Page 39 of The Cadence

Will listened to the story but he didn’t respond. “You need ice,” he said, looking at my face.

“She had some before. I’ll get more,” Kirsten announced, and sauntered toward the ambulance.

She’d already let me know that one of the EMTs was really cute, but they were too busy to talk to her and too professional as well.

They’d had to treat several people besides the fetish guy, who was now on his way to getting booked.

Fortunately, there hadn’t been a lot of other customers, but everyone who had been inside the building was suffering from stinging eyes and a cough.

The store was closed, so I had the rest of the day off.

“What really happened?” he asked me. “I’d like to hear the truth instead of tall tales from Kirsten.”

“She did help a lot,” I answered. “She emptied her whole canister onto his face.” Then I told him a more balanced version of the eggplant event. As I talked, he gently stroked the place where I’d gotten whacked.

“Here you go,” Kirsten butted in, and pushed a cold pack toward my face.

He intercepted it and placed it carefully against my cheek.

“It’s so lucky that I had the pepper spray.

My dad got it for me for my birthday last summer.

He said that since I was legally an adult, I could stop sneaking off to The City and do it more safely,” she explained, but then quickly corrected herself.

“I actually go there all the time. I actually live there.”

I caught something else, though. “You were legally an adult last summer?” I asked her. “Does that mean you turned eighteen and you’re nineteen now? You’re still a teenager.”

“I’m close enough to twenty that it counts,” she assured me. “It’s basically the same.” Then her head whipped to the right and she smiled. “Cully came! I told him that I saved you and that we almost died.”

She skipped off to the parking lot’s perimeter where he was trying to convince the officers to let him pass.

The two of them had a very emotional and also very physical reunion that started to resemble what they did next to the loading dock.

In not too long, all eyes in the parking lot were directed toward them, including those of the emergency personnel.

Except for one pair of eyes. Will continued to look at me, and he still carefully held the cold pack. “This is going to bruise. What should we do to make sure that guy stays in jail?”

I explained how incarceration worked, since the Bodines hadn’t experienced many brushes with the law (no matter what they might have done to deserve them).

“He’ll be out soon enough, but I heard one of the police officers mention that they ran his name and saw that he had warrants out of Nevada. Everybody has warrants,” I said.

“I’ve never known anyone with warrants.”

“You may have been hanging out with the wrong people,” I told him, and he said maybe so, but he was happy to be in a warrant-free crowd.

We were able to leave, and we went together in his car because my eyes were still bothering me.

“That was crazy,” I said as we pulled into the garage.

I was very, very glad to be…and it was at that moment when I realized that it was home.

It was the place where I felt most comfortable and secure, just like I had at my grandma’s house.

The ladies from church had been correct that it didn’t take too much time for you to feel like you belonged somewhere.

Will was watching me again. “Your eyes just got—"

“I’m tearing up from the pepper spray,” I explained. “I need to wash them out again.”

I took a shower and changed clothes, too, and put what I’d been wearing into the nice machine in the laundry room. When I came out, he held a grilled cheese sandwich on a tray along with a glass of milk.

“I thought you might want this,” he told me, but then frowned. “Now I know it’s not from the pepper spray. You’re crying.” He put down the sandwich and strode across the kitchen to hug me again. “It was scary, honey, but it’s ok.”

It seemed stupid to admit that I had been crying over the fact that he’d made me a sandwich, so I nodded.

And what had happened at the store did sound kind of funny, but it had been frightening.

That guy hadn’t been playing around and I was glad for Kirsten and her spray.

I suddenly had the thought that I’d better tell Cully that she was younger than he might have believed, but I decided that it could wait.

Will loosened his arms. “Come eat your sandwich,” he said, and he guided me over to the couch. There were pretty pillows on it now from Annie, but it was still big and comfortable and he sat next to me and watched as I took a bite.

“Crying is probably good for my eyes,” I noted. “It clears them out.”

“I don’t want you to,” he said. “I don’t want you to cry. Would you feel better if I went and killed that mother—”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I interrupted, and further stopped this line of thought by holding half the sandwich to his mouth. “Take a bite. You need it too, because this probably made you very anxious.”

“I needed to get to you,” he agreed. “The head of security at the stadium came running onto the field and said I was excused from practice.”

“The head of security can do that?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Lyle has been there for a long time, and he has a lot of sway with the coaches and the rest of the team hierarchy. They listen to him.” He took another bite. “This is good. You eat the rest.”

“I’m happy to share.”

“Let me take care of you and not the other way around,” he said sternly.

Like how he had carted me off to a new home, and given me money and a job? “I’m not taking care of you. I just wanted you to enjoy the grilled cheese,” I answered.

“You always do that. If it was raining when I came to tutor you, you used to take my wet coat and hang it over the heater. You always got me a big glass of water so I would be well-hydrated.”

“We had learned about it in science,” I remembered. “It’s important.”

“Do you remember the last time we saw each other, after my graduation?” he asked me.

I swallowed what had suddenly become a big lump of dry bread in my throat. “I do remember,” I said quietly.

“You cleaned up the mess in my mother’s bathroom. I stood there watching you, like I couldn’t even move.”

“I think you were in shock,” I said. “It was terrible.” I had known, from personal experience, how awful it was to find your mother in that state. And then I had a frightening thought.

“Did you bring that up because you’re thinking that your mom is going to do it again now?” I asked urgently. “What gave you that idea? You had said that she wouldn’t.” I could drive to Chattanooga because his car would definitely hold up—no, flying would be quicker.

But Will shook his head. “I don’t think so. I went through her bathroom when we were down there, looking for pills, and she didn’t have any.”

She could have been good at hiding them, though. I nodded warily.

“She was putting on a performance back then,” he continued. “Now there’s no reason for the show because it was all for my father’s benefit, and he’s not around to watch anymore.” He paused. “Not that he cared much when he was alive, either, but she made the attempt.”

I remembered her attempt, and it had been terrifying.

We’d been on the way to my grandma’s house after my declaration of love in the high school parking lot, with Will behind the wheel and me looking out the window and trying not to cry again (either from disappointment, humiliation, or just a simple broken heart).

Then calls had started to come in on his phone.

“I don’t want to answer while I’m driving,” he’d said, frowning at the screen.

Of course he wouldn’t have done that, because he was Will.

And his car was clean and looked polished, but it was old so it didn’t have anything like a microphone or the capability of wireless connections so that he could answer easily.

After three more calls went to voicemail, he had pulled over into the parking lot of a donut shop to pick up the next one.

“What do you need, Mama?” he’d answered.

I had only heard his side of the conversation, but what he’d said was alarming.

“Did you take something? What was it?” Then he’d almost yelled, “Stop saying that!” He’d suddenly dropped his phone and pulled out into traffic without looking, and another car had honked and swerved.

“I’ll get out at the next red light,” I had told him, because bad driving reminded me a lot of being with my own mother behind the wheel, after she’d had a few. I had gotten out and walked before, and I was prepared to do it again.

“No, I can’t leave you on the side of the road. I can’t tell what’s wrong with her,” he’d said, and the car had jerked back into the lane, in a way that felt much too familiar to me. “Her words were so slurred that I could barely understand what she was saying.”

“Does she usually drink a lot?”

“She likes to have a Pimm’s Cup in the summer.”

I’d had no idea what that was, but it didn’t sound as if it came in a six-pack. “What about drugs?”

I’d watched his jaw tighten, but he hadn’t spoken. That had been answer enough and I’d prepared myself for what we were going to find at his house. And yeah, it had been terrible.

“Calla?”

I looked over at Will, the Will of today and not the high school grad of seven years before who was worried about his mother. “Are you still hungry?” he asked me.

I hadn’t been very hungry to begin with. “No, I’m good. Thank you.”

“I’ll get you some more ice for your face.” He started to get up.

“No,” I said again. “Could you sit here?” I put my hand on the couch cushion to indicate the place I meant.

“Right there?” He slid over so that our hips touched. “Like this?”

“Just like that.” I turned my head so that I could press my face against the hard contour of his arm muscles and breathe in his scent, the one I’d tried to catch over my grandma’s dining room table as he had attempted to explain long division.

“We could do this instead,” he suggested, and leaned back against one of the new, decorative pillows. “You could lie here.”

He meant against his chest. I crawled over to rest my cheek, the one that hadn’t been hit by the eggplant, exactly where he’d indicated.

“This is good,” I told him. It had been chilly as I’d sat on the curb outside the store, with a sharp wind blowing.

Now I was warm and besides that, I felt the same way as I had in my rocking chair on my grandma’s porch.

It felt like this was exactly the spot where I was supposed to be, that this was where I was safe and at home. I thought back to the day of her funeral and how I’d leaned against him as we’d sat on my former bed.

“Ok,” he had told me then. “Ok, you can do that.” His voice and his body had been stiff and he was so uncomfortable.

But now he had a different message. “This is very good,” Will said. He sighed, but I thought it might have been contentment. He also held me tightly. “Very, very good.”