Page 25 of The Cadence

I waved, happy to see them all. Will had coordinated with some of the other players, so now I was sitting in a group of the women that I had met before, instead of with strangers.

That hadn’t bothered me but I knew that he would feel better if I were surrounded by familiar faces in this big stadium.

“I’m looking forward to the bye week,” Kasia said as she plopped down in the orange seat next to mine. She did seem tired. “I’ve been taking care of my nephew while my best friend, his mom, is on her honeymoon and it’s…” She shook her head.

“Kids are a lot,” Calandra agreed, and several of the other people around me also had things to say on the topic.

One of them, a woman named Symone, put her hand on her stomach every time someone mentioned a baby, and I got the idea that she might have one on the way.

My grandma would have immediately gone into her yarn stash to find something soft to make a blanket, which I bet they would need up here.

These women had been warning me about how cold it got, so a baby could use several blankets and Grandma had always knitted the cutest…

“Are you crying?” Kasia asked me. “Are you all right?”

“It’s from the wind,” I said. It had been a bad idea to think about my grandma. Time seemed to be helping, as everyone had said it would, but it still didn’t take much to make the tears come.

She seemed a little puzzled, since the temperature had dropped since the first time I’d been at Woodsmen Stadium, but it was still a nice day and not very windy.

Luckily for me, the game started shortly and a hundred percent of everyone’s attention was devoted to the field, but not just to the players.

They also paid a lot of attention to the beautiful dancers and to the coaches.

The head coach’s daughter was actually sitting next to me, and she explained the coin toss. It finally made sense.

Most of the women in the orange seats near me were involved with guys on the offense, and I found it funny how they sat back a little when the defense, the important side, went out to play. Were they really not aware of how vital it was that the other team didn’t score?

They were fun anyway, and this was a more relaxing game because the offense did step up and got more points. The defense, as usual, played great. They may have let one or two touchdowns go past them but that wasn’t on Will’s side of the field, and his ankle looked steady. He didn’t limp at all.

I was still feeling excited when he came out of the locker room and into the lounge, and I had to hold my hands together with my fingers interlaced so that I didn’t start clapping when he joined me.

“Hello, Calla.”

“Hi, Will! That was wonderful. Really, really good.” I did clap, but just quietly.

“Thank you. Do you ever think that I play badly?”

I had to consider for a moment before I remembered something. “Once, in high school, you suited up when you were sick. You puked on the sidelines and that was a tough day for you. You only got three sacks.”

He smiled. “If you ever decide to start writing books, I’m going to ask you do my biography.

I’ll come off as bigger than…” He stopped and looked at his phone.

“This is the third time that my mother has called me in the span of ten minutes.” He glanced around the crowded room and I thought back to the last time I’d been with him and his mom had started calling.

That had been seven years ago but I remembered it very well, because it had been bad.

“I’ll drive and you can talk to her,” I suggested.

I had decided to get a ride to the stadium so that we would have only one car and could go home together—it was just easier on someone who might be tired, and therefore might worry.

We worked our way through the players and families, out to the throng of Woodsmen fans behind the metal barricades.

They yelled and clapped when they spotted Will.

He signed jerseys, footballs, and a baby’s bib, and he took some pictures with them, too.

Then he reached backwards for my hand and we went the rest of the way to the car together.

He didn’t call his mom back until we were on the stadium drive and heading toward the exit. But when he did, I heard her speaking high and fast before he even said hello. It sounded like she was hysterical—was it happening again?

“What? What?” he asked her, and then he motioned with his hand, as if he wanted me to stop the car. The traffic had thinned a lot so I pulled into one of the outer parking lots just before the stadium’s main gate.

“What?” he repeated, and it got so strangely quiet. His mother wasn’t saying anything and it didn’t seem like he was even breathing.

“Will?” I spoke softly, too.

He shook his head. “Call nine-one-one,” he said into the phone, and I heard her answer in a voice that was calmer than before. Then it got silent again.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him. “Will?”

“I’m coming home,” he said to her. “I’m coming.” She didn’t seem to respond, but he put the phone down on his lap.

“What happened?” I asked him, afraid that I knew.

But this time, it was his father. “He went to his bedroom last night and she didn’t check on him until a little while ago, when the game ended. He was cold.”

“Holy Moses. Oh, I’m so sorry!”

He was already busy. He talked to someone at the Woodsmen and also to his agent, and between those calls and typing, he asked me to take us home. I went as fast as I could, gripping the steering wheel. When we pulled into the garage, I did my best to line up this car with the other one.

Will finally put down his phone. “Would you come with me to Tennessee?”

He had sounded so unsure. “Absolutely,” I said firmly. “I definitely want to.”

“You could see Miss Mozella.”

“I’ll go to help you,” I corrected him. “I’ll pay for my ticket.” I had been saving, after all.

“I already bought it for you.”

A short while later, I was ready to drive us to the airport. It hadn’t taken me very long to pack my black dress and black shoes, but I hadn’t been sure of what else to bring. How long would we stay there? I had ended up throwing a mishmash of items into my bag before hurrying to the main house.

“Did you lock it? Did you turn on the alarm?” he asked me before we left, and I had. I also told him that I checked all the faucets and nothing was dripping at all, and then we got back on the road. The next flight to Detroit was leaving soon and I went fast again so we could make it.

He kept very, very quiet. A lot of people at the airport were watching him but they were acting extremely respectful and giving him space, and I got the feeling that they might already have heard about his father.

I checked…there it was. Someone must have spotted the breaking news alert out of Chattanooga, and the Woodsmen fans were already reporting on it to each other.

They were also sending their condolences and best wishes to Will, and I thought I’d share those messages with him later.

Not now, though. Unlike what had happened with my grandma, this had been out of the clear blue, and I thought that he must be reeling. When we got on the first flight, a little plane, I said how hard the shock of it must be. “You didn’t expect this, and that must be worse.”

“No, I did expect it,” he answered. “With the way he drank? If it wasn’t today, it could have been next week or it could have happened a year ago.

Either he would have died from cirrhosis, a heart attack, or some other illness related to being an alcoholic.

He also could have wrecked his car again and taken someone else out with him. ” He paused. “It’s better this way.”

Besides a little conversation about food and our trip, we were mostly quiet.

Will pulled out work related to his new company, which somehow he had thought to bring, and pressed his knuckle against his lip while he read through it and made notes.

I had a book from the library but I couldn’t focus too much.

I had also brought a box of tissues, just in case, but he didn’t seem to need them although I checked a lot to make sure.

Both the flights were much smoother than the first one I’d taken, and I was so relieved by that.

We had sped through the Detroit airport to get to the second plane and we sped out of the Chattanooga airport, too, going directly to a rental car in the pitch darkness.

The whole time, Will had kept his eyes above the crowd, walking fast with his gaze at least a foot over the heads of all of the rest of us.

That separated him from everyone else, including me.

He didn’t want to talk. He had wanted me to come, though, so I was glad to be here, and I still had the tissues ready. Just in case.

We drove in more silence to his parents’ house—now just his mother’s house. They—no, I should have said that she lived in a part of town that I had visited only a few times. It didn’t reflect very well on me, but I had driven past this place before.

Holy Moses. I realized that I was just like Kirsten, who had spied on the Woodsmen players in Michigan.

I was just like the woman who had tormented Will when he had been in college, his stalker.

Well…it wasn’t exactly the same, and I tried to comfort myself with that thought.

When I’d driven by his childhood home in my old car, I’d known that he wasn’t in residence.

He had been away at school and then playing for the Rackers in Alabama.

I’d been sure that I wouldn’t see him, but I’d still spied and that wasn’t much better.

“I’ve been here,” I heard myself admit as we approached the driveway.

“I remember.” He had to clear his throat after he spoke, because it was clogged up from disuse and maybe emotion, too. “I can’t believe I let that happen, even if I was an idiot back then.”