Page 33 of The Cadence

“I’m sorry about that. He’ll get more for you, in a nice way,” I promised her, and I glared at Cully.

My ex-friend grabbed the flour and made another cloud puff up as he stalked back toward the aisle with the baking supplies.

I glanced at the long line of customers and wondered if any of them had their phones out and had recorded that interaction.

For the rest of the shift, until the last Woodsmen fan had gone home, Cully and I ignored each other and I watched people and hoped that at least my hair looked ok.

“You’re a beautiful girl,” my grandma had told me when I’d first moved into her house.

“But it doesn’t matter if I say so. The important thing is that you think it about yourself, Bug.

” She had brushed my crazy hair and shown me pictures of women with hollowed-out cheeks and giant eyes that were too big for their faces, like I had looked back then.

“So beautiful!” she’d repeated, nodding seriously. “Someday, you’ll see it, too!”

But I had been more interested in getting other people to see it, like the girls at my high school who already had beautiful hair and bigger breasts and the boys…

the boys like Will. As years had passed, I’d accepted myself a whole lot more, but the idea that people were watching me just to criticize was enough to throw any woman off her game.

I definitely felt like I’d been thrown off mine as I drove back home, and when I got there and checked Will’s location? I didn’t feel any better.

He wasn’t at the hotel where I knew that the team was staying.

The night before the game, he was in what looked like a residential neighborhood that didn’t have anything to do with football, except it might have had something to do with his ex-girlfriend Nicia.

I stared at my phone and thought about texting him or even calling, but that was just pathetic.

I didn’t have much experience with men but I knew enough not to chase them when they were running away.

I reminded myself of something important: he wasn’t running away from me, because I’d never really had him to begin with.

I felt just as stupid as that day in the parking lot when I’d yelled that I loved him.

I felt just as hollowed out, but that was ridiculous.

I wasn’t the girl crying in a bathroom stall anymore.

I had a nice bed in a beautiful house where I could cry much more comfortably, so even though it was well before I usually went to sleep, I headed upstairs.

I put on the t-shirt that he’d given me and then I bawled into my pillow.

When I woke up, there were several notifications on my phone. Four were voicemails from Will and he had texted six times, too, and he seemed to get more worried with each message. “I’m not going to call the police again,” he had written, “but please answer me.”

“I went to bed early,” I wrote back now, and almost immediately, I got a response.

“I want to hear your voice.” My phone rang, and this time I answered it.

“Hi, Will.”

“Hello, Calla.”

“I’m ok,” I promised. “I’m totally fine.”

“I’m glad.” He sighed. “I’m sorry that I acted crazy. I know you can take care of yourself.”

And I knew how worried he got. Even if he had been off with his ex, he wouldn’t have forgotten about me. “I’m sorry, too,” I answered. “I should have told you what I was doing.”

“No. This is my problem to deal with.” He paused and then he said, “I’m going to make an appointment with a doctor when I get back.”

“You are?”

“Are you happy about that?” he asked.

“I’m very, very happy about that,” I admitted. “I’ve been wanting you to so much but I’ve been trying not to push.”

“You’ve mentioned it at least once a day, and usually more,” Will said, and that was probably true.

“Was that annoying?”

“It bothered me to see how much it bothered you. It made me realize that it was a bigger problem than I’d been letting myself admit,” he said.

“Last night, I was sitting in my hotel room and sweating because I couldn’t reach you.

That’s not a metaphor, I was actually overheating with nerves, and I realized that I can’t act like that.

It’s not fair to you. I can’t put that much pressure on you. ”

“It’s not fair to you, to feel so anxious,” I told him.

“I don’t feel anxious,” he disagreed. “I felt like I needed to know where you were, and I felt like something terrible had happened to you.”

“In other words, you had anxiety. I’m so sorry that I did that to you the night before a game! Did you get any sleep at all?”

He didn’t answer the question. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. This isn’t something that you’re doing wrong. What’s wrong is how I’m reacting to normal behavior.”

“Please say that you got enough sleep.”

“I’ll be fine,” he answered instead, and then he had to go.

I feverishly turned on the old guy radio show that everyone here listened to, “Woodsman Football with Herb and Buzz.” Not that they would be able to report on Will’s sleep patterns, but I listened closely for any information that would help or hurt him.

“You’re twitchy,” Cully announced when I walked into the grocery store for my shift.

He was right, and I was. I had almost called in sick because I had worked myself up to such a state of worry, and over what?

Will’s lack of rest? He was a professional and he could handle it.

He’d played his whole senior year of high school with broken phalanges, for goodness sake!

Or was I upset about him spending time with his ex?

I was sure about one thing: I was still mad at Cully. I shrugged slightly as an answer to his question and turned my back on him.

“Uh, Calla, I’m sorry,” he said.

I glanced over my shoulder. “For what?”

“For talking about Kirsten’s kitty, for one thing.” He didn’t say kitty. “For talking about having sex with her, and then for telling you that you’re jealous and that you should go sleep with Will.”

“I think you told me to go fuck him,” I recalled, and his shoulders hunched.

“I was also mouthy with my mom last night and she got real mad. She took away my gaming laptop and yelled at me for a while, and then she told me to go to my room. That sucked without my laptop,” he lamented.

“Cully, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“And your mother is taking away your toys and putting you on time-out?” I asked him.

He got mad again, just like the day before. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying…”

“Yeah, yeah! I know what you’re saying!” He stomped away but after a little while, he came back to my register. I had been ringing up a few people who had rushed in for last-minute pregame purchases, but almost everyone was now at home and watching Herb and Buzz on their TV show.

“Do you want help out to your car?” he asked the final person in my lane, but she said no, picked up her fifty-two pounds of chicken, and ran out. “Calla?” he said to me. He sounded hesitant again.

I continued to clean the conveyor belt because that poultry had been juicy. “Yeah?”

“I get what you meant. You could be right about me and my parents.”

“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” I said.

“I lived with my grandma for a few years and she also had a hard time accepting that I was growing up and that I needed her to treat me like an adult. It helped when she realized that I was already acting like an adult, so she could loosen up a little.” It had been difficult for her because she’d never stopped thinking about me as the little girl who’d disappeared with my mother, like I’d gotten frozen in time.

“I know that this situation…” He stopped and considered his next words.

“I know it’s not the best. Kirsten and I have sex next to the loading dock because neither of us has our own place,” he told me.

“You were right that it’s not romantic. It’s not clean, either, and she’s been saying that her shoes will get ruined. ”

“Why don’t you move out of your parents’ house?” I suggested.

“You mean, I should move in with Kirsten?” Cully had been looking dejected, but he perked right up. “That’s a great idea!”

“No. No, that’s not what I meant,” I told him. “I was thinking that you could live with some friends. You grew up around here, so you must know people.”

He didn’t seem to hear that. “She hates living with her grandmother,” he told me excitedly. “She’s looking for a job, too, so she’ll have some money soon.”

I tried to imagine what kind of job Kirsten would be able to hold down. “Well—”

“Miss? Excuse me, miss?”

“Thanks, Calla!” Cully told me happily. “The game starts in three minutes. I’ll talk to her first.” He jogged toward the back, and I turned to deal with the customer. He looked familiar.

“Have you seen the state of your baguettes?” the man asked. He held up a loaf of bread that I thought he’d taken from the shoddy display that Cully was supposed to have fixed the day before. He definitely was supposed to have removed those baguettes because they weren’t fresh anymore.

“This is a disgrace,” the shopper announced. “Only the bag is keeping it upright. Watch what happens when I remove it from the paper! It’s—well, I hesitate to say it, but it’s phallic.”

Then I remembered him. The drooping carrots! “Why are you taking our bread out of the paper bags?” I asked, just as he triumphantly held it up for me. We both watched as it sagged to the side in another pathetic curve.

“Our loaves are stale,” I told him. “That should be as hard as a rock. Did you do something to make it droop over like that? Wait, is that even from this store? I don’t recognize the name of the bakery on the bag!” And Cully hadn’t recognized those carrots, either.

“I—” He looked at me, looked at the bread, and then dropped it like it burned his hand. He ran through the doors and into the parking lot.

Holy Moses, people were weird! I put on a glove before I disposed of the gross baguette and I asked my happy coworker to please deal with the rest of the bakery display at halftime. For now, we had a game to watch.