“Damn!” she muttered. Her smile was gone again.
“Do you want to move too?” I suggested.
“Like I would follow him, a pathetic puppy? No wonder you never got a boyfriend, Zoey,” she scoffed. Then she drew in a breath and released it. “Sorry.”
I understood why she was being mean, and she wasn’t wrong about what she’d said. The best thing for us would have been to get out of here—but she didn’t want to leave when I suggested that, so we were stuck in these bleachers for at least a little while. She insisted on standing up for the anthem, leaning hard on my arm, and then the game started. Willow was looking at her phone rather than at the field, and she let me layer two more blankets over the pink one since it didn’t matter now if she looked like a hippo. Boyd hadn’t come over to talk and he wasn’t watching her, either.
As I fretted about my sister, I also watched the football. I had been around it because I’d been in our high school band and we’d played at every game. I hadn’t been actively trying to learn, but I must have picked up more than I’d realized. Now I understood a lot of the action taking place on the field and it wasn’t nearly as boring as I’d expected.
“Wow, that’s not a bad return…fumble!” I clapped along with the twenty or thirty other Junior Woodsmen fans as our team recovered the ball after they had kicked it off. I was having fun and it seemed like the rest of the sparse crowd was, too. Why weren’t there more people here? Well, the players on this squad were a lot more familiar, and maybe that was why they weren’t as interesting. Some of them lived in Michigan year-round and in the off-season, they had regular jobs just like the rest of us. And they were unobtrusive when we saw them, not splashing money around at restaurants, bars, and shops. The Junior Woodsmen weren’t at the airport, flying off to exciting places, and we didn’t see them driving around the area in nice cars. They didn’t own pricey real estate, either. They just weren’t as exciting as the real Woodsmen.
I wondered how much these guys got paid, and as I considered that, I shifted because the metal seat under my butt was unforgiving, even with a blanket for padding. Judging from the state of the bleachers, nobody was pouring a lot of money into the team. But even though the facilities were worse than what I’d seen at my high school, the skill level was higher. They probably weren’t as good as the regular Woodsmen—no, they definitely couldn’t have been as good as the regular Woodsmen—but I was impressed. They were all former college players, after all, who were still trying for a spot on a major team’s roster. The action was very compelling.
It was especially compelling for me because I knew one of them personally, extremely personally because he had thrown up on my shirt. An exchange of bodily fluids meant something. He’d even remembered my name when I’d seen him later at Jannie’s bar, and he’d called me Miss Harmon.
“Why are you smiling?” my sister asked grumpily. It was late in the second quarter, close to halftime. I’d been wondering if they would have a marching band perform like mine in high school.
“That was a great throw and the other guy caught it,” I explained. “The Junior Woodsmen are close to scoring.”
“So?” She sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her mitten. “This goes too slow.”
I definitely remembered that from my own playing days—the days when I’d been playing the baritone horn. Our brass section had been great. “We could leave at halftime,” I suggested, but she shook her head. “We can get up and move around a little.” She said no to that, too. I knew why, but I still had to argue because she wasn’t supposed to stay in one position for so long.
“Boyd already knows that you have mobility issues,” I said. Obviously he did, since they were his fault.
“He doesn’t have to see it,” she told me. “I don’t have to put on a disability demonstration for him and his girlfriend.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that. And I thought she wasn’t his girlfriend,” I said.
Willow held out her phone. She had been staring at it and I saw that she’d screenshotted a picture. It was of that woman and Boyd as they ice skated together, smiling and holding hands. “It doesn’t matter if they’re dating,” I said. “It isn’t anything to you.”
“Yeah, right. Nothing to me.” She looked away as she spoke.
We did stay to the end, the bitterly cold end. The Junior Woodsmen were up by three touchdowns and, if someone had asked me how the game had gone, I would have said that they’d won because Everett Ford had played great. He had run a little but he’d thrown a lot more, and they would have done even better if the guys who were supposed to catch the ball had actually done that. But they dropped it a lot or just seemed to miss it. It was hard to catch a block of ice, though, which was probably the state of that football.
“Ok,” I said, as the players ran off the field for the final time. “Let’s go.” My butt had become totally numb sometime in the third quarter.
“I want to wait,” Willow said, and it wasn’t a request but an order. I stood, shifting my weight from foot to foot, and trying to wake up the dead parts of my body. Boyd and the woman walked by and he did look up into the stands. My sister smiled and waved again and he nodded slightly back at her before staring down at his feet. What a coward.
“Now we can go,” I said, but we couldn’t. She didn’t want to walk in front of anyone, not even these strangers. Some friends and family members of the Junior Woodsmen and the team from Lexington went onto the field, so we had to wait even longer for them to clear out. By the time that the players had retreated into the orange building, the spectators had filed toward the parking lot, and we made our way slowly down to the bottom of the bleachers, I could see that it wasn’t going to work. There was no way that Willow was going to walk all the way to my car.
“I’ll go and get your wheelchair,” I stated, and I expected her to tell me no. But my sister didn’t argue, which told me that she really did need it. I transferred the blankets I’d wrapped around myself to her, and then I trudged to the parking lot. Northern days were short in January and it was already getting to be twilight. The game had started early and I understood why: there were no lights in the lot, much like at the bar where I worked, and I also hadn’t noticed any around the field. I thought of all the cool stuff we’d seen on the tour of Woodsmen Stadium, like the beautiful cafeteria (it didn’t even seem right to call it that, compared to other cafeterias where I’d eaten) and the huge workout rooms for the players. Couldn’t they have donated some portable lights for these guys, or a nicer bench? Heat lamps? I hoped that their locker room inside the orange building was ok.
Once I got to the car, I took her chair out of my trunk and then unfolded it so that I could push it back with me. It bounced and jostled as I walked and it wasn’t going to be great for Willow, but it was better than me half-carrying her again. I decided thatI would start going to the gym at Emilia Shaub College so that I could get in better shape, which would help my sister and might have helped me as well. Maybe cute boys also worked out there, and we might strike up a conversation as we picked out weights, or maybe they’d ask what I was reading—I would bring a book, just in case no one actually wanted to talk to me.
I pictured myself in a gym that, in my mind, looked a lot like the one at Woodsmen Stadium. It was too bad that there hadn’t been any actual Woodsmen in there when we’d taken the tour. The coach we’d met had been married and the player, Everett Ford, had been a pukey mess. A pukey mess who was also married, I reminded myself. His wife had been cheating but sometimes people were able to overcome that.
As I approached the bleachers, I saw that a new crowd of people were also walking past there—mostly big guys, and a lot of them wore dark green coats that were the same color as the Lexington uniforms during the game. “Fucking dump,” one of them said, and someone else told him to watch his mouth in front of the lady. That meant me, because there was no one else around. I heard several more complaints as they went toward their bus and I shared them with my sister.
“I guess that the hot water broke in the showers,” I told her. “And the locker rooms aren’t heated enough, either.”
“I don’t care.”
“Ok, fine.” I helped her stand and she batted away my hands as I tried to tuck in the blankets once she was seated in her chair.
“Damn, Zo, I can do it!” she said irritably. “Let’s get out of here.” But it wasn’t going to be a speedy exit, because we weren’t moving all too quickly. We weren’t even halfway to the lot when another group of guys overtook us on the path.
“The Junior Woodsmen,” I whispered to my sister. She ignored me but I was interested. I was watching for the one player I knew personally because we’d exchanged bodily fluids—although it hadn’t really been reciprocal. I hadn’t puked back on him, for which he should have been very glad because his day had been bad enough without that. A few of the players asked if we needed help and I said no, but thanked them. It just made Willow more upset, though. She scrunched down in the chair and into the blankets I’d layered over her.
