Font Size
Line Height

Page 21 of The Cadence

“I think we’re in a unique position since this market is small compared to other teams in the league,” Audrey said.

I had looked up her husband, who was on the offensive side doing something.

“There are high school sports, but nothing else professional to focus on—well, there’s also Junior Woodsmen football, but they’re in the development league and not as good. ”

“It has to be said that the Woodsmen are the best team ever, anywhere in history,” Kasia added, and they both nodded like that was a given. I actually hadn’t minded the Rackers when Will had played for them, but I kept that fact to myself.

“And you’re new here,” Audrey continued. “After you and Will are together for a while, people will calm down.”

“I hope so,” I said, “but Will and I really aren’t together. Not like how you and the fans are thinking.”

“But you said that you’re living with him,” Kasia reminded me. “It’s easy to get the wrong idea.”

It obviously led to confusion for many people. My grandma’s friends were texting and asking questions about when I planned to move out of the guest cottage and into my own place, because they were worried that I would get confused myself.

Kasia and Audrey kept talking about the game, analyzing everything about the offense and then discussing Kasia’s upcoming wedding, too.

That part was more interesting to me but really, my thoughts were elsewhere.

I was keeping close track of the door that led to the Woodsmen locker room and I was waiting for it to open.

It finally did, but not for Will. This was a different guy, one who looked vaguely familiar, and then a total stranger came out, and then a few more players who I recognized, somewhat.

Gradually, the crowd of people waiting with me shrank in size, and Kasia and Audrey both left. Will still hadn’t come.

I started to get worried. He was always timely, always.

It wasn’t like him to show up late for anything, and I didn’t think he would make me wait on purpose.

I looked up pictures of the roster so I could see the defense, and I watched as several of those guys left and went home with their loved ones—so it wasn’t like one side of the team was being held back for some reason.

“You ok?” I finally wrote to him.

After a moment, he answered “yes.” And then the door opened again and he came out with a small crowd of his teammates, and I released a breath of relief and smiled at him.

Will looked back at me and he smiled too, and I felt like things were ok.

We slowly walked outside together, where he had to stop to sign autographs for the fans who lingered in the dusk to greet the players. Finally, we drove home, him behind me.

When we got there, I saw that things were not ok.

“Why do you have that on your leg? What is that?” I asked, pointing at his ankle.

It was easy to see now that we were out of the waiting room area where too much furniture had blocked my view, and we were no longer in the parking lot that was more shadowy and filled with cars than it needed to be.

He had sat on the new couch to put up his foot and the problem was as clear as day.

“This is a boot, but it’s mostly precautionary,” he explained. “I rolled my ankle in the third quarter but I can tell it will be fine after a few days. The trainers agree.”

“In the third quarter?” I repeated. “You played for the whole game, though.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It looks bad!” I said, pointing to the boot. It looked huge and uncomfortable, and also scary.

“No, not really.” He leaned back and I was very glad that he’d agreed to get this big couch, because he fit so well on it.

“Can I get you anything? Water? Aspirin?” I suggested.

“I’m good.”

“Ok, I’ll leave you alone,” I said, and his eyes opened.

“No, you don’t have to go. What did you think of the game?”

Since we hadn’t yet picked out a coffee table or other furniture for this room, I sat cross-legged on the floor next to where he lay. “Overall, I was pretty impressed. You were amazing and the offense wasn’t so bad.”

He shook his head but he smiled, too. “Tell me more.”

I shared some of my own insights and also those of the people who had been around me in the stands, because they definitely had more knowledge than I did.

So did the other women I talked to in that family lounge, where I had paid attention to the conversation before I got so nervous about Will’s absence that I forgot to listen.

“This is interesting,” he commented.

“But not necessarily correct,” I cautioned. “It may be total malarky, as my grandma used to say. How about some dinner?”

“Sure.” He started to get up.

“No, no, I’ll fix it,” I told him, and jumped up myself. He said he was coming to the bar stool to watch, though, and we kept talking about the game and about my experience in the stands, too.

I had left some papers and markers on the counter, because I’d been sketching out ideas for what I would paint on the table that was my latest project.

As we spoke, he looked at my drawings and then started to line up the pens, perfectly straight and sorted by the colors on the caps so that he made a precise rainbow.

“Very nice,” I pointed out. “Sorry I left a mess.”

“Not a mess, a small pile,” Will corrected. “Organizing is a habit I have.”

“I know. I remember how you liked to have everything orderly, even the numbers when we did math.”

“Especially the numbers,” he told me. “Columns and neatness in math are very important.” He looked down at the pens and knocked them with his finger to mess them up.

But in the next moment, he was straightening them out again. “As I get older, it gets worse.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I get overly focused on neatness and order.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Sometimes,” he sighed. “The other things do more.”

“What other things?”

“I get ideas and then I can’t shake them. When I was staying on Mackinac Island with the team, I kept thinking that you hadn’t locked the doors here and that someone would be able to get in.”

“I locked them,” I protested. “I leave messy piles of markers, but I can remember to do that.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. I also kept thinking that I’d left the oven on and that the house would burn down. I woke up a few times, sure of it.”

“I checked it,” I said. I had, because he’d texted and asked me to.

“I couldn’t stop thinking it, though. And sometimes…this sounds crazy.”

I put down the knife and onion that I held and waited.

“Sometimes I think that I’ve been in an accident when I drive. I’m sure that I hit another car, or sometimes I imagine that I hit a kid.”

“Holy Moses!”

“I haven’t. I know I haven’t, but I can’t stop thinking it anyway,” Will said. “I’ve driven back around, retracing my route, to make sure that everything is ok. Today, on the way home from the stadium, it happened again.”

“I would have seen.”

“I know and I told myself that, but it doesn’t help. They’re called intrusive thoughts,” he explained. “I’ve been reading about them. When I’m playing or practicing, they don’t happen as frequently but when I’m tired like this, they’re harder to control. After games, I always feel…”

“Scared? Overwhelmed?” I prompted.

“In danger of letting them take over,” he concluded.

“I’m sorry to hear this.” I walked around the counter to be closer to him. “What can I do?”

“Nothing. I’m not sure why I told you.”

“You should tell me things,” I said. “You should maybe tell a medical-type person, too. Because I bet there are strategies you could use other than powering through and being upset.”

“I’ve been reading about strategies.”

“Like what?”

“There are a few.” Will pointed at the stove. “I don’t think it’s my imagination that the chicken is burning.”

“Shoot!” I ran back around and rescued it. The damage wasn’t too bad. “It’s still going to taste fine.”

“You’d eat it anyway.”

“What?” I glanced over my shoulder.

“You don’t ever complain about food. The last time we went out to eat, your burger was raw in the middle but you were going to ignore it,” he recalled. “I was the one who said it had to go back to the kitchen.”

“I felt a little sorry for that waiter. He was new.” I nodded, though.

“You’re right, and I’ll eat anything. I have a steel-lined stomach, I guess, and I don’t have a great sense of whether things taste the way they’re supposed to.

It’s from when I was a kid and I fixed my own food. I ate anything and everything.”

“Because no one was feeding you,” he said, and I nodded again.

“My mom did when I was young. She must have,” I said. “Mostly I remember getting by on my own.”

“Because she left you.”

This was always a hard thing for me to talk about but people always wondered.

My grandma’s friends had asked her so many questions when I’d shown up on her doorstep, and in a house the size of hers, of course I had heard them.

“Did her mother just forget her? And you never saw her for all these years?” someone had whispered.

The answer was a little complicated but boiled down to “yes.”

“My mom met Clifford and she wanted to be with him,” I said. “She was more interested in her new man than in her daughter.”

“How old were you?”

“Uh…I guess I must have been around six when they first got together. I was at an age that I should have been in school, but then we moved farther out into the country to be closer to him and she never got around to signing me up. The change was gradual,” I explained.

“First, he started spending a lot of time with us.” I remembered because he’d smelled terrible and he’d always brought his two mean dogs with him, so I hadn’t liked it.

“Then he and my mom started going over to his place more and more, since it was closer to the bar they liked. Also, even with how he smelled and his two mean dogs, it had to have been nicer than staying in our house.” She had never made much effort to keep things clean and I had never understood that you were supposed to.

It was something else I’d learned later, from my grandma.

“And your mom left you,” he said again.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She left me. She would still come back now and then, but I was mostly on my own. When I was thirteen, one of the neighbors noticed it and called the police. It wasn’t like we lived close to each other, so no one knew what was happening,” I added.

It hadn’t been their fault. “He only found out because he was checking on everyone after a storm.” He had ridden up on his ATV and I had been thrilled, since a tree had come down and smashed through the roof.

I hadn’t known how to handle it and I had no idea how to get in touch with my mom.

He hadn’t been able to believe that I was there alone, and that it was more or less a permanent thing.

I hadn’t hidden it from him and I’d left that day on the back of his ATV.

“It worked out, because once the state was involved, I got to live with my grandma,” I continued.

“It was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. And she did her best to teach me how to cook. First, she had to fix the way I thought about food, too, so that I didn’t hide it in my room or eat so much that I got sick.

It was hard for me to stop behaving that way, but she was patient. ”

I slid the slightly burned chicken onto two plates and put a little salad on each one, too. “Here we go, and I hope this tastes good.”

“It looks very nice,” Will told me.

That was generous, but he did tuck right in and ate more than what my grandma and I would have finished in a week. I’d had to really adjust my quantities when I made things for the two of us.

“Thanks for listening to me, Calla.”

“You’re welcome and vice versa,” I answered. “I’m done.” I pushed most of my dinner over to him. “I ate so much popcorn at the stadium because I was nervous. These guys hit you harder than they did in high school.”

“That’s true.”

I watched him finish my share. “Do you think you could go talk to a psychiatrist-like person? I worry about you getting hurt, like your ankle, but what you said about those thoughts makes me worried, too.”

He put down his fork. “That’s not why I told you.”

“I know. You had to say it, because it was weighing on you and you wanted to let it out. That happens. Remember when I cried on your arm on the day of the funeral? It felt like I had to.”

He handed me a napkin since I’d started again now, just a little. “I do remember. I was mean to you.”

“What? No, you weren’t!”

“No?”

“No, not at all,” I affirmed. “You were surprised that I threw myself on you, since we hadn’t seen each other in so long and didn’t really know each other anymore. Maybe we hadn’t actually known each other back, either. We used to be tutor and student but we weren’t friends.”

“I count you as my friend now, though,” Will said. “Don’t cry more.”

“You’re my friend, too, and I’m glad I have you. Really glad.”

“That makes two of us,” he answered.

And being two together was almost always better than being one alone.

Ad If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.