it, and they were definitely sharing sparks. Why, oh, why couldn’t she have met him before now?
Because you had to go through some hard times so you’d grow up and appreciate a guy who works hard for a livin’ and don’t live on his daddy’s credit cards. Granny Annie’s voice filled her thoughts again.
“If not, then you don’t get to sit on my porch while a big storm rolls in,” she said.
“You ever been married?” he asked bluntly.
Wow, he got right to the point. But she kind of liked that. “I’m only twenty-two.”
“My sister was married at eighteen.”
“Why did you ask?”
“We talked for a long time the other night, and I didn’t have the courage to ask you if you were involved with someone right now.” He stopped and sucked in a lungful of air. “I’d like to ask you out, but I don’t mess with another man’s woman.”
“Never married. Got out of a relationship right before Christmas last year, so it’s been long enough. And yes, I would like to go out with you. I felt sparks, too.”
“Is that why you tried to throw pizza on me?” He chuckled.
“I did not!” she exclaimed.
“That’s the way I’m going to tell the story. So do you want to go for pizza on Sunday evening when you get off work?”
“I’d rather go for a big juicy steak.”
He nodded seriously. “I’ll cook for us, then, because there isn’t a restaurant in Texas that can top my steaks. Pick you up at eight?”
“I’ll be ready.” Her heart threw in another extra beat.
“Okay, then. I’ll call you later tonight, but right now I’d better get Johnny on home. He talks about Brook all the time.” He straightened up and turned to blow her a kiss before he headed over toward Dana’s place.
She caught it and wrapped it tightly in her hands. She could have sworn that it warmed her whole palm.
Harper was already in bed, air conditioner lowered to where her nose was actually cold to the touch. She was curled up under an extra blanket when someone rapped gently on her cabin door.
She bailed out of bed and sent up a silent prayer that it would be Wyatt on the other side of the door. Her prayers were answered.
She grabbed one of his arms, pulled him inside, slammed the door shut with her bare foot, and then cupped his cheeks in her hands. “I have missed you so much,” she said as she brought his lips to hers.
“I love you,” he said when the kiss ended.
Lightning streaked through the room, lighting it for an instant so that she could see his eyes. His eyes said that he wasn’t teasing, and the passion in the kiss that followed testified that he meant what he said.
“It dawned on me as I was helping the widow settle stuff that we aren’t guaranteed tomorrow or even the next minute. I don’t want to die without telling you that I love you. I did when we were kids and I still do now that we are adults. I want us to have a future together. I went to bed in my house and couldn’t sleep because I didn’t want to waste another minute without saying the words to your face.”
“I love you,” she said simply and led him to the bed. “Now please hold me. I’m freezing.”
“With pleasure.” He kicked off his shoes and started to undress.