“What if we practiced swimming together?” he suggested. “We were going to do Spanish, too.”
“I would like that a lot.” I looked up at him and he smiled at me.
I didn’t improve much that afternoon, but we didn’t try very hard. We splashed around and he showed me how to throw rocks to make them go a lot farther and when we got out, he went up to the house to get more food and more drinks. Football made you very hungry and playing in the water gave you an appetite, too. While he was up there, he also downloaded a language-learning app and we practiced under the umbrella.
“Hola,” he told me carefully.
“Buenas tardes,” I answered. I knew at least a few words, and one was very important:amigo. I wasn’t feeling like a leper and I was thinking that maybe I did have more than one person. We stayed on the beach and drank lemonade, and I thought again that I had a lot of…I had to look that one up.Suerte. I was a lucky woman.
Chapter 13
“No, sorry. You can only take one,” I said to the fifth grader. I knew her from last year, when I’d been a student teacher in her fourth-grade class, and she’d always had a hard time listening to directives.
She did now, as well. She looked at me, grabbed a second cookie, and then walked away.
“Let her go,” my cafeteria coworker Jerica advised. She dropped her voice. “That one has always been a little bitch. Last fall, she swore at me when I told her to clean up a puddle of chocolate milk that she’d spilled on purpose. Then she had a crying fit and denied that she’d said it, and her parents had their own fit and promised that their perfect princess couldn’t have done any of that. There was no proof except I know what I heard, but you know how Suzanne is. She always wants to pretend that there are no problems so then she won’t have to deal with them.”
I did know that the principal seemed to be afraid of conflict, so it made sense that she would have tried to bury the issue. I alsodidn’t like calling any child a bitch, but swearing over spilled milk and then lying like that had really been a bitch move. “Didn’t her teacher do anything?” I had arrived in his classroom as a student teacher in January, so I hadn’t been a part of the incident.
“You mean old Phil?” She snorted. “I didn’t bother to talk to him because I hate him, too. I knew him in high school and he was what we called a lech. Know what that is? He hasn’t changed a bit, except now he’s a dirty old man instead of a young one.”
“Really?”
She eyed me. “Didn’t you work with him last year? He didn’t try anything on you?”
“No. He seemed pretty normal,” I told her. But I thought about that more when I left and on my way to my sister’s place, because I was visiting her today. She and Boyd were living in an apartment over his parents’ detached garage. This was a good setup, she had explained, because they were far enough away to have their privacy but close enough to go over for dinner, since neither she nor her boyfriend knew how to cook. She did have to navigate a flight of stairs to enter and exit, which concerned me, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to fight again.
In the weeks since the first Woodsmen game and our argument, we had mostly made up. I had gone ahead and said that I was sorry, that I was glad she cared enough to drive illegally to give me advice, and that I respected her opinions. I didn’t say anything about her being wrong or stubborn, but I still thoughtshe was. In turn, she said that she accepted my apology, but she didn’t give me one back for telling me that I was naïvely falling in love with Everett and that I had stupidly moved into his house where he was going to use me somehow and then drop me like a piece of chewed gum on the sidewalk.
He wasn’t going to do that. He had continued to be a wonderful friend to me, such as when he’d given me a better perspective on Boyd’s actions after my sister’s accident, and he was also a great roommate. First, the house was never dirty—that wasn’t so much due to his neat and tidy habits but because he had cleaning ladies who came once a week. I had never been so startled as when I’d walked in and saw that there were new sheets on my bed and my laundry had been washed and folded. It was like living in a dream.
The other part of the dream, the bigger and more important part, was Everett himself. We ate dinner together most nights when he didn’t have to be at something for the team, like practices, meetings, visits with the trainer, or watching football film. He had also flown out of Michigan in the orange Woodsmen plane to one midweek game and one on a weekend. But other than that, we were together and we talked, not about important things but just conversation. He asked me about my sister, my coworkers at school, and my new job as the lunch lady. I asked how his coworkers on the team were treating him, how the next game was going to be, and how his shoulder was feeling. We laughed sometimes and smiled often, and it was…it was just nice. I liked it a lot because I liked him a lot.
He was the first thing my sister asked about after I climbed the stairs to her apartment. “He’s great,” I told her and then, to head off her next question, I said, “No.” Because she was going to ask if I was sleeping with him and I was not. I had already explained how we had defined our relationship as “friends,” and I had also pointed out that it wouldn’t have helped his custody effort to mess around with another woman. That fight was still ongoing, although the last time I’d asked him about, Everett hadn’t seemed as gung-ho—he wasn’t as angry. He had stared hard at the picture I’d shown him of Eris and her son, one of her latest posts, before shrugging and saying that she’d been trying to contact him again outside of the purview of their lawyers. Maybe they would talk, he’d mentioned. Maybe things were different.
Willow was still focused on something else: sex. “You know, all those sports guys mess around,” she said. “It’s true. It happens a lot when they’re away at games with the single ones and sometimes the married ones. Look,” she said, and showed me some of the latest Woodsmen gossip. I shrugged as if I wasn’t interested but then my eyes did go back to her phone, because I’d seen “Ford” and “quarterback” mentioned there. But it only reported that someone had spotted him in the hotel lobby.
I shook my head. “Everett says that they’re too busy to do much when they’re away. It’s walkthroughs, meetings, then—”
She flipped to a picture and showed me what looked like the inside of a bar or maybe a club, because people were dancing. I saw several faces that I recognized, since I had made an effort to remember the players. None of those faces were his, though.
“I guess some of them go out,” I acknowledged. “He might, too. I’m not monitoring him.”
Willow looked frustrated. “You don’t care?”
“No, I don’t,” I told her, and I didn’t let myself rub my brow bones even if my head did start to hurt a little. I changed the subject instead. “I heard something funny about my cooperating teacher from last spring.”
“The old guy? You didn’t like him, right?”
“We didn’t really get along,” I answered. “I tried, but he didn’t think that I was a good teacher. He wanted to meet with me a lot when I first started there, to…I guess to tutor me.”
“To tutor you into being a teacher? That’s weird.”
“I said it wrong. More like he wanted to be a better mentor,” I clarified. “But I could never go out because I had class, and work—”
“What do you mean, ‘go out?’” my sister asked, and I heard a snort from the other room. “Baby, come here,” she called.
I hadn’t known that Boyd was eavesdropping. I nodded hello when he joined us, and then forced myself to say it, too. Getting over my anger at him was a hard habit to break but I was trying.
