She moans. “Don’t remind me.”
“What? I’d make a great husband.”
She doesn’t respond, so I flick her knee. “Aside from the puck to the head, I’d be so good to you. Take care of you. Shower you with gifts. Won’t be home all that often during hockey season, but you’d get three full months when I’d be totally focused on you.”
“Three full months? That’s your offer?”
“The season’s long, but I promise, when I’m home, I’m home.”
“We’re not really getting married,” she grumbles. “You don’t need to convince me.”
And yet, I feel like I do. I want to convince her that I’m a good guy. That if this were real, I’d be all in.
I pull up to her apartment, on Girard Avenue in Fishtown. She’s on the second floor, above a small notary and printing shop, squished in the middle of the block. While it’s not too far away from a dicey part of the city, she’s right on the main thoroughfare, surrounded by a mix of commercial businesses and private residences, so I feel good knowing she’s safe.
It takes me a while to find a parking spot, and by the time I have all of her stuff in my arms, I’ve lost Jo to a little boy riding his bike. She talks to him for a minute before he rides away, and when I lift my brow in question, she explains, “That’s DJ. He lives down the street. I took photos of him and his family when his sister was born.”
“Oh? So you do other photography besides sports?”
She heaves the teddy bear up. “I’ll take photos of whatever will pay the bills, but yeah, I’ve sort of become the neighborhood photographer.”
She escorts me inside the building and up the narrow staircase to one of the tiniest apartments I’ve ever been inside. The teddy bear takes up half the room. Dear Jesus.
“Nice place,” I force myself to say as I spin in a tight circle, feeling a little claustrophobic. “What is it? Three hundred or so square feet?”
She sets the sunflowers on the table in front of the window. “Three fifty.”
The apartment is a studio, and I help myself to poking my head in the even tinier bathroom. I can’t go two feet without running into the corner of something. “You like it here?”
She plants herself on the edge of her bed and opens up thecamera package. “In this apartment? Sure. It’s nice. Better than sleeping on the couch like I did when I first moved here.”
I plop down in one of the two chairs in front of her kitchenette. “When did you move here?”
“About three years ago. A friend of a friend put me in touch with Sean. He was looking for a new assistant, and I was looking for a way out of West Virginia, so if it took me sleeping on a futon for a few months, I was okay with it.”
I study the small bookcase with photo albums and worn paperbacks, the bag of knitting needles and yarn, the dresser and shoes lined up underneath, the hooks on the wall with exactly one coat, one jacket, one scarf, and one hat—all black. Curiously, there are no photos out at all.
So interesting, my Jo. “Why did you want to leave West Virginia?”
With her face half hidden behind her new camera, doing something with the focus, she takes so long to answer that I have enough time to notice the uneven table legs balanced on a few coasters. When I finally drag my gaze back over to her, she’s still fiddling with the camera. She really loves it, which makes me both happy and annoyed, because is it really more interesting than I am?
Guess so.
“If you don’t want to answer that, can you at least tell me what you’re really afraid of? Because I doubt it’s thunderstorms.”
She slants her gaze to me, finally putting the camera down. One hundred emotions are contained in those wide brown eyes, and I can’t parse them apart to tell the difference between apprehension and annoyance. Fear or frustration. Hostility or humiliation. But finally, her lips part, and she speaks quietly, focusing those enigmatic dark pools on the wall past my shoulder.
“I’m from a small town, about nine thousand people in total. My graduating high school class had less than two hundredkids. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone’s in everyone else’s business.”
She pauses, and in those few seconds, I imagine living in a town full of people like her family.Thatmust have been claustrophobic. Living in this itty-bitty studio is nothing, comparatively.
“Waylon grew up next to us. We were in the same grade and…” Jo flicks her eyes to me, the wary expression crossing her features, and I know whatever she’s about to tell me isn’t the whole truth. I know it like I know hockey. Like I’ve been practicing and studying my whole life for this.
“I loved him. At least, I thought I did, and when I finally got up the courage to tell him, he very kindly responded by saying he wasn’t interested in a relationship.” She lifts her hands to use air quotes. “He said, ‘It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t have time for a girlfriend right now.’”
I wince. The ol’it’s not you, it’s metrick.
Jo goes on. “I believed him. He was… He was my friend, and I believed he was telling me the truth, so when I saw him with my sister two weeks later, it really hurt. They had just started dating. Of course, everyone found out what happened, that I was made a fool of by my own sister and the boy I was head over heels for, and…I couldn’t stand it. I had to get out.”
