“What?” I had turned to stare at him.
He was nodding seriously. “Their culture wasn’t called the cradle of civilization for nothing,” he’d told me. “It went from there to Egypt and they refined it into the game we know today.”
“Baloney,” I had said, and took my shot. The ball had bounced off a sarcophagus and rolled into the cup. “Yes!”
To my shock, I’d won, which I knew because Ronan kept careful records. But despite his claim of competitiveness, he was very congratulatory after the ninth hole.
“You get a prize,” he’d told me, and when we’d gone down to the security shack, he had disappeared for a moment and then come back with a stuffed crocodile. His friend the guard had explained that it was a discard stuffie, since it had lost an eye.
It was sitting on my desk right now. I called him Polyphemus.
It had been very, very fun, right up until the end of the night when I’d driven us back to the barn. I could see from where I’d stopped that the party was still ongoing, just as he’d said it would be.
“Thanks for wiping the course with me,” Ronan had said. He’d held out his hand and for a second, I’d thought that he’d wanted me to take it—before I’d realized that he only wanted his keys.
“There you go,” I’d answered, handing them over. “I would play again.”
“You just want to rub another victory in my face,” he had told me, laughing. Then he’d walked me to my car and stood on the pavement as I’d said goodbye and driven away.
Now I put my containers back into the little cooler bag I carried. You could get lunch here, too, but I liked my own food, which I prepared myself in my own kitchen out of ingredients that I had purchased. Then I returned to my quiet office.
From my desk, you could sometimes hear things going on in other departments. We weren’t too far from the security office, where people were always coming and going. I kept our door open so that I could see everyone who went in to talk to them for some reason or another, like getting parking passes or stickers for their cars.
I looked at my phone for a while and then woke up my computer, which had been asleep for several hours. My main concern about this job was that someone in the Woodsmen football organization would realize that Special Projects wasn’t completing any projects, special or not. They probably weren’t going to fire my boss because of his wife and her connections, but they could have easily said goodbye to me.
When the season had ended, the back office (the operations side which ran everything not directly football-related) hadcontinued working like they hadn’t even noticed. There was always something for them to prepare, and the first big event for the next season was coming up in July: Fan Day, when the stadium opened to the horde of fervent fans and they got to meet the players.
That was also when the team held tryouts, invitation only. I picked up Polyphemus and thought. Junior Woodsmen got an automatic slot to come but not everyone was going to take advantage of it. Some of them were hoping to get onto other teams instead and some weren’t trying out for anything. Ronan Wilder planned to play with the Juniors next winter, muddy and cold and in a locker room filled with rodents. With the hand not holding my new crocodile, I opened the report I’d prepared for Mr. Gowan, the comprehensive survey, and looked at some of the problems I’d listed. He hadn’t mentioned it since our meeting but, of course, he’d had several vacations to plan and he never did anything, anyway.
But why couldn’t I do something? Some of the issues were huge, like what Ed had explained about the leaking pipes in the walls and under the floors, but some were slightly smaller. It would have been easy enough to get a roofing contractor out there to climb around and look for damage. Maybe it only needed patches and the skylights could be repaired. Maybe I could get a free estimate.
I strolled out to the security office and spotted one of the women who had just been having lunch behind me. I identified her as Victoria, although I hadn’t wanted to turn around and stare so it was hard to be sure until I heard her speak.
“Hi,” she greeted me. “Can I help you with something?”
I wanted to know if the team regularly used the same people for repairs—like, if there was a group of contractors that they always called to take care of things. I thought that the security office would know because they would have lists of the companies who were allowed to come into the stadium and park in the lots. They ran a very tight ship here.
She made a cute face, wrinkling her nose. “I’m kind of new so I don’t exactly know,” she said when I explained my request. “Hold on and let me ask Calandra.”
I’d previously determined that she had just started, because I didn’t remember seeing or overhearing her before. She was already sitting with people at lunch, which I found a little strange. But maybe she’d already known them.
She managed to find out which department handled all the repair requests. “The Office of Stadium Affairs deals with the physical plant,” she explained. “It’s not actually a plant, it just means the buildings and grounds.”
“Ok,” I said, but this wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t looking to go through official channels right now. “Don’t you guys keep a kind of log of who comes and goes from here? Would it have the name of a roofing company?”
She didn’t think to ask why I wanted to get that information from her, rather than going to the people that dealt with the physical plant in the Office of Stadium Affairs. Instead, she started typing on the closest keyboard and in a few moments, she had a name for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m Victoria, by the way,” she also told me, and I introduced myself back to her. “I just saw you in the lunchroom. I was facing your back so I was looking at your hair.”
I touched it. “My hair?”
“Yeah, I love your highlights.” She picked up a long, slightly wavy strand that lay over my shoulder. “They’re like a vanilla blonde. Where do you go?”
“It just grows that way,” I said, but I could immediately see that she didn’t believe me. “It does, because I was very blonde when I was a kid and it darkened up to light brown, but pieces still get like that.”
“Mmhm.” She had dropped the lock of hair she’d held. “Lucky. Right, see you later.” She walked back through a door behind the main desk.
