Page 24 of The Cadence

“Oh, ok. I also used to take the bus where I lived before, but to buy beer, you need identification.”

Kirsten sighed and took a little wallet out of her pocketbook. “Here,” she said, showing me a card behind some clear plastic.

“That’s from your university, right? It doesn’t show your date of birth and anyway, I need something official and government issued. Do you have anything else?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve been driving around here,” I pointed out. “You really don’t have a license? Then I can’t sell this beer to you.”

She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Are you joking right now?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I could get in trouble, too. I’ll have someone put this back.” I transferred the six-pack to the shelf under the register where the penis carrots had gone before, and where I kept my box of tissues for just in case.

“Are you fucking serious?” Kirsten asked me indignantly.

“Let’s move on,” the guy behind her recommended. He had already unloaded his brimming buggy, and it looked like he was hungry.

Kirsten wanted to keep arguing, so she started up with him.

His response was to ignore her insults about his weight and his ugly beard and to continue moving his empty buggy forward so that she had to move, too.

I told him to knock that off but I did start ringing up his items instead. “That’s so rude!” she told him, and me.

“I’m sorry he pushed you, but I can’t legally sell to you. That’s the law of this state, not my personal rule,” I said, and eventually, she did leave. She walked off in a stomping, angry way that also included more cussing.

Cully grabbed the carrots and the beer to put them back and he was gone for a while, much too long with the number of customers that we had. When it was finally closing time and I was counting out my drawer, I asked him where the heck he had gotten to.

“I threw away those carrots,” he said. “I didn’t recognize them.”

“Do you personally know all the vegetables? Why did it take you so long?”

He grinned. “I also went to the parking lot to find that girl, the one you kicked out. I definitely recognized her.”

“Who, Kirsten? What do you mean? I didn’t kick her out, I just wouldn’t sell to her,” I said. I looked at his goofy smile. “What did you do, Cully?”

“I gave her the beer,” he admitted, seeming kind of sheepish now. “She said she used to have a license but she lost it because she got so many tickets and had so many accidents, but she’s over twenty-one. I think.”

“That was dumb,” I told him, and he said that he knew.

“But she’s cute,” he explained, which was true. “Girls like that make me think different. Not with my brain.”

“Yeah, I get your meaning,” I said, and I remembered those carrots. “That’s theft, though.”

“No one will catch one six-pack walking off,” he told me. “I won’t make it a habit.” Anyway, he continued, the manager loved him. She did seem to cut him a lot more slack than the rest of us got.

I still thought it was a bad idea, but I had other things on my mind. Those things made me have to balance my drawer two extra times because I kept coming up with different numbers, but finally, I was done and Cully and I left together.

“The Woodsmen jet just landed,” he mentioned as he checked his phone. He’d been checking it throughout our shift, because he wasn’t great about keeping it put up like our manager wanted. He explained that there were fans waiting at the airport and they were reporting on the team’s location.

If the team was already here in Michigan, then I didn’t have to wait for much longer.

“See you!” I called over my shoulder and he said bye.

I started to run a little, or more like I did a weird skip because I was still bad at all the PE stuff.

Luckily, I was better at driving, having done it for years before it was legal for me, and I made it home fast. Then I checked Will’s location and saw that he was on the road himself.

He would probably be tired and I hoped that his thoughts wouldn’t bother him.

I decided that I shouldn’t just hang around his house, waiting, so I went back to the guest cottage to hang out and wait there. Finally, I did see his bedroom light come on and my phone verified his arrival. Not too much later, he also came knocking at my door.

“Hello, Calla,” he said when I opened it.

“Hi, Will.” I was very glad to see him, which probably showed in the smile that felt like it might split my jaws.

“Want to come over?”

I did, and we talked about the game and his trip as he emptied his bag, got the dinner I’d made earlier out of the fridge, and sat down on the new couch to eat it.

“That was great, but I’m tired,” he admitted after a while, and he put his fork down on the coffee table that Annie and Remy had recently chosen.

“Do you feel ok?’ I asked.

“If you mean my ankle, yes. If you mean my brain, then mostly. It was a long trip and this is only the beginning of the season.” He yawned.

“You should go to bed,” I said. I could watch his light from my own bedroom and I would know that he was resting.

“Not yet. Tell me about your day.”

He already knew plenty, since we’d been texting so much, but I told him about the wilted carrots. That made him laugh, and I was very happy to hear it. I also told him about Kirsten showing up, and that made him get the cold, frozen face that I didn’t like.

“Tell the manager if she’s causing trouble.”

“She’s not,” I said. “She was the second person to try to buy without ID, and the first was a boy who had drawn on a mustache to look older. I can handle it. But then Cully got involved,” I added, and explained that part of the story.

“I understand why he’s thinking with other parts of himself because she is very, very pretty. ”

“No, not really.”

“Will, yes. She’s very pretty, but she doesn’t act very nice.”

“She’s been seeing the new center, Langston Diouf,” he mentioned. “The only reason I know is that he already got in some trouble with the Woodsmen PR people about the shit he’s posting. They want us to keep up a clean, wholesome image, like we’re all a big family, and those videos weren’t it.”

“What was he…Holy Moses.” I had been scrolling as we spoke, and I had found what Will was talking about. The posts had been removed but, of course, other people had helped to spread them around. They showed Kirsten and the Woodsmen center locked together in ways that were…wow.

“Wow,” I said out loud. “This is why Cully said that he recognized her.” I turned my phone sideways to try to understand how they were holding one of the positions. “I don’t think of myself as conservative about the human body, but this is more than I need to see of people.”

“That’s what the PR department told Langston,” he agreed. “And the guy has been getting shit from all of us. He did from the West Virginia fans, too, and he was embarrassed.”

“Did you talk to him?”

Will’s eyebrows raised. “Me, personally?”

“Yeah, you,” I said. “You would be able to give him really good advice.”

“Because I’ve never posted naked videos of myself?”

“Because you think about things before you act on them, and you make good decisions. Like, for example, arranging everything so that I could come to Michigan. I’m very glad about that.”

“Are you? Are you really? You were lonely before,” he said.

“I was, so it was a good idea for me to get another job and it was a good idea to get more into painting the furniture so that I’m busier. I also know that you’ve been making an effort to spend time with me, which I like a lot because you’re so nice to talk to.”

“You say the sweetest things,” he told me. “You always have. You acted so appreciative that I was at your house making you learn math and work on writing sentences.”

“I was extremely appreciative, and so was my grandma. That was another reason why she always made you cookies, to show you how grateful we were.”

“I think I acted like a jackass back then.”

“No,” I said immediately, “you didn’t. You were honest with me and that was the best thing you could have done. I appreciate that a lot about you, too.”

“My honesty,” he echoed. He sat forward, leaning his elbows on his thighs and resting his forehead on his palm for a moment. “I’m really tired.”

“Go to bed!” I told him again. “I have fabric samples to show you in the morning.”

He nodded, and I watched him put his plate in the sink and then walk toward his room. I locked the door carefully and checked it again to make sure it was ok before I went to the guest cottage. Then I lay in my own bed and wondered why his light was still on, and why he wasn’t sleeping.