Page 4 of The Cadence

I t was a good thing that I put on those shoes, that was my first thought. This was not a barefoot kind of place.

“I’ve never been in here before,” I mentioned.

“I’ve never had somebody take off with my car like that, either.

” They would have had a hard time if they tried, since you had to know the trick of jiggling the accelerator with your foot while you put it in drive or it wouldn’t go.

Once you did that, though, it could really move.

“That was a valet,” Will said. “I always stay in this hotel when I have to come home.” We were striding through the lobby as he spoke and he looked straight in front, not glancing either right or left.

Since he was so tall, his sightline was above the heads of most of the other people in here.

He moved fast, too, and I was equally glad that I’d put on my tennis shoes instead of flip flops because I had to jog to keep pace.

As fast as we went, though, we still had to wait for the elevator with a few other people who had gotten there before us.

“It’s cooling off,” one of the women noted, and I nodded.

“I think I heard thunder,” I answered.

“Is that right? My weather app didn’t show any rain.” We discussed the problem with forecasts and when she and her party got off at the third floor, I said goodnight.

Will hadn’t spoken, and he didn’t until the doors closed again behind them. “That’s why I prefer a big city.”

“What do you mean?” I watched the numbers of the floors slowly light up as we continued to rise. “I love elevators.”

“Why?”

“You go in, the door closes, and it opens at a new place. In a car, you can see where you’re going but when I was a kid, I thought an elevator was magic. Why do you like big cities?”

“No one talks to you.”

“She was talking to me, not you,” I reminded him. “Her husband was staring but she didn’t have a clue that you’re William Franklin Bodine. Or does that bother you, too? Do you want people to know who you are?”

“Hell, no. I’m happy to go unrecognized. The only people who know me are either serious football fans or they live around here. I don’t want to talk to them or anyone else,” he said. The doors opened and he waited for me to step out first. I had always appreciated his manners.

“If you don’t want to talk to anyone, then why did you ask me to come here? Was it because of guilt again?” He tapped the key card on the lock and we stepped inside. “Holy Moses! This is a palace!”

He didn’t seem to notice the splendor around him, like the big windows that looked out onto the mountains and the fancy furniture.

“What did you ask me? If I feel guilty? No, I don’t.

I went back to your house because I felt…

” He seemed to be at a loss for words. “I felt that there was a need for my presence,” he finished.

“That’s not really a feeling. A feeling is an emotion that you have inside you, like happy, sad, yearning.”

“Yearning?” Will shook his head and paused for a moment to think. “I felt like things were unfinished,” he told me next.

“That’s still not an emotion,” I pointed out.

“Do you want a drink?” He walked to another area of the room that seemed to be a personal bar. There was a little refrigerator and a few bottles on the countertop for him to choose from.

“Sure. I’ll take whatever you have.” I continued to look around and got a feeling of my own: confused. “Where do you sleep in this place?”

“It’s a suite. That means there’s a separate bedroom.”

I checked, and he was correct that there was another room with a large bed. There were also two bathrooms, one more than we had the pleasure of using at my grandma’s house, and two closets. Also, there were two TVs, two desks, and that nice bar area.

“Are you done exploring?” he asked, and offered a glass. “I figured you’d like whiskey.”

“You figured right.” I took the drink and sighed a little. “My grandma didn’t know that I was familiar with alcohol. She would have been so upset.”

“You’re twenty-one,” he pointed out. “Did her objection have to do with religion?”

“No. Can I sit down?”

“Why couldn’t you?”

Mostly because I didn’t want to mess up the nice couch.

“She was worried about liquor in general. From what I heard, her husband was a drunk. The other ladies never said it outright but I caught a few hints over the years. She also worried about me smoking dope and mainlining. That means IV drug use, which I know because I looked it up.”

“Do you do those things?”

“No, I never have. The most I dabble in is liquor.” I looked at the short pour of caramel-brown liquid in the glass. “It was nice that she cared.”

“I remember the first time I met you,” Will said suddenly. He’d helped himself to his own drink. “She stood around the corner in the kitchen so she could listen to what we were doing, because she was worried.”

“Not only because I was alone with you, though. She was also concerned because she’d talked to the school about how behind I was.

She kept going in to see the principal and that woman just wanted to ignore her.

Grandma had been trying to do the assignments with me but she had dropped out after sixth grade and it was hard.

She didn’t know how to help but luckily I got you. ”

He stood and walked into the bedroom, and when he returned, he had another box of tissues. “I bought a multi-pack,” he explained.

“Thanks.” I used several and then went to the bar area and refilled my glass with more than what he’d given me before. “Crying over my whiskey. I’m like a country music song.”

“Don’t have too much. It never turns out well for the singers when they do.”

I looked at the glass and put it down on the bar top. “Were you going to drink this alone tonight, if I hadn’t come here?”

“I probably would have done some work.” His eyes flicked toward one of the desks, where I saw an ultra-slim laptop and a few file folders.

“You’re still going at it hard,” I said admiringly. “Mr. Valedictorian.”

“I got my college degree,” he told me. “I only stayed for three years, but I went back to finish. I plan to get my MBA, too, and I’m starting a business.”

“You certainly don’t have to prove to me how smart and capable you are. I knew right away, from the moment you came over to my grandma’s house and lined up all your supplies on the table. You had the nicest, most confusing calculator, and books for stuff that I had never even heard of.”

“They didn’t help you much. You could hardly read.”

I nodded, looking at the bottle of whiskey.

I could read the label now, but it had taken a lot of work.

Will wasn’t trying to be mean with what he’d said about my illiteracy—it was true.

Also, there was the whole issue with math, in that I hadn’t ever done any before.

I hadn’t played sports either and that was why physical education class had been rough.

It hadn’t helped that I’d started out wearing my grandma’s tennis shoes, ones that were a few sizes too small.

They had been an orthopedic type so they weren’t great for running around…

But the real problem hadn’t been the shoes or my total lack of athletic coordination.

I’d also skipped PE due to mean remarks from other students and I had spent that time in a bathroom stall.

In fact, there were only two things at which I had been competent during my freshman year: lunch, because I knew how to eat (and it was free because we were so low-income), and art class.

“I graduated too, from high school,” I mentioned. “I did it. Are you surprised? I never got up to the level that you reached, so I never needed the big books you brought over the first time we met. But I got the credits I needed. I made it.”

“Good for you. I figured you would.”

“Really?” I wiped my eyes again, but then I smiled. “It was because of my grandma. She wanted me to so much that I couldn’t quit. And after you left, I had other tutors. It turned out that one of the ladies from church had been a teacher and they formed a whole network to pull me through.”

“You were ready to learn.”

“Now I want to learn what you’re doing,” I said. “Tell me more about this business idea.”

“It’s very dull,” he answered.

“I still want to know,” I countered. “You used to tell me about football and I liked to hear it.”

“I thought you were trying to get out of studying, but you did seem interested,” he recalled. “So was your grandma, standing in the kitchen.”

“How did you know she was right there?”

“Your house wasn’t big enough for her to go far. Anyway, I could see her shadow and sometimes she nodded when I talked about our games.” He looked again toward the desk. “Do you really want to hear about my business idea?”

I did, so he told me. It wasn’t simple, like opening a store or running a restaurant—not that those were snap-your-fingers-and-done, but maybe I would have understood them better.

This was all financial stuff that I wasn’t familiar with at all.

Will explained just like he had when he’d tried to teach me pre-algebra and had discovered that I couldn’t really do multiplication and division.

He started at the basics and then worked up.

It took a while and reviewing some charts on his computer, and as I learned, I finished the second glass of whiskey. He had another as well. He also ordered room service and he asked me if I wanted anything.

“You said before that you weren’t hungry but that was hours ago,” he noted. We had been talking for a long time, but not just about his business idea. I’d learned some more about his life in Michigan, too, and about his team there.

“I haven’t even wanted to look at food,” I agreed, and he stared over at me.

“You mean that you were drinking on an empty stomach?”

“I’ve eaten now and then, but I haven’t had much appetite for a while,” I explained.