Page 11

“T ouchdown! Number sixty-two, Tyler Hennessy,” the voce boomed, and the stadium went wild.

We did too, jumping and screaming. Miss Gail hugged me, and I was glad. She’d already made sure that I knew she was ok with my slip of the tongue.

“I understood what you meant. I didn’t like being in debt to others, either,” she had told me quietly when we arrived at their condo this morning.

“I wasn’t trying to say anything about you, personally. I’m just afraid of not being able to take care of us. I’ve been afraid for five years, just about every moment of every day,” I explained.

“It’s all right,” she said. “And don’t worry about me mentioning anything to your father. Ty and I also had a talk about keeping our opinions to ourselves.”

“Do you think he can do that?” I asked her, and she had laughed. I didn’t think so, either.

The offensive linemen were now slapping his back to congratulate him and the QB ran over to shake hands. I screamed louder, trying to encourage them to be even more effusive. It was the fourth quarter and that scoring drive had just moved the Woodsmen ahead! There was plenty of time left in the game, though, and I looked over at my father—

“Dad?Daddy!”

His eyes opened and he said something, but too quietly for me to hear because of the noise in the stadium.

“What’s wrong?” Miss Gail was asking, and I leaned down close to put my ear near his mouth.

“Ok,” I told him. “It’s ok.” I looked up at her. “He’s feeling tired, so we’re going to go. It’s just too much here.” And I should have known better! I had asked him if he wanted to leave at halftime and he’d said no, because he’d known how much I wanted to stay.

“I’m ready,” she quickly concurred.

“No, you don’t have to come with us,” I told her. “Please tell Tyler how great he was, ok? Thank you.”

“Kasia, are you sure I can’t do anything?” she asked me, and I nodded and quickly pushed his chair toward the exit. There were so many people in our way but security stepped in to help, and soon enough, we were back in the parking lot.

“Do you need something to eat? Water?” I asked. I had put stuff in my car, just in case. The concession prices at the stadium were out of control, but he’d eaten before we’d left. Had it been enough? Probably not, I chided myself.

“I’m ok now. I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned back against the seat and looked exhausted.

“Don’t be sorry! I wish you’d told me earlier, though.” We drove on the nearly empty road toward the main gate and I tried not to let him catch me looking over as I checked on him. “I’m kind of glad to leave, anyway. It was so loud in there.”

“Kasia…” He shook his head. “Don’t tell stories.”

“It was really loud,” I answered, because that had been the true part.

We drove the rest of the way home listening to Herb and Buzz on the radio, and the game only got more exciting. They were hoarse with yelling and finally Buzz called out, “That’s it! That’s quadruple zeros on the clock, and count this as another Woodsmen win! Golly gee, we’re jumping for joy in the booth!” I silently pumped my fist but my dad didn’t hear, because he had already fallen asleep.

I helped him into the house and worked in the garden and on the gutters again, since I hadn’t yet figured out how to fix those. I texted Tyler, too, but I didn’t expect to get a response. He was busy, probably getting interviewed by any number of reporters and then, hopefully, making better friends with his teammates. I paused, my gloved hand full of slimy leaves, as I thought about other ways to encourage that.

What about a party? I hadn’t ever been good at making friends myself, but I was aware that people liked to have fun with food and alcohol. I considered the idea. A party at his condo might have been hard, with Iva already there and baby Balderston moving in permanently on Monday. Babies seemed like the opposite of fun, but maybe I wasn’t giving him enough credit. Anyway, Iva wouldn’t like all the people and their germs, and Tyler didn’t drink, anyway.

What about a dinner instead? He could invite some of the guys on the offense to go out next week, since it was a bye with no game scheduled. If he was interested, I could send him a list of possible restaurants since I had slightly more knowledge than he did of places to go around here. Not much more, but I could think of things.

I scooped leaves more enthusiastically and then swung the hammer with a lot of happy force before I realized that my dad was resting, and now was not the time for noise. I did quieter activities as I checked my phone a lot, and Miss Gail did send some very nice pictures of my dad and me grinning widely in our Hennessy jerseys. She also checked in to see how he was feeling, and asked if we needed anything. But we were ok, I assured her. I had just expected too much, and I was sorry that we’d left her alone.

I finally heard from Tyler much later, when I’d already gotten into my bed and was nearly asleep. “I’m on my way,” he wrote.

“Where?” I answered.

“Bless your heart. 5 min.”

“Hey!” I said back to that, and I got out of bed to walk to the window and watch for lights. Not a lot happened on this road…there he was, meandering carefully over the potholes.

“What is this car?” I whispered as I walked outside and saw the dark SUV.

“I traded in the yellow one for blue,” Tyler said. “Somebody claimed I drove the yellow one to get attention, but no one can say that about navy.”

“It’s nice, but you didn’t have to get a new car just because I was wrong about you needing the spotlight.”

“I was tired of people pointing at me,” he said, and I didn’t want to tell him that it would continue no matter what he was driving, unless the vehicle had a cloaking device. “Why aren’t you sleeping yet?”

“I was almost asleep,” I said, and we both looked down at my sweatpants, the bright pink dimmed in the moonlight and not quite as clashing with the Woodsmen orange t-shirt that I also wore.

“You don’t dress up,” he said and it sounded like an insult, except he was smiling.

“Not too much,” I admitted. I’d been wearing my best outfit so often that it was starting to pill from multiple cycles in the dryer. Maybe I didn’t need that skirt, shirt, and matching vest to look good, though. Shay Galton accomplished a lot with her wardrobe choices but she also used amazing body language, and why couldn’t I? I adjusted myself into one of the poses that I’d copied from her posts, putting my breasts forward, twisting my pelvis to a somewhat painful angle, and puffing out my lips.

Tyler noticed, but he didn’t have the reaction he would have if Shay Galton herself had been there. “What are you doing? It looks like your hip is dislocated. I saw that happen once in college, and it was a bad injury.”

“My hip is fine.” I used it to walk towards the house. “Are you coming in?”

“Sure.” He walked as quietly as I did and then pointed at my bed, which was pulled out and took up most of the living room/dining room/kitchen. “I guess I did wake you up,” he said.

“No, but it’s late. I don’t know why you’re driving around after a game…what are you doing right now?”

He was getting into my bed, settling on top of the covers. It creaked in a way that sounded dire, but it held. “This mattress fucking sucks,” he noted in a low voice. “It’s like lying on a thin layer of rocks.”

“It’s pretty bad,” I agreed. “There’s no room for an actual bed in here, but it never bothered me too much.” I lay next to him, and the mattress had never felt so bumpy or so small. It also felt fun, having him here with his arms linked behind his head and his feet hanging off the end by a foot or so.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked me. “Are you glad I woke you up and came over?”

“I was awake and yes, I’m glad you’re here,” I said, and it made him smile, too. “I’m glad, but I still don’t know what you’re doing.”

“For one thing, I wanted to check on your dad,” Tyler answered. “I heard he left the game early.”

I stopped smiling. “I think he’s ok,” I answered. “I’ve been worried, lately.”

“And that’s why you want to drop out of college?”

“Can we not talk about that again? I don’t want to fight, and I’m not going to listen to you no matter what you say. Your opinion doesn’t matter.” I took a breath. “No, it’s not because I don’t respect you or anything like that. It’s because I’m the one who has to deal with this, so I have to do what’s best for me and my dad.”

“Ok, I get it. Your dad won’t, though.”

I expelled another breath that was as sigh, well aware of that. “Now let’s talk about your game, and how I could tell that your ankle hurts.”

“Was I moving like it bothered me?”

“No, I could tell when you were sitting on the bench. You were keeping your weight off that side,” I said.

“You could see that? Did Herb and Buzz notice?”

“If they did, they didn’t say anything,” I assured him. “I checked all the Woodsmen sites and social media stuff and there’s nothing there, either.” I paused. “Are you really ok?”

“Yes. Now I know why your neck never healed,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.

“That’s also ok.”

“Bullshit. It will only get worse if you keep sleeping on the floor of your office. And you were doing that when that little guy came in and tried to assault you.”

Cody wasn’t exactly little, because he was bigger than I was. “I was wondering how long it would be until you asked me about him,” I said. “That was someone I knew from high school.”

“And why the hell was he touching you?”

“I didn’t want him to!”

“I got that,” Tyler said. “You were making it obvious with how you were going to knock him out with the lamp.”

“Cody thinks…” I thought about the phrasing. “He thinks we have some kind of residual relationship.”

“Which means that you did have a relationship, way back when?”

“When I was a freshman,” I said. “He was a junior and played alto sax, and he drove a car his dad had given him. I thought he was amazing.”

“That little shit?” He sounded stunned.

“Remember how I mentioned that people could make mistakes? I did,” I answered. “I made a mistake in falling for him. He seemed to like me, and I wasn’t used to that. I was the kid who was always wrong, somehow. Like, I had to go eat in the office sometimes, because so many people messed with my lunch tray. My dad didn’t know how to deal with my hair so I always got the same cut that he did at the barber. I dressed like him, too, in work boots and cargo pants. Those things didn’t serve to make me popular,” I explained. “They served to make people call me names, and unlike you, I wasn’t a fighter. I stood up for myself but not in a scary way.”

“I didn’t fight everybody.”

“Right, you were busy kissing some of them,” I said, and he smiled.

“Some of them. So you were kissing Cody.”

“More than that. He told me that girls in high school had sex so if I wanted to be with him, we had to do it. Then the next day, he dumped me. Publicly, in front of all the woodwinds and the low brass. It was awful.” I remembered him laughing as I had tried not to cry.

“Why’d he do it like that?” Tyler asked. He sounded sympathetic.

“Well…it’s because he was upset about the sex. He thought I would be so into it and have a major orgasm, like he must have seen when he watched women in porn. I didn’t. I was upset because it hurt and he took that as a personal insult. He told the whole percussion section that there was something wrong with me, that my vagina was malformed and that was why I couldn’t come. He started calling me No-Kasia. No, as in, no O.”

“What an asshole.”

“Yes, and I told him that he was and that I was upset,” I said. “Unfortunately, I did it in verse.”

Tyler blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I thought I was a serious poet, so I wrote him an emotional villanelle,” I explained.

“Come again?”

“It’s a kind of poem with nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain.”

“I don’t know what you just said, but it sounded so sexy.”

“Did it?” I wondered. “How about if I told you that villanelles have two refrains?”

“Hot,” he said, and I laughed softly.

“There are two repeated lines throughout the poem, and mine were, ‘My soul torn asunder by a wild coyote’ and ‘Love, unbounded, eternal, Cody.’”

He winced. “Less sexy, now. Fuck, that’s…”

“Yes. Yes, it is, and it didn’t work on him, either,” I agreed. “I should add that there aren’t many words that rhyme with his name. Goatee? Bony? Now I might say, ‘You repulsive little toady,’ but it was supposed to be a cri de coeur. Anyway, villanelles are hard and I was a terrible poet, but I did better with insult rhyming couplets.”

“I’ve never heard of an insult couplet.” He gestured with his hand, motioning his fingers toward himself. “Lay some on me.”

I remembered what he’d said about his first kiss, that the girl had laid one on his cheek. I would have to lay couplets instead. “How about, ‘One day I look forward to your existence as a ghost, you smarmy, slimy, shitty milquetoast?’”

“No,” Tyler said. “No, that’s not better. What the hell is the milk thing?”

We talked for a while, laughing about poetry. Eventually, I dug out some of my old journals and he read them with the light from his phone, shaking his head. “This is…”

“Yes,” I agreed again. “At first, I saved them because I thought they were so good. Now I look back in amazement. I would go around speaking in verse all the time. Isn’t it hard to believe that I didn’t have a lot of friends?”

“I didn’t, either. And I wrote stuff, too,” he admitted.

“You wrote poetry?” I asked in amazement.

“No.” He looked down at the page and tapped it. “You put your feelings in verse, but I just did it straight.”

“In prose,” I suggested.

“Exactly. Some counselor told my mom to try it, to give me a notebook rather than watching me fight everybody in the whole damn class. I was so pissed that sometimes, I’d use the point of the pen to dig right through all the pages to the back cover. I hope my mom didn’t ever read the stuff I wrote, because it would have broken her heart to see it. We never could hold onto much of our crap anyway, just what we could pack fast and carry with us. Those notebooks must be long gone and that’s good.”

He had just said so many things that could have broken my heart, too. “But then you found football,” I said. “It helped you to feel better and make friends.”

“It worked better than the journaling to stop me from fighting so much, and I did meet more people. I wouldn’t say that we were friends, but at least we were teammates. One of my PE teachers had told my mom that I needed to be in athletics. He said I was tough and I was fast, too. It was hard at first because we kept moving but then that ended.”

“Why?” I asked.

“When I was fourteen, my father got arrested for drug possession and he was carrying enough to make his prison term serious. We didn’t have to worry about him for the next seven years and nine months, and during that time, I got big enough that I wasn’t ever going to worry about him again. When he got out, he picked a different fight with the wrong guy. He was always starting shit and that time, he was beaten to death.”

“Good grief.” Now I thought about Tyler practicing with the Woodsmen and the bruises I’d seen when he was in the bathtub. They wouldn’t have killed him, but it made me afraid for him.

“You’re over it. You’re over that guy.”

“Uh, what?” I asked. “Who?”

“That little guy who was touching you,” he answered. “I guess you don’t usually try to hit people with furniture if you’re interested in them.”

“I’m definitely not interested in Cody. Definitely not,” I stated with conviction. “He showed up about two years ago to deliver water bottles to our complex, and I just about puked. He’s been bothering me on a biweekly basis ever since, but I stopped being interested in him about five years ago. That was when I finally grew up, but throughout my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I was still trying to catch his interest with my couplets.”

“By couplets, you mean poetry. Not…” He pointed at my breasts.

“He wasn’t that enthusiastic about those, either.”

Tyler looked at my chest. “If I were him, I would have been interested in all of it. I would have liked if somebody wrote a vill—what was it?”

“A villanelle,” I said.

“I would have liked someone to write that for me, and I don’t see what’s wrong with those.” He pointed again.

“He wanted something larger,” I explained. “He had a lot of ideas.”

“The real thing had to be better than whatever porn he was watching.”

“Maybe. It hurt my feelings how he made fun of me, so I wrote a pantoum about that. ‘My body was yours, but you despised it, O the wild night that ended in ruin.’ It only got worse from there because those lines repeated.” I shook my head. “I should have stuck to blank verse. Or maybe, I should have taken up football and worked through my emotions on the gridiron instead of foisting my poetry onto the world.”

He reached over and tested my arm muscle. “I could see you as a receiver. You were pretty fast when you made that run into the end zone at the practice building, even though you’d eaten half the buffet before we went out on the field.”

“I felt the need to get my money’s worth,” I explained, and he answered that I hadn’t paid for that lunch, had I? “Whatever,” I said. “I would like more chances for free buffets, but I think I’m better just watching you instead of than trying out for a team.”

“You should stick to poetry. I kind of like it,” he said, but I no longer considered myself as someone who followed the muse. “What are we going to do about that villanelle guy?” he continued.

“Cody? I don’t think we’ll have do anything, because he’s scared.” I relished the sound of that. “He’ll leave me alone.”

“No,” Tyler told me. “He won’t, because he’s in love with you.”

“What?” I sat up and the mattress squealed. “He is not! He never was, and especially not now. We hate each other.”

“You may hate him, but if he’s been coming in every two weeks for years to bother you, it’s not because he’s an asshole. That’s not the only reason,” he corrected himself.

“No,” I said. “No way.”

“Why aren’t you seeing anybody else? Just a lack of time?”

“I guess.” I lay down again and he turned onto his side to face me, muttering a little about the poking springs. They did creak horribly under his weight. “I met a guy when I started college and we went out for a while, but we didn’t have the same interests and no, I didn’t have the time for it. But I was interested in sleeping with someone else, so we did.”

“How was it?”

“Meh,” I answered. “He liked my body a lot more, which was gratifying. But it was the only thing that was gratifying.”

“So…no O,” he correctly surmised.

“Not when I was with him. I know there’s nothing wrong down there, but he was pretty quick and he didn’t pay much attention to my enjoyment.” That, along with how many cans of beer he was slamming, had led to the end of our dating relationship. It just seemed like such a waste of my resources, especially since he’d insisted that I had to bring the condoms if I wanted to use them. I did, and they were expensive. “I think that everyone should share the price of birth control,” I mentioned.

“That guy was selfish,” Tyler commented, and I remembered him kissing Shay Galton and how she’d pumped her hips against him. She’d seemed into it.

“You’re not selfish with sex?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I never heard that I was, but maybe they’re talking behind my back.”

Yes, Shay Galton had seemed into it, but her whole life was pretense. How could he have judged? “I bet everyone’s saying nice things,” I said, in case he really was worried. “I bet you do just fine.” I patted his shoulder to encourage him.

“Thanks, Kasia.” His eyes met mine through the darkness. “Want to see for yourself?”

I looked back at him, sure that I’d misunderstood the meaning of that question. “What?” He couldn’t have been suggesting…

But maybe he was. He reached over and put his hand behind my back, and then he pulled me toward his body. Space remained between us, but I was close enough to feel the heat of him. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“You’re not with anybody, and neither am I. What’s stopping us from enjoying this comfortable bed?”

I smiled. “Just the lack of foam and support, I guess. Do you really want to fool around?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. I would say, we’ll have fun. What do you think?”

“Um…” Was there really a choice here? No reasonable woman would have said no to him. Besides how he looked, I liked him—but it would only be for fun, as he’d said. It wasn’t anything to do with emotions.

But I also saw how it could go really wrong, even if it started for the right reasons. No, it wouldn’t be like how things had ended after the first time with Cody, when I’d been crying and in pain and he’d been angry and calling me names. But there were other potential pitfalls that someone could tumble into, and those could hurt just as much.

Still. How could I say no?

“We could start slowly. Like kissing,” I suggested. I remembered how he and Shay Galton had kissed and had immediate second thoughts. “I’m sure that your former girlfriends had a lot of experience with hundreds of guys.”

He frowned.“So?”

“I’m not criticizing. I’m envious,” I explained. “I’m saying that I don’t have that, so I won’t have their skill level, either. Don’t expect, you know, a Shay Galton-style kiss.”

And that, apparently, had been the wrong thing to say. Tyler rolled onto his back and put his forearm over his eyes. “I don’t want to think about that woman.”

“Are you still into her?” I asked. “I thought she’d offered another chance but you’d—”

“No, I don’t want Shay,” he told me, but at the same time, he stood up from the bed. “If I don’t ever hear her name again, I’ll be a lot happier.”

“Oh, ok.” I nodded.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re not totally over her—”

“I’m totally over her,” he stated. “You know what I found out when she came here for Fan Day? She was messaging the guy she’d taken out a restraining order against. He has serious problems and what she was doing was dangerous. It was mean, too, because he’s mentally ill. But I found out that she was still contacting him and we fought almost the whole night before I had to go meet all those people.”

“Why?” I asked, bewildered. “Why would she do that?”

“Because when he caused problems, she would get attention.” He paused, shaking his head. “I told her to go, that I needed some time, and that time showed me that I’m over her. I never want to hear anyone call me Royaux, either.” He looked toward my dad’s bedroom door. “I shouldn’t have suggested this.”

“I think it was a good idea!” I said, rising up to kneel on the mattress. Something metal gouged into my knee. “It was a great idea.” I had been ready to go, before I’d ruined it.

“Maybe.” He stood for a moment, looking down on me. “It’s probably too late for you, anyway.”

“Too late?” As in, it was to late for him and me? Or did he mean that no one would ever want to—

“Grandma hours,” he reminded me, and he touched my cheek briefly with his fingertips. “Now I understand why you keep them. With all the shit you do, you need your rest or you’ll end up sleeping on the floor somewhere.”

“No, I don’t need to sleep right now,” I argued, but I also looked toward my dad’s door. “I guess this isn’t the place.”

Tyler nodded but then he added more. “It’s a bad place, and it was a bad idea.”

A bad idea? “Well—”

“I’ll see you Monday.” He was already turning to go, but I scrambled to my feet, not ready for him to leave quite yet. The bed made a terrible noise, like an elephant trumpeting, and we both heard my dad’s voice call out.

“Kasia?What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m fine!” I answered, but I didn’t want him to try to get up to check on me. “Tyler, I didn’t think that was a bad idea at all. We’re two unattached adults. Why not?”

“Don’t tell your dad that I was here. I don’t want him to think I’m sneaking around with his daughter. Good night.” He closed the door quietly behind himself.

As I’d feared, my dad was struggling to get up when I went into his room. “No, don’t,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“I thought I might say hello to Tyler. Wasn’t that him in the driveway?”

We both looked toward the window, under which the engine of the new, navy blue SUV had roared to life.

“He came over to say hello,” I agreed. “He wanted to talk about the game.”

“Kasia, you don’t have to tell stories. It’s no surprise that he’s in love—”

“Don’t say that,” I answered, and my voice sounded sharp. I immediately wished I hadn’t spoken that way and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know why you think he wouldn’t be,” he told me, and he sounded angry, too. “You’re the prettiest and the smartest—”

“No, I’m not that girl. I’m ok with it,” I stated. “I accept reality and I deal with it. Not everyone does.”

“Do you mean me? I’m right about you, and I’m right about Tyler, too.”

“Daddy, you’re the one who sleeps with the portrait of Mom angled just right so you can feel like she’s still looking at you.”

“I understand what reality is. I’m living it, every day.” His eyes went toward the painting. “I miss her, but I accept it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I wish I could do something to make it up to you.” I didn’t only mean how I’d been rude, but also how I was…not enough. I’d been trying my whole life and I hadn’t ever been able to make him better.

“We’re just tired,” he said. “Go to bed, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

I left his room and lay on the lumpy, poking mattress. Instead of sleeping, I thought that all of the choices I was now making, like giving up on law school, quitting college, and casually hooking up with Tyler, were only going to make my father unhappier. I was tired, but it was a long, long time before I could sleep. When I did, I dreamed of the woman in the picture frame, the mother I only knew as paint on canvas.