Page 30 of The Cadence

“Loose ends,” Will repeated. “Yes, there are a lot. It’s better to be up here, away from the situation. I’m hiding.”

“You are not! You call her every day.”

“And you defend me better than any teammate I’ve ever had on the football field,” he responded. “When did I say that I wanted to handle things alone?”

“That was why you wanted me to be by myself in the guest cottage,” I reminded him. “You thought I would like to grieve that way.”

“I’m not grieving,” he reminded me right back, and I shrugged.

Maybe he wasn’t doing it like I had, with the bouts of crying and the onslaughts of memories, but he was still going through it.

“I always felt like…I always believed that I should handle things quietly, without other people interfering. You know how they talk.”

I thought of all the rumors about him that had run around our high school, and I nodded.

“It’s different now,” he continued. “If I want to think about something, I can do it in the car before I get home to you. I don’t need to be in an isolation chamber.”

“No, most people don’t,” I agreed.

“I would choose an isolation chamber over spending more time with the people at the party we just had.”

“That’s also true,” I answered. “I like Cully at the grocery store, but I have a lot of questions about his taste in women.”

“Why doesn’t his taste lead him to you?”

I stared at Will, not understanding. “What?”

“Didn’t he go after you at all?”

“You mean…you mean that Cully would be thinking without his brain about me? No,” I scoffed. “No, no way.”

“Why?”

“We’re friends,” I stated, but then amended that statement. “Actually, I would only say that we’re friendly. We make each other laugh at work when it’s boring or when the customers annoy us, but that’s all. You’ve seen his type! That’s not me.”

“You mean Kirsten.”

“That’s not me,” I repeated. “We’re very, very different.” She was small and curvy in the way men liked. She made them think of sex, which they wanted to have with her. I was the opposite.

“You mean that you know how to use cutlery, you don’t talk about your pretty parts at the dinner table, and you don’t get sloppy drunk to the point of falling down. I saw them walking across the lawn,” Will explained. “Sully had to keep her on her feet.”

“It’s Cully. You’re definitely correct about the first two, and the third one about drinking to excess isn’t anything I do very often. Only when I’m very sad and overwhelmed and get to close to good whiskey,” I answered. “I don’t really want to use the term ‘pretty parts’ anymore, either.”

“Fair enough,” he said, nodding. “Cully would have done better to chase you around instead.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” I wondered.

“The two of us are very different. He’s a little boy in a lot of ways, like how he still lives with his parents.

They do his laundry and he has no desire to learn how to do it himself.

He only got the job at the grocery store because his mom said she was going to put his gaming laptop in the driveway and run it over unless he got his butt into gear and made some money. He doesn’t have any ambition.”

“And that’s important?”

“Not how you’re probably thinking. I don’t care about someone getting a big check each month or having a fancy house with an elevator. I wouldn’t mind it,” I had to admit.

“So, what does ambition mean to you?” he asked me.

“It means wanting to have a good life, a safe life that’s secure.

I would want someone who worked hard like I do, so that I didn’t feel like I was pulling him along.

I think that was one of the reasons that my mom took off with me when I was a kid.

She was angry that she was the only person with a job. ”

“Just like my parents,” Will pointed out. “My mom supported us all for years, but she was pretending the whole time that she didn’t really have to work. She didn’t want anyone to know that we were barely scraping by, because that would have been admitting how far the Bodines have fallen.”

“I don’t think she was fooling anybody,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I don’t care. Why wouldn’t you have to work for things?

I always did and that’s the reality for most people.

But for my parents, it was all about the show and not the mess behind it.

I got good at picking up on clues to what was really going on with them,” he told me.

“If you listen well, you can hear most of what people are trying to hide.”

“Like what?”

“Like Kirsten and the things she was saying tonight. When she wasn’t mentioning her genitalia…sorry.”

I nodded.

“When she wasn’t talking about something inappropriate, she told me a lot. She said that she’d gotten kicked out of college for academic reasons.”

“What?” I had been listening with half an ear as I’d talked to Langston, but I definitely hadn’t heard that. “She did?”

“I think so,” he agreed, nodding. “She said several things about being tired of school, hating her classes, and how the town was boring and not as good as The City. She also mentioned that she never wanted to go back there, but then she admitted that she couldn’t.

I kept listening and she complained that it was a shitty school where the professors only cared about grades but those weren’t important, and she said that they weren’t ever going to have a fun student body if they let people walk away only because they had some issues with turning things in.

It made me think that she’d flunked out. ”

I thought for a second. I had vaguely heard her say all those things, but they’d been interspersed with other comments about wine, bars, the Woodsmen, and yes, her parts. “I didn’t put that together.”

“She’s going to live with her grandmother up here. Her parents are angry and don’t want her to come home until she figures out a plan,” Will said.

“She told you that, too?”

“More or less.”

“And you understood her because you were used to decoding your parents and how they tried to hide the truth?” I asked him.

“People are always doing that,” he answered. “They say things they don’t mean and they omit the important parts. I listen and watch, and that was how I figured out that my dad had a girlfriend and that my mother…” He shrugged. “You already know about my mother’s issue with prescription drugs.”

I nodded, remembering how I’d learned about that.

“I do the same thing on the field,” he continued. “Do you know what the quarterback’s cadence is?”

“No,” I said.

“You need to learn more about the offense.”

“I’m working on that, but it isn’t as interesting as the defense.”

Will smiled at me. “Before the quarterback snaps the ball, he calls out a message to his players. Some of it is nonsense but some of it is important information about what they’re going to do next on the field. If I can understand even a little bit of what he’s saying, it’s a huge advantage.”

“So you’re an interpreter,” I said. “You’re a word detective.”

“I guess so.” But he sighed a little. “It would be better if everyone just said what they meant. It would be a lot easier for me and the defense if the quarterback would yell, ‘Next play for us is a strong-side sweep.’ They never seem to do that.”

“I try to say what I mean. Do you?”

Will looked at me for a moment. “I’m not honest all the time.”

“Nobody is, not totally. You lied to me recently because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”

“I did?”

I nodded. “I gave you that book about the gardener who digs up the engagement ring and then meets…I don’t want to ruin it for you.”

“What?”

“You said that you’d read it on the plane back home from West Virginia and that it wasn’t bad, but I found out the truth when I looked at the team’s social media posts,” I said.

“What did those tell you?”

“You were in the background and I saw that you were reading something else, not anything with a beautiful aqua cover,” I answered.

“I’ll read it on Thursday when we fly to Alabama,” he promised, and I said it was a library book but I would renew it.

“I know that you’re honest about the important stuff,” I said, which led me to my next question. “Are you going to visit with anyone while you’re away?”

“It’s too far to make it back and forth to Chattanooga to see my mom. I won’t have enough time.”

I hadn’t been referring to her. “So, no one?”

“Well, one of the guys who used to play for the Woodsmen got traded to the Rackers in the deal that sent me up here, and I think some of us are going to go say hello to him. Ray Bishop,” he added, but I only knew the names of the people who played with Will, not any extras.

And I hadn’t been referring to Ray Bishop, either. “You said that you’re really busy on these trips,” I recalled, and he nodded and commented that he was getting mosquito bites and we needed to go inside.

I was recalling something else that Will had told me, though.

It had been on our plane flight up here, the first one, when he’d let me look at his phone and I’d seen his pictures of the beautiful woman who had been his girlfriend, the woman who still lived in Alabama after she’d moved there for him.

They still saw each other when he went back, that was what he’d casually mentioned to me.

What message would a word decoder have taken from what he’d said about her? Did he want to see her because he still cared? Was it only to check in about old times, or was there more? I thought, unfortunately, of pretty parts.

The mosquitoes were biting me too, and I followed Will back into the main house. But it stayed on my mind.