again. The coast was still clear, thankfully. Beside me, the new girl working the juice bar glanced at me before looking away again just as quickly. Nobody wanted to get busted. I couldn’t blame her.
“I don’t know,” my older cousin rattled off quickly, bringing me back to the call as he sounded freaking distracted and like he was muffling his voice. “The ambulance took him a couple hours ago, and they’re telling us he’s in the back having tests done.”
“I’m so sorry, Boogie. What can I do?” I asked, thinking that, if Paw-Paw had been kind of like a grandfather figure for me, he had been almost like a dad to my cousin—a second dad, but a dad nonetheless. As far as I knew, Boogie still went over to his house once a week to check on him, and that had been the case since he’d moved back to the Austin area a while back.
“I need you to do me a solid,” he replied.
I watched the front door as a couple of regular members came in and headed straight for the front desk. I smiled at both of them, holding the phone up to my ear with my shoulder, and scanned their passes. “Whatever you need.” There wasn’t a single thing I wouldn’t do for him, or for any of my loved ones, and I had a lot of them.
Paw-Paw included.
I’d never forget the kindnesses he’d paid me when I was younger. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but the last time I had, he’d given me a big hug and asked me a thousand questions about how I’d been doing since the last time we’d seen each other—a year before that. When I was little, he’d pull quarters out from behind my ears. For one of my birthdays, he’d given me a pendant of a flamingo that had belonged to his late wife. I still had it in my jewelry box.
Guilt nibbled at my stomach as I sent a silent prayer up that he was fine. If he was, I’d do better. I could visit a little more, maybe each time I went to see Boogie. I could call to at least check up on him. I could send him some gifts. Boogie had complained to me not that long ago about how Paw-Paw was still trying to do too much for his age.
“—tell him.”
“Have a good workout,” I whispered to the members as I pulled the phone away from my mouth. “I’m sorry, Boog. What did you say? I’m still at work for another twenty.”
My cousin repeated himself. “Zac’s not answering his phone. I’ve tried calling him and so has his mom, but he isn’t picking up. Can you go by his place and tell him?”
The hell did he just say?
He wanted me to go tell Zac his grandfather was in the hospital?
Zac Travis, who had been the starting quarterback of the National Football Organization’s Oklahoma Thunderbirds? The one the TV anchors had literally just been talking about? The man whose life I’d saved when we were kids?
Seriously, what the hell were the chances?
“Please, B. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”
Of course I knew that. Boogie rarely asked for anything. So, of course, of freaking course, when he did it would be something like this.
“But he’s not picking up, and I’ve been blowing him up for the last hour. His mom’s been trying to call him too and nada,” my cousin rattled on, stress and worry hanging on his every syllable.
He’d used the same voice back when Mamá Lupe had been sick. But this was different.
My cousin wanted me to go tell his best friend that his grandfather was in the hospital because said best friend wasn’t answering his phone.
It was that simple, and it made a whole lot of sense.
In a way, it was nothing.
My cousin wanted me to go tell his best friend, who I had known almost my entire life, who had loved me and treated me like a little sister once upon a time, that there was something going on with his grandpa because he wasn’t answering his phone. Because he needed to know. Of course he did. Of course he should.
There was no reason for me to say no. No real reason for me to even hesitate. So we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in almost ten years; it wasn’t like that had happened because we’d gotten into a fight or because I’d done something dumb to make