He watched me. “What are you thinking about so hard? If your eyes were plasma cutters, they’d have bored a hole right through me.”
“I guess you’re lucky that they’re just eyes,” I answered. I was not going to tell him, again, what I thought about people giving half-assed performances because the last time I’d done that, I had insulted him. Instead, I stared at my empty plate, sitting on top of his empty plate.
“Mmhm,” he echoed. His tone made me look up again. “I know what it is.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re thinking that it’s weird how I’m so into Christmas, and that I half-ass my way through my job, too.”
“No!” I answered immediately. “No, I’m not. After what you said about how hard it is to make it as a football player, I looked up the statistics about the number of college athletes who go on to play professionally. I had no idea that it was such a tiny percentage. I agree that it’s nearly impossible to make a team like the Woodsmen. There are almost insurmountable odds against it.”
He started smiling. “But you think I should try.”
“I don’t know,” I hedged. “I was reading about you, too, though. One guy was gushing about the old Junior Woodsmen quarterback and he went on to say that before last season, the only thing the team had was a defensive end who didn’t quit. He meant you.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Why would I make it up?” I asked.
“I just can’t believe that anyone takes the time to write about us,” Ronan explained.
I shook my head. “He thinks that you’re really good and I bet that he’s right.”
Now he started to laugh. “You’ve never seen me play!” he said, and that was true. It was also true that even if I had watched him, I wouldn’t have known whether he was good or not because I’d never paid attention to football in the past. Even as a Woodsmen employee, I hadn’t bothered to go to their games.
“What would it take for you to make the Woodsmen team?” I asked. “Just hypothetically. Do you have to be bigger and stronger? Faster? Have better eyesight? Jump higher? Shoot farther? Aim better?”
“I’m trying to figure out if you’re talking about football or basketball. Or target practice.” He was smiling again as he shook his head. “The Woodsmen are on another level with everything. Every single facet of their game is better, so yeah. I need to type faster, learn to whistle, bake a decent pie, and play amazing football.”
“You can’t whistle?” I asked and in response, he pursed his lips and blew nothing but air. It was sad. “How do you improve at football?”
“If you can answer that question, let me know. We can bottle it up to sell and split the profits. I’ll be the face for advertising and you’ll be the brains behind the operation.” He looked at me closely. “Nah, you should also be the face. You’re a lot prettier than I am.”
I shook my head, dismissing all of that. I thought that he was cute—not cute, because you didn’t call a mountain “cute”—more like strong, attractive, and imposing. Anyway, he was only teasing. “I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about so I’ll stop.”
Ronan was quiet for a moment, which could have been because he was reading over the dessert menu. But then he returned to the former topic. “If I wanted to try to improve before next season, there are things I should do. I already know what they are,” he said. “There’s no magic potion to put into a bottle. I know we all wish there was.” He discussed food and his diet, not trying to lose weight, but just eating healthier in general. As he talked, he looked at our empty plates and replaced the dessert menu in the metal clip at the side of the table.
“That’s one thing. There are others that I could work on, specific to my position.” He was frowning. “I have a job, I have bills to pay. I can’t devote my life to training for something that won’t happen anyway.”
“Then you shouldn’t,” I said. “You should be practical. That’s much more important than some pipe dream.”
“It wasn’t always a pipe dream,” he told me. “I got injured during my senior year of college.” He put his hand over the side of his stomach. “It wouldn’t go away. I played through it but I didn’t do myself any favors.”
“So that’s why you didn’t get drafted?”
“I mean, I wish I could say that it wasn’t my fault, that the demon of injury cursed me. Was there a Greek god for that?”
I thought. “Um, one of the sons of Apollo was the god of medicine or doctors, I think, but I can’t remember his name. Mythology was just a hobby for me.” I had read a lot as a kid, though. Wherever we had moved, I had usually found a library.
“I can’t blame anybody, Apollo’s son or someone else. It was a combination of a lot of things and one problem, the biggest one, was that I lacked talent. If I’d had more of that, then the other things wouldn’t have mattered. Talent would have pulled me through.” He sat back and sighed.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry because I didn’t have what it took?” he asked.
“No, I’m sorry that you’re not going to order dessert and that I made you feel like you got kicked in the shin. I didn’t mean to bring up a sore subject,” I answered. “Um, I didn’t get valedictorian.”
“What?”
