by Abby Tyler
She entered the gym to the clipped synchronized cheers of a group of girls rehearsing for the pep rally. The smell of leather and sports equipment, and the echoes of the girls’ voices, made Ginny nostalgic for her own high school days. Fridays would a fun break from her elementary school routine.
She headed toward the boys’ locker room. Ginny assumed that since the gym was devoid of boys, the dressing room would be as well. But she didn’t take any chances and rapped carefully on the door. There was no answer. She opened it a crack and called inside. “Everyone decent?”
Still nothing. She risked a peek. The first section of the room held mats, balls, and other equipment. But no people.
As Ginny stepped inside, she wondered if this was the room that they were thinking of. With its open floor, she could make it work. She just needed to make sure her kids stayed out of the equipment. Some of it didn’t look very secure, including an entire barrel full of wooden baseball bats. Hmm. Given the explosive behavior of some of the cases on her roster, maybe not.
The thought of trying to lug a bunch of equipment all the way through the school every Friday sounded problematic. Maybe if she could spare any extras from her room, she could find a place here to stash them. The inflatable balls alone were too much to shove in her car and bounce down the halls.
She spotted a door at the back of the room. A slice of light came through the crack, so she approached it cautiously. She didn’t want to unexpectedly encounter the showers with anyone in them.
“Hello?” She took a few timid steps, relieved to see offices lining a narrow hall. These must be for the coaches. She moved closer, realizing it was too quiet for there to be any kids.
One of the doors had a metal plaque that read Carter McBride. Ginny touched it for a moment, conjuring his image, the sandy brown hair, the kind expression. He was something. Probably every teen girl had a crush on him. Was that hard for him to manage?
“Did you need me for something?”
Ginny jumped at the voice and whirled around. Of course it was Carter. Right as she was caressing his nameplate.
“Oh! No! Actually, I was just trying to figure out the spot where they thought I might be setting up on Fridays.”
“They want to put you in the boys’ locker room?”
“That’s what I heard. It seems a little crazy. But maybe the open area with the equipment would work?”
“I’ll have to check on that,” he said. “You know there are guys who get dressed back here, right?”
“They said that the end of the day on Fridays were generally empty.”
Carter rubbed his chin. “Yes, I suppose that’s when the girls take over.”
He was more dressed up than the other two times Ginny had seen him, in khaki pants and a red polo shirt with the Eagles logo embroidered on the pocket.
“Do you think they meant the front room? I’m concerned about the equipment.”
“No telling,” he said as he checked his watch. “I only have a second, but we could certainly take a quick walk around. You might see something the others don’t.”
They passed through another set of doors. “Back here is the main dressing area.”
Half-size lockers lined the walls, and a pair of benches stood a few feet from each side. The main part of the floor was open.
“Do you think they meant to put me in here?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Past here really is only the showers.”
Ginny looked around. “It’s definitely safer here. No temptation.”
He led her to a door near the back of the room. “There’s a closet. With some rearranging, we could probably fit some of your things in here.” He unsnapped a key ring from his belt loop and unlocked the door.
Inside, the smell of worn leather, sweat, and dirt was overwhelming.
He coughed with a deep, choking laugh. “We’ll need to air it out.”
Deflated balls, a few out-of-service football shoulder pads, and a stack of sagging boxes covered the bottom. But with some shelves, yes, this could hold a lot more.
“This will be great,” she said. “I can empty it out.”
“I’ll help,” he said. “You want to come tomorrow afternoon, say two?” He jingled the keys. “I can get you in.”
Her heart sped up a little. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll definitely be here.”
“Good. We can talk Roscoe strategy, among other things,” he said. “See you then.”
He strode back through the dressing room, his dress shoes ringing on the floor.
Ginny leaned against the door, her stomach fluttering. She would see him again tomorrow to clean a closet and discuss her dog.
Among other things.
Chapter 6
Carter pulled up behind the high school, looking for the green Jeep he’d seen parked at Ginny’s rental house. She probably didn’t know her way around, so he didn’t want to go in without her.
The section of the school with the gym and dressing rooms was a large unbroken wall, only really discernible because it was taller than the rest. He couldn’t assume she’d recognize it.
The lot was deserted, so he slowly circled, watching for her to drive up. As he made the next turn, he spotted her pulling up around front.
He rolled down his window. “Follow me to the back. There’s a much closer door.”
She wore a blue Eagles sweatshirt, the kind the booster club sold to raise money for the team. He liked that she was getting right into the spirit of the school, despite the fact that his team had lost thirty-five to nothing last night.
She’d been in the stands, sitting with a couple other teachers from the elementary school.
He parked his truck and jumped out. Ginny pulled up next to him, her ponytail swinging as she hopped out of her Jeep.
Ginny was different. Real different. Genuine. Focused. He liked that their time together was about other stuff, not just each other. Roscoe. Her job. Spending time with her was easy.
“Nice Jeep,” he said. “A similar vintage to mine.” He closed his door and locked it manually. The power locks had quit working years ago.
“Maybe they were in the car nursery together.” She made a point of pushing down the lock on her car door, same as him.
They fell into step together. “I’m actually in the market for a new one,” Carter said. “I just haven’t been willing to let go of old Angel just yet.”
“Angel?” Ginny squinted her eyes at him. “Let me guess. Mom? Aunt?”
He shook his head.
“Old girlfriend?” Her voice dripped with trepidation.
“They always ask that,” Carter said with a laugh. “Angel was a cat we had when I was little. She was a stray, but I was convinced I could get her to live with us.”
“Did she?”
“No. She broke my heart completely by running off with a tomcat after about six months. But I never forgot her. I had drawn literally fifty pictures of her.”
“I have a story like that,” Ginny said.
“You took in a stray cat who broke your heart?”
“No, actually, it was a rat.”
They paused in front of the back door of the gym, and Carter extracted his keys. “A rat.”
“Yes, I know. I think I watched Cinderella too many times. I had this notion that I could sew little jackets and hats for him.”
“And how old were you?” He pushed the door open, and they walked inside. The interior was pitch black and smelled of gym socks and vinyl. Carter flipped on the lights.
“Nine, maybe?”
“So I’m guessing it didn’t end well.”
“Actually, my steady meals of cheese and bread kept him coming around for quite some time. Maybe two weeks.”
“So did you ever get him dressed properly?”
Carter stopped walking, and they stood beneath one of the basketball hoops. It was nice seeing Ginny here in his space. She fit.
“Well, I made the clothes, and at one point, I managed
to lure him into a box.”
“All right, I’m hooked. I need the whole story.” His words echoed in the big silent gym.
“He bit me. I ran straight to my mother. She took me to the hospital.”
“Please tell me they didn’t make you do rabies shots.”
“No. I told them I had been feeding him for two weeks and that Herbert was a sweet rat, and they decided he probably wasn’t rabid.”
“Have you figured out since then that this doesn’t happen unless they find the rat and test it?”
“Don’t spoil my delusion!”
He grimaced, imagining how Ginny’s dad mostly likely had dispatched of the rat that bit his little girl. “Okay, okay. Did you ever see Herbert again?”
“No. I kept his clothes for a long time, though.”
They turned toward the boys’ locker room, and he unlocked the outer door. “What are our childhoods for, except to traumatize us?”
She laughed. “I had a rather ordinary one. My only real beef was that they never let me have a dog.”
They passed through the first door, and Carter flipped on the light. “Now you have a doozy.”
The equipment room smelled mustier than yesterday, the scents all trapped overnight without the passage of students and the opening and closing of doors. Ginny wrinkled her nose, which made her look even more adorable. With her ponytail and Eagles sweatshirt, she could be one of the students.
They walked down the hall and into the dressing room. It was a good deal messier than when they had been there the day before, covered in wrappers, empty Gatorade bottles, a few scattered shirts, and an abandoned set of shoulder pads in the corner.
And dirt. Bits of caked mud were everywhere.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said. “The cleaning staff won’t come until very early Monday morning.”
“Does the football team dress in here before the game?”
“No, my team knows better. The middle school team practiced on the field behind the school yesterday afternoon and changed here. I’ll speak to their coach. They’ll need to respect this space before they get on my team.”
They approached the closet, and Carter unlocked the door.
“We can start pulling all the stuff out.” He looked through the closet. “I don’t think there will be much worth keeping.”
He stepped inside the closet and began passing things to Ginny. She made stacks on the floor. Deflated sports balls. Old helmets. Parts and pieces of shoulder pads.
They opened the sagging boxes, discovering a pile of old jerseys.
“I don’t even recognize the style,” Carter said. “These might be from twenty or thirty years ago.”
“What condition are they in?” she asked.
“The top ones, not so good,” he said, pulling out the first one.
They dug through the box until they got four or five jerseys down. The top ones were dirty and stiff, unlikely to hold up to even a single washing.
But as they dug deeper, the red jerseys were still vivid and seemed protected from the elements by the layers of the others.
“Do you guys have any sort of faculty-student football game fundraiser type thing?” Ginny asked.
“Not since I’ve been here,” he said. “But I know what you’re talking about. At my high school, there would always be a volleyball match between the teachers and the team.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have anything like that here. Not for any of the sports?”
“Not in my two years. Maybe they did it in the past. What are you thinking?”
“Well, if the football team needed anything, shoes, meals, or whatever, a fundraiser game would be a way to use these jerseys.”
He held one up. “That’s definitely an idea. So we should hang on to them?”
“I think so. If nothing else, you should choose a good one and put it in the trophy case.”
He dropped the jersey back in the box. “You’re full of good ideas.”
“It’s because I’m a city girl,” she said with a smile.
“Chicago, right?”
“For college. I was born in Seattle.”
“You don’t have much of an accent,” he said.
“Probably because I took a lot of speech classes. I had trouble talking clearly early on. And a few other delays. It’s a little bit of why I became a therapist myself.”
He understood all that for sure. “The best kind of teacher is the one who’s gone through the fire themselves.”
Ginny separated the bad jerseys from the usable ones. “What about you? Why did you get into football coaching?”
“I played myself. Loved it. High school. College. I was supposed to be this hotshot. Supposed to get drafted high.” He didn’t meet her gaze, instead dragging out another box, heavy with cobwebs and dust. “I didn’t get drafted at all. Had to scramble for a useful degree, anything I could use to get a job. Coaching was a natural fit.”
He hated talking about this, so he started ripping tape off the next box, hoping she wouldn’t ask for details.
She gathered up the strips of old tape. “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”
That was something, at least. “Thanks.”
The last box held a surprise. Old vinyl signs, the sort you hang on the fence or at the bottom of stands in the stadium.
Ginny’s face brightened. “Unroll one!”
He laid it out on the floor. It read Applebottom Fishing Expeditions. Proud sponsors of the 1971 Eagles.
“Wow,” Ginny said. “It’s older than we are!”
The next one read Home of the Eagle State Champions.
“So they used to be good?” she asked.
“A long time ago,” Carter said. “There’s trophies in the case.”
“When did it go downhill?”
“Before we were born,” he said.
He rolled up the sign and lifted another. Applebottom Eagle Championship Years was stenciled across the top with a series of dates. The last one was 1985.
“They had this one coach that led the team straight to the top,” he said. “Couldn’t have just been good players. The streak lasted, well,” he tapped the range of dates, “fourteen years.”
“The good players would graduate and go, but the team would still be good,” Ginny said.
“Exactly. Anybody can win with a bunch of talent. It takes someone special to lead any collection of players to victory.”
“You don’t think that’s you?” she asked.
He stuck the banner back in the box. “I couldn’t lead myself to the starting roster at university. I doubt I’m going to take anybody to greatness.”
Carter didn’t mind Applebottom’s losing tradition. He couldn’t be blamed for it, and he didn’t have to try to be something he wasn’t.
Ginny ran her fingers along the banners, her eyes downcast. Probably she wasn’t nearly so impressed with him now that she knew he wasn’t that interested in overachieving. And she probably didn’t know the half of it, although who knew what people might have told her about him by now.
She spoke first. “Well, I don’t need the whole closet, so maybe we can combine these good jerseys with this banner box to stay in there, and I’ll use the rest of the space.”
His shoulders relaxed. She hadn’t pushed.
Ginny moved the shirts from one box to another while Carter left to carry the discards out to the dumpster.
The metaphor wasn’t lost on him. She’d hang on to the good stuff, and he’d toss the trash.
Chapter 7
By the second week of school, Ginny was ready to start moving the kids into a curriculum that would hopefully advance their skills. She knew each of them by name. Seeing the reality of their abilities helped her prepare activities that would play up their strengths, so that they didn’t feel frustrated, but would still be challenged.
On Tuesday morning, she realized that this was the day she and Carter would usually do a dog lesson. But they hadn’t arranged anything after the
ir closet clean out on Saturday, which had ended on a negative note. And she still didn’t have his cell phone number.
Was he not interested in helping her with Roscoe after that hard talk? Had she been too nosy?
Maybe she could leave a message through the office, although that would certainly stir up gossip. Still, their dog lessons were officially sanctioned by the Applebottom ladies. It wasn’t like they didn’t know. No one could sneeze in this town without someone holding out a box of tissue.
Ginny walked behind the secretary’s desk and pulled her mail from the slot marked with her name. Inside was a small, handwritten note.
* * *
Ginny!
I don’t think anyone has taught you to set up your voicemail. I have left you a couple of messages. I don’t know your cell phone. Are we meeting Tuesday at our usual time and place? Here’s my number.
Carter
* * *
Her face crept slowly with warmth as she ran her fingers over the numbers. So they were meeting again tonight, after all.
“Get something good?”
The voice so close to her shoulder startled her out of her skin.
It was Candace, a third-grade teacher. Two of her students were regulars in Ginny’s room.
Ginny casually folded her stack of mail in half to hide the note from Carter.
“Just the usual. And a notice that I hadn’t set up my voicemail for the district.”
“Oh, that old thing,” Candace said. She shook her head, sending her shiny black hair flowing like a shampoo commercial. She was one of those teachers who must have money separate from her salary. She dressed impeccably, with matching accessories and expensive shoes. Next to her, Ginny felt like a clod in her stretch pants with dirt on her knees.
“Mrs. Humphries at the front desk can help you,” Candace said. “You want to do it pretty quick. A lot of parents like to use the system. You might have some messages stacked in there.”
“Thanks. I’ll ask her.”
Ginny had shut off the ringer in her room because it might excite some of the kids who were easily startled. It didn’t even occur to her that she would have voicemail.