Until I was flying through the air.
“Cate McNaughton! You showed up,” Ronan said.
“Why did you lift me onto the bar?” I asked him. I almost fell off again but he grabbed my hands to steady me. “What did you do that for?”
“This is how we met. I thought you liked standing on tables,” he told me.
Even up here, I didn’t exactly tower over him and I was on the tall side of average. I had looked him up after the tour and comprehensive survey, and there was a rudimentary website for the Junior Woodsmen—there was even a small, hard-to-find link to it on the actual Woodsmen website. Ronan Wilder was twenty-five years old, born in Missouri, college in New Mexico. He had played for another team in Canada for a season before coming here to northern Michigan and his position was defensive end. There was an absolutely terrible picture of him, too, where he had really long hair that looked as if he’d backcombed it into a kind of halo around his head. Also, his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, so maybe he’d been drunk or horribly hungover.
“Help me down from here,” I ordered, and he lifted me off the table. He didn’t seem to mind that I spilled my beer down his back as that happened or that I’d mistakenly kicked over a bottle of something that was now dripping onto the barn floor.
“I’m glad you came,” he told me. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Why?”
“Because you never responded to my texts,” he said, and I shrugged.
“I didn’t know this was an RSVP thing. What is this thing?” I asked.
He glanced around. “The barn belongs to another guy on the defense—no, it belongs to his grandparents, but they don’t care that we’re using it. It’s the end-of-the-season party,” he explained, just as Ed had. “You didn’t come to the game?”
I hadn’t even thought about going there. It was cold today and I wasn’t a football fan, anyway. “Sorry,” I said, but he laughed.
“No, you’re not. Nobody comes to our games.” He took my beer can, empty now since he was wearing its contents. “Want another?”
I took one, mostly to have something to do with my hands and because…Judas Priest. I was the person that the health teacher had warned us not to become in ninth grade: everyone else was drinking, so I was too. I stood there as person after person came up to talk to Ronan, smacking him on the back, hugging him, and in the case of one woman, kissing him on the lips. She glanced at me and I nodded. I stayed where I was mostly because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Was that your girlfriend?” I asked as she walked off.
“No, no girlfriend.” He sounded relieved, but that was hard to judge because subtlety wasn’t a thing when you were screaming over music. “How did your survey end up? Are they going to tear down the building like I recommended?”
“I don’t actually think that they’re going to do anything at all,” I answered. “My boss is an idiot who doesn’t accomplish jack squat.”
“Sounds like a good job.”
I nodded, because it was. Now that other team departments weren’t asking for help, I could have sat in my cubicle and played on my phone all day while getting paid. I had done that, too, but it got boring and frustrating. “He’s gone most of the time,” I continued. “Before it got so cold, he was golfing, and then he started skiing. He travels a lot to go to parties and see people.”
“That sounds like an even better job. How would a person manage to get into a position like that? I’m going to retire from football someday.”
“I think he has it because his wife’s family is part of the ownership group of the Woodsmen. They also own a lot of other stuff around this area and she’s really connected.” After looking up Mr. Gowan and seeing his wife’s identity, I had developed my theory of how he’d gotten his job as Director of Special Projects, even though he never did anything: I figured that they had given him the position and the nice desk to appease his in-laws.
“In other words, I have to marry up,” Ronan said, and I nodded. “Too bad. I don’t plan to get married in either direction.”
“Me neither.”
“I guess we’ll have to make it on our own merit. So, I’m screwed,” he said conversationally, and I realized that I was smiling at him. “Is that why you came up to Michigan? To work for the Woodsmen?”
I nodded again. “I graduated from college last spring and I applied to about thirty jobs. I had almost forgotten about this one until they contacted me.”
“Everyone says that it’s a great place to work.”
“I’m glad to be there.” Maybe someday, I could run the Office of Special Projects. I would sit at an even nicer desk and get nothing done there instead of doing nothing in my cubicle. “Ed told me that the Junior Woodsmen have other jobs, too. What do you do?”
“I’m a mechanic,” he told me. “Now that the season’s over, I’ll go back to working as a service tech at a dealership. The guy who owns it also owns part of the Woodsmen team and all those people try to help us out. My dad was a mechanic and he had his own shop, so I learned from him.”
“In Missouri,” I said.
His eyes widened. In the awful picture on the Junior Woodsmen website, you couldn’t identify the color, but I had remembered seeing them when the lights had come on as we’d stood on the table in the epicenter. They were green, a shade I’d never seen in anyone in real life.
