Page 27 of The Cadence

“Don’t use that tone with me, Calla,” she answered. “Are you in his little house while he’s in the big one?”

“Well, yes,” I confessed. “But I’m saving for a new apartment.”

“Which you don’t want to get, because you don’t want to move away from him,” Miss Mozella said, and they all nodded in confirmation. “We know that you—”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I interrupted her. “I need to get back to the Bodines and I don’t want us to spend this time together arguing.”

“I wonder if Ophelia Bodine will sell the place,” Miss Lisa mused, and funnily enough, that was the topic that Will and his mother were pursuing when Miss Mozella dropped me off in their driveway.

She had to hug me again and say that she was so glad that things were going well, but she also wanted me to remember that I always had a home here with her. “I love you,” she told me. “Your grandmother didn’t tell me much about what happened between you and that man, but Bug, please be careful.”

“I will. I love you too,” I answered, and knocked on the door. She waited until Will had opened it and we both waved before she drove away.

“Why do you look so upset?” I asked him. There was the obvious, of course, but now he seemed very angry.

“My mother and I are discussing her plans for—”

“William!” His mother now stood at the end of the hallway, and she also looked angry. More like furious. “That is a family matter.”

“I tell Calla everything important,” he said. “She’ll hear it now or later, but she’ll hear it.”

His mom turned her glare from him onto me and then swiveled and left. “Holy Moses, she’s mad,” I whispered.

“She’s spiraling because I suggested that she should sell this place and move somewhere smaller that’s easier to take care of.

” He walked into the front room, which was kind of empty.

This house looked nice from the outside but I’d noticed that there were important things missing, like furniture.

In that way, it reminded me of Will’s home up north and it made more sense why he’d been ok to live like that.

He stood at the window. “I should have known better than to bring it up,” he said. “This house was important to both of them.”

“Is it historic or something?” It was definitely pretty.

“It’s old, but I meant that it was important for them to feel like they hadn’t lost everything.

They believed in the power and privilege of the Bodine name, and this place represented some of that.

They hung on, even when we didn’t have electricity because the bill hadn’t been paid, and even when my mother would cry for hours about the selling the furniture and threaten… ”

“What?” I prompted when he stopped. “What did she threaten?”

“When she got very worried, she would make dramatic pronouncements about hurting herself, throwing herself off the roof or jumping from the Walnut Street Bridge. I knew she didn’t mean it.”

It didn’t surprise me very much. “She never actually tried those things,” I confirmed, and he shook his head.

“No. She wanted attention from my father.” Will turned to face me. “We’re a seriously fucked-up family, Calla. All of us.”

“No, not you.”

“Yes, me too,” he said. “I’ve spent all day coming across even more proof of it.”

“But—”

“Never mind,” he said. “Did you eat?”

He wouldn’t talk about it anymore. We ended up getting takeout and it was wonderful, but the atmosphere at the house was not.

His mother was clearly still furious but she was covering that by acting overly sweet, in a sickening kind of way.

He barely spoke and I wasn’t sure of what to say myself, except, “No, ma’am,” “Yes, please,” and other statements like that.

They talked for a moment as I waited in the car, and it was a huge relief when we finally left.

I sighed with a big whoosh and when I looked across the car at Will, he did, too.

Then we both smiled at each other, and that felt so much better.

“She apologized for getting angry like that. She’s sometimes tough to take,” he said. “She steps into the martyr role pretty easily, but I don’t blame her. She put up with my dad for a long time. He wasn’t so much of a total asshole when she married him.”

“No?”

“No, but he’d already been kicked out of two colleges by that point, so she might have seen a problem in the making.

He got kicked out of his private school here, too, the one that generations of Bodines had attended.

They offered me a scholarship to come play football for them and I said no because I was trying to show solidarity with him.

Stupid of me,” he remarked, and shook his head.

“You did ok without that school. You did amazing!”

“Sometimes I wonder what our lives would have been like if she had left him. Why didn’t she?”

“Some women like the ‘bad boy’ thing,” I said. “They think, ‘I can reform him. My love will fix him!’”

“You sound sarcastic,” he pointed out. “You don’t agree that a man can reform?”

“Remember who you’re talking to,” I answered. “I was the one going up to the penitentiary every week to visit the man who refused to be reformed no matter how many times he got locked up or how much he hurt his mother.”

“Your father,” he said, and I shrugged.

“He was never going to straighten out, never, no matter how much my grandma wanted him to, no matter how much she prayed on it or hoped for something different. We are who we are.”

“So there’s no changing us,” Will summed up. “That’s a damning take on humanity.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said quickly.

“I quit chewing on my hair, which was a disgusting habit. I learned to read, didn’t I?

I stopped hoarding food under my bed or in my closet.

I stopped being quite so hopelessly romantic, too, which was a very good thing.

But at heart, I’m still the same Calla that I ever was. ”

“At heart, I haven’t changed either.”

I was so glad of that, but I was also aware that he hadn’t meant the statement as something positive. His words had made it sound like a life sentence. “Well, I liked you a lot when we first knew each other and I still do. If my opinion means anything to you—”

“It does,” he said. He started talking about getting in a workout, and asking if I wanted to come. I had managed to pack a weird assortment of things that I could have used for exercise, but I hadn’t brought the right shoes.

“I don’t mind wearing my sandals,” I said when we were in the hotel room. But when we got to the gym where he always went when visiting our hometown, he’d had a pair of tennis shoes delivered there.

“Thank you! But who delivers shoes at this hour? And how did you know my size?” I wondered.

“The number is worn off your sandals but the black shoes with the elastic straps still have a nine on them. Is that the pair you’re wearing tomorrow?” he asked me, and yes, I would put those on for his dad’s funeral, just as I had for my grandma’s.

Will pushed himself very hard at the gym, lifting enough that other people were staring (of course, that might have been due to his identity as a Bodine and a Woodsmen football player, too).

I did my stuff but finished a lot sooner, so I sat near the front on one of the benches and read my book.

I was in the middle of the good part, where they were finally kissing (and more) when he also finished his workout.

“Ready?” he asked me.

It wasn’t something I was proud of, but probably due to what I’d been reading and also due to the way he looked, his cheeks slightly flushed above his dark beard and wearing his sleeveless t-shirt with the thick muscles of his arms—my breath suddenly caught in my throat and I felt heat spread through my face.

He noticed. “What?” he wondered. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

It was good to be truthful, which was something my grandma had taught me.

It was something I hadn’t learned during the first decade or so of my life, not until I was blessed to have her in it.

However, lying was also necessary if you had a good reason.

One of those reasons: I didn’t want to tell Will that I was staring at him like I wanted to rip off his clothes because I did, in fact, want to rip off his clothes.

First, a gym was not the place for that.

Secondly, he was in mourning! He wasn’t thinking about sex right now.

Third and last, he wasn’t ever thinking about sex with me. He had made that very clear.

“I’m hot,” I said. “I got too warm when I tried to do the rowing machine.”

“Are you ready?”

Holy Moses, I was, but not in the way he meant. We went back to the hotel and despite the hard workout, I heard him through the open doors, turning over and over instead of sleeping. I heard him because I wasn’t asleep, either.

The funeral was a lot faster, less attended, and less teary than my grandmother’s had been.

The only people who had come, besides the deceased’s wife and son, were two very distant cousins and me.

He had been cremated so there was no burial, and we drove Ophelia Bodine back to her house right afterwards.

“We’ll be in touch soon,” she said to her son, who nodded and looked around at the mostly empty room.

“Mama, I want you to consider moving. Think about it. Please,” he answered her, and her mouth compressed into an angry line.

She glanced at me before she spoke. “We’ll discuss it later,” she said. She took a deep breath and turned to me. “I apologize, Calla. I haven’t been a good hostess to you.”

“No…that’s…”

“I’m glad you were here,” she told me. “I’m glad you’re here for my son.” She looked at him. “Goodbye, William.” He kissed her cheek and I also said goodbye, and then we were on our way.

It was cooling down up north in Michigan, but it was still hot in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

We walked into the airport after returning the rental car and I was glad to get out of the sun.

The fabric of my black dress was heavy for this kind of weather.

Luckily for me, the airport here was nothing like Detroit in terms of size and busyness, so it was a short walk to our gate.

I limped my way there, and when we sat down to wait for boarding, Will reached into his pocket and handed something to me.

“Band-aids?” I asked, looking at the little box.

“I remembered that those shoes hurt your feet when you wore them before,” he said.

“They do, a lot. Thank you for these.”

“I should have given them to you before, but I forgot I had them.”

“You’ve had a few things on your mind,” I pointed out.

“I still do. I have to do something about my mother.”

“Do you think she’ll sell that house?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “I don’t mind paying for it, but I think it would be better for her if she moved on.”

That was probably true, but it was so hard to let go.

Will took my hand and I looked up at him. “It was also on my mind how glad I am that you’re here with me. Thank you, Calla.”

I nodded and rested my head against his arm. I was glad, too.