Page 17 of The Cadence

“We get a few tickets to each game but I never picked them up before. They might seat all the Woodsmen families together, so you wouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not worried about that. I’d talk to whoever was there, even if I did go by myself, and I’d have fun if I never spoke a word.”

“I remember that about you,” Will said. “I remember how you never cared about the other people in high school.”

“No, that’s not right,” I corrected him. “I cared a lot. I wanted them to like me but I wasn’t the type that was going to fit in, not at first. It was hard but eventually, I wasn’t sitting alone at lunch anymore and I wasn’t crying in the bathroom.”

“You were crying in the bathroom?”

“I mainly did that over grades and thinking that I was dumb,” I explained.

“Like hell you’re dumb!” His words exploded from the speaker.

“I also remember leaving your house for the first time and I couldn’t get my mind around how unfair it was.

There you were, thinking that you couldn’t understand your work because you had some kind of deficiency, and the whole problem was that you’d never seen the inside a damn school before! ”

I remembered explaining that fact to him, and how he’d stared like I was either an alien or had just confessed to something awful, like murder or rooting for our rival high school.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Will continued. “I drove the whole way home, thinking that your family was made up of a bunch of idiots worse than mine.”

“No, not all of them,” I corrected him again. “My mother didn’t make good choices, but—”

“She didn’t ‘make good choices?’ Really?”

“She made very poor choices that were all about her own self-interest,” I said. “Is that better?”

“She ignored her daughter. She neglected you.”

That was true, but why were we talking about it now? “When do you get home?” I asked. “It feels like you’ve been living off room service for too long.”

The answer was “tomorrow,” which I already knew.

But when he got back here, the football season would jump into full swing.

Some of the other guests at the party at Roy’s Tavern had talked about how busy it got and how infrequently they saw their boyfriends/husbands.

“I mean, even when Hatch is home in Michigan, there’s always something,” a woman named Hazel had told me.

She’d been sitting in a chair and I’d had to bend almost in half to hear her.

“I have a lot going on, too, and sometimes we have to schedule when we’re going to see each other. ”

I had decided that I wanted the same thing. I needed to be busy with my own life so that I didn’t focus as much on Will, and also so that I would be able to say something interesting about my activities at the next party…if I was invited. I was getting a little ahead of myself.

He let me change the subject and we moved on from my past issues of neglect and crying in the bathroom. “I need more furniture in my house,” he told me. “I keep looking around this hotel room and remembering that I don’t have a place for us to eat.”

“You do,” I reminded him, because we’d been sitting at his kitchen island on bar stools that had recently been delivered in huge cardboard boxes.

Since we’d gone out to dinner and talked more, we’d been eating together most nights.

Will really was a terrible cook, but I’d learned some things under my grandma’s tutelage.

We’d also been trying new recipes and he had no problem buying truckloads of groceries.

But he had meant something more than the three bar stools, he explained, and more than the chest of drawers that I’d put in one of the bedrooms. He had ideas about how to accomplish some changes, based on the decorating knowledge he’d gotten from a few of the other guys on the team trip.

“Are they really into that?” I asked doubtfully, and he assured me that they were. The guy he’d been talking to, Jory, had explained that he’d had his own house practically rebuilt by a local woman and her crew.

“I’m not sure how much I trust his opinions, though,” he cautioned. “Jory has a thing about statuary…anyway, I need some furniture.” Will discussed that for a while, asking my opinions on things that I didn’t know very much about.

“I never thought about the style of stuff,” I finally told him. “I was just glad to have what was there. My grandma saved for a long time for her dining room set and I think that’s nice. Maybe I would try to buy more like that.”

“You have it all in storage if you want it,” he reminded me, and I did remember that he had paid ahead for a year.

But then he had to go, because they were having a mandatory meeting before they also had a mandatory team dinner.

“Make sure to lock the doors behind yourself when you get home,” he said.

“Text when you get there to let me know.”

And that was where the problem started, because I didn’t, and also, I left my pocketbook in the car.

It was my fault but there were other circumstances: when I drove up, there were two bunnies sitting near the big pines near the main house.

I hadn’t seen any since I’d come up here.

I had always loved to watch when they hopped around the back yard at my grandma’s place and I had been thinking a lot about her and her furniture, wishing that I had more of her things with me.

I had the car keys in my pocket when I got out and I left the bag with almost all my valuables, including my phone, in Will’s nice new car—and without having that in my hand, I forgot to text him, too.

After the bunnies had nibbled delicately and then hopped away, I went back into the garage and got involved in working on my new piece of furniture, and I almost fell over dead with shock when I heard a strange man’s voice call my name.

“Calla?Calla Easterly?”

“What?” I answered, and as I stumbled to my feet, I knocked over a can of paint. It was a uniformed police officer and he wanted to know if I was all right because this was a welfare check.

“Will Bodine,” he started to tell me, and I remembered that I hadn’t texted after my arrival.

“Holy Moses! He called the police on me?”

“He was concerned,” the officer stated. “You should get in touch with him.” As he spoke, he peered around the garage.

“I’m fine. He gets worried,” I explained. “I didn’t mean to make that worse, and I’ll call him right now. Do you need to look inside or anything?”

He didn’t, as long as I was all right. “I am,” I said. “I’m a little embarrassed that you had to come out here to check on me, though.” I wouldn’t forget my phone again, but also, Will would need to calm down.

He was hardly calm at the moment I called him back, after the police car pulled away. “Why didn’t you tell me you were home?” he demanded, and it was loud. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, and you need to stop the hissy fit!” I told him. “I’m sorry that I didn’t text you or hear your calls. Any of them.”

“I was sure that something had happened.”

“I know, but there’s nothing wrong and you didn’t need to get the authorities involved. It’s a waste of their resources.”

I heard him sigh. “They probably think I’m crazy.”

“They were more excited to be here and talk about you. I explained that you were worried about me being alone, and they said they understood. They also said you can call whenever and they’re always happy to come over.

It’s late but it’s still so light here,” I said.

“I was out painting and I didn’t even notice the time. I’m sorry that I made you so worried.”

“I’m sorry that I had a hissy fit.” I heard more voices in the background. “I have to go. We’re supposed to be discussing our objectives for the season. One of mine could be to calm the hell down.”

“Also, to have a little faith that I’m capable of taking care of myself,” I suggested. “I’m not useless. I actually appreciate your concern but we don’t need to involve the authorities and make our issues public.”

It was too late. Maybe the report of this incident had gone out on a police radio broadcast or been on an emergency incident website, because the next thing after I hung up with Will was a text from Kirsten.“Why was there a welfare check at Bodine’s house?” she asked me.

I peered through the windows of the guest cottage.

“Are you out in the street again?” I asked her, but she said no, that the news was all over Woodsmen forums. I hadn’t really been aware of those, but when I checked, I found that I was all over them, too.

There I was at Fan Day in my Bodine football jersey, smiling at Will, and there I was at the grocery store!

A customer had taken a picture of me? I fumed for a while and then repeated to Kirsten that everything was fine and she had to leave me alone now.

Will was famous due to his amazing athletic skills and his unfortunate family legacy, and I’d accepted that as a given.

But me? I scrolled, looking at what people had to say about Calla Easterly.

It wasn’t anything terrible, like no one mentioned any of the grist that my grandma would have cared about (prison, neglect, et cetera).

But there was definitely some criticism.

“All his money can’t buy a stylist!” a comment read under an image of me that was, I could admit, pretty unfortunate.

I’d had my hair piled into a knot on the top of my head like a red tornado.

But it was because I’d taken a break from the register to help stock the shelves, and the store was air conditioned but I’d gotten hot anyway.

And a few more people questioned why I was even working there, why I didn’t have a “better” job or why I wasn’t just mooching off Will.

“We all know what he makes!” that woman had said, nodding sagely, and her video had received a lot of likes.