No.
Chapter 6
Everett was mostly quiet on the way to his house, except for giving me a few directions. I knew my way around after living in this area for my whole life, but I had never been on his street before. His place was a rental, as he’d said, but it was big and pretty. The most impressive thing was the location: it was on a low bluff overlooking grey, cold Lake Michigan.
“This is beautiful,” I said, staring at the view from the driveway. “You’re so lucky to live here.” I tried to think what it must have cost per month and I decided that it was probably more than my student teaching stipend, the whole thing. I wondered if he’d have to move into something smaller and farther from the lake when the lease ran out and if he didn’t make it back to the real Woodsmen team. After seeing that exam room today, I had to think that nobody in the Junior organization was getting paid well.
“I grew up landlocked in Arizona and I went to college in Colorado,” he said. “I thought it was a pretty cool thing to get to see so much water.” We were moving slowly toward the door as he spoke—he clearly wanted to go faster, but just like when I walked with my sister, I had taken his arm and was setting the pace. The slow pace. We went inside and the first thing I noticed was that it was plenty warm. His furnace was working fine and there were also accommodations like furniture to sit on, appliances to use in the kitchen, and solid surfaces to walk on. I had looked at an apartment the week before that was in my price range, but it turned out that the rent was low because the floor was not what I’d been expecting. It had been what the landlord called “joists,” sideways boards with insulation stuffed in between them. He said that I was welcome to install my own flooring over that or I could have chosen to live there like a permanent tightrope walker.
But Everett had floors that were probably pre-installed and they seemed very sturdy and most likely expensive, just as everything else did in his house. He went to his bedroom to clean up and I heard water running, so I tried out the couch, saw that there was a toilet in the bathroom (that had been an issue in a different apartment I’d toured), and tested what came out of the kitchen faucet. It was water and, unlike what we used at the motel, it was very hot. He must have had a good shower, which I was also hoping to find in our new place. Two days before, I had looked at a room in a house where the only shower was a hose hooked up outside (which wasn’t functional in the winter). The person who had shown me around had explained that they had all shared atub until it cracked, but that none of them really minded using buckets for bathing now.
Before, I had thought it was a hardship to share a bathroom with my sister, mom, and dad. Sharing one with my sister and also five strangers while bathing with buckets? That was much worse. I wondered if I could sneak in a shower while I was here at this house, but I decided that I couldn’t. Instead, I did some of the same things that I had after Willow’s accident. Everett had all the stuff you’d need for cooking, like a full set of pots and pans, but everything seemed almost brand-new. There was one plate on the shelf that looked clean and ready to use, but there was another full set of them still in a box, unopened. He had plenty of food too, so I started to make a quick meal in case he was hungry. I had already discovered that the couch was comfortable and it was easy to set up a place for him to lie down and relax in front of the big windows with the view of the lake.
He came out in just a few minutes, so I definitely wouldn’t have had time to take a shower myself. I didn’t do much afterwards, like the styling and makeup that my sister recommended, but it still took a while for me to rinse out my hair. It was straight and easy to handle, but there had always been a lot of it and it had also been a while since I’d had it cut. Everett’s hair was now wet, making it look almost black. It always looked nice—not short and neat, but a little long and messy, a little curly and maybe like it wasn’t going where it was supposed to. Even in the pictures where he’d posed at the movie premieres with his wife, he usually seemed to have a piece or two that was doing its own thing.
“Did you have hot water?” I asked.
“This isn’t the Junior Woodsmen locker room,” he answered. “In this house, I have hot water, heat, and no mice. They’ll clear out the rodents in the practice facility before the preseason training starts there in the summer.” He sat on the couch where I’d plumped up some pillows and then rested back against them. “Are you cooking something?”
“I’m making lunch,” I explained. “Are you hungry?”
“Uh…” He had to think about the answer, which made me worried about how severe his head trauma was. “I’m surprised that you’re doing all this,” he finally said, but I just told him that it was normal to want to help someone. Right? “Sure,” he answered, but he still seemed unsure.
And I thought that I understood why. When we had been at the practice facility, the parka guy and the trainer had assumed that I was his girlfriend or even his wife, and I hadn’t corrected that. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up now, though, so I decided to pretend like I hadn’t even noticed and I definitely hadn’t gotten excited about it. I would look for an opening to explain that I wasn’t pursuing him, though.
I brought over his soup and a sandwich, along with a big glass of water. I also found another blanket, because I remembered how my sister had always been cold in the hospital. “Thank you,” he told me. He took a bite of the sandwich and looked up. “I’ll get a car to take you back to the game. You don’t have to stay here and babysit.”
“The trainer said that you should have a babysitter. Or, not really that, but just someone to stay with you to observe. A friend, and not a girlfriend.” Good, I slid it in there.
Everett looked surprised. “What?”
“You and I have only been talking,” I continued. “There’s nothing really going on, which Willow was pestering me about.”
“About us? You and me? We only texted a few times.”
“Right, and you dropped by to see me where I work. You did that three times,” I noted. “And you drove out to get my sister with me.”
“I had seen two cars in the parking lot when I went to the motel where you work. They both looked like total pieces of shit that wouldn’t have made it very far in that weather. I thought you’d need my truck.”
“I did. It was just really nice of you, that was what I was saying.” I paused. “And you were asking me all those questions about the schools only because you needed information about them for the custody dispute. Is that correct?”
“My lawyer told me it would help if I really knew what I was talking about, since Eris probably can’t even remember the name of her son’s preschool. I was finding about the hospitals around here, and looking into air quality and stuff like that. But I was mostly trying to…”
He stopped and looked at me, and I waited.
“You’re right.”
I tried not to gasp and I felt my heart pound as I thought about what he might have meant. “I’m right?”
He nodded, but then squinted and put his palm against the side of his head. “My life fell apart, just going totally to shit. I guess I really did need a friend, somebody outside of football and everything else.”
Oh. “And that was why you were talking to me about the school system,” I said. “Maybe to find out more about it like your attorney had recommended, but not totally. Your custody case wouldn’t depend on your recall of the number of speeding tickets issued around each campus.”
“You seemed nice when I met you at the stadium. You seemed like you cared.”
“I did,” I said. I still did.
“Then I saw you later and you were still trying to be nice. But I wasn’t lying about needing to know stuff or trying to make up a story to fool you.”
