The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  “You guys could hang out a little. Would that be ok?” He sat back down at the table. “I, uh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. We don’t have to talk about your mom.”

  “It’s ok. It’s not like I forget about her, even if I’m not talking.” I played with Emma’s ears and she nudged into my leg.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I am, I really am.” He sounded a little surprised by this.

  “Thanks.”

  “Yeah,” he said again. “Uh, thanks for coming over and making me dinner.” He reached over and touched my knuckle. “Are you ok?”

  “I’m not upset. Don’t worry,” I told him. “I don’t mind talking about my mom, but we should switch this up and make it more like a party, not a funeral.”

  “No, I was asking if your hand is ok. You keep rubbing it.”

  I looked down and realized what I was doing: massaging the knuckles of my left hand with the fingers of my right. “It aches,” I said, but it felt like my voice was coming from somewhere else. Oh, no.

  “You hurt yourself at the bar?”

  “No.” I stopped rubbing and willed the pain to subside. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “I got aches all the time when I played. I didn’t always remember what caused them.” A smile started on his face. “I guess I’ll be getting them again, and I didn’t know I’d missed it.” He touched my hand again.

  “You’re a real football player,” I told him.

  “It’s just a development team. The guys there aren’t any good. The facilities suck, the field feels like it’s maintained by gophers. I’m probably going to freeze my balls off.”

  “If you’re trying to convince me that it’s not a big deal, you can’t,” I told him. “I’m really excited about this.” We could deal with the eviction tomorrow.

  His smile grew and his fingers held mine. “I’m back.”

  I held his hand, ignoring the pain that started again in my knuckle. “You’re back,” I agreed, and I smiled at him, too.

  Chapter 8

  Kayden

  “We’re going to try something different today.”

  “Really?” Jamison peered at me. “We’re not going to go out and throw the ball in the field?”

  “No, we’re going over to someone’s house.” I glanced around the parking lot to make sure that the Helping Hands director, Miss Margulies, wasn’t around walking her old dog. I wasn’t positive that I was allowed to take the kid offsite. In fact, I hadn’t checked on that at all, much like I hadn’t checked on the dog policy in my apartment building. Kylie had let me know that Emma wasn’t actually permitted inside, and had launched into a story about disguising her as a reedbuck, which turned out to be a kind of African deer. I wasn’t sure why those would be ok if a dog wasn’t, but her story had also involved setting off firecrackers and something about a weather balloon, so I’d left it alone. Anyway, that wouldn’t be my apartment much longer, so they wouldn’t have to worry about my dog visitors or any reedbucks, either.

  Jamison ran an admiring hand over my car, which didn’t look so great with the mud and salt crust it had developed. “This is so nice. The other guys were saying you had a cool car. Now I can tell them I rode in it!”

  “No, don’t mention that to anyone.” I realized that I sounded pretty pervy. “I mean, I don’t think I’m supposed to take you anywhere, but we’re just going over to Rami Nour’s house. He’s the quarterback for the Junior Woodsmen.” He used to be, I mentally corrected this.

  “Does he have kids? Like, my age?”

  “Uh…” I vaguely remembered him saying something about children. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  That made Jamison launch into a story about making friends, and his school, and where the Nour kids might go to school, and that BS continued all the way over to Rami’s house. It wasn’t annoying, actually. It reminded me of when Kylie talked, which was a lot, but also not irritating. She always had something to say and I liked to listen to her.

  Rami’s house wasn’t anything, not at all like the houses of players on my former teams. It was small, ugly—worse than what the rookies on the Rustlers had bought. I remembered signing the papers for my house when I arrived there to be the starting QB, looking at all the zeros of the price on the page and my agent smiling and telling me that now I’d made it to the big time. Rami’s house said, “I’m not there yet.” Or maybe, “I’m not ever going.”

  A woman opened the door who I thought was his housecleaner, until she said, “You must be Kayden Matthews. I’m Rami’s wife, Alicia.” She was wearing dirty sweatpants and a shirt with a hole in the front, and she looked down at her outfit and laughed. “We were out this morning cutting down the Christmas tree.” There were yells and more laughter somewhere in the house behind her. “Rami and the kids are finishing up the decorating now. Come on in.”

  “I’m Jamison,” the kid with me announced. “I’m eleven, but I’m in sixth grade. You guys cut down your own tree? My mom and I have a tree, but it sits on the table. It’s plastic. Was it hard to cut it down? Were there any animals in it? Do you use colored lights? How old are your kids?” I followed them into another room as Rami’s wife tried to answer all his questions.

  “Kayden,” Rami said. He was as dirty as his wife was, as were the kids milling around. At least ten of them, I thought, until they stopped moving to be introduced and I counted four. “Who’s this? Your son?” he asked, pointing to Jamison.

  I looked over at the scrawny, red-headed kid wiping his runny nose on the sleeve of his coat. “No!” I said quickly. There had been a scare in my second season with the Rustlers, some woman I’d met in a bar who’d claimed that the baby was mine. DNA had proven otherwise and I’d been a lot more careful after that. “Jamison is…” I trailed off.

  “I’m his court-ordered community service,” he stated matter-of-factly. “He has to spend every Saturday with me to make up for breaking into someone’s house and destroying it. Miss Margulies explained it all,” he said, turning to me.

  There was total silence in the room. “Uh, yeah, I think we heard about that,” Rami finally said. “Kayden, Jamison is good here if you want to come into the kitchen with me. I’ve got the binders with the playbook all ready.”

  “Sure.” I didn’t look at the big-mouthed kid as I stalked into the other room. We sat at Rami’s rocking, sticky table to go over the offense.

  “You learn really quickly,” Rami mentioned after a while.

  “Huh? Me?” I looked up from the page. We’d already been through two binders and I was getting the third pretty well.

  “Yeah, you’re learning it a lot faster than I did, and this isn’t at all similar to what you ran with the Rustlers. Or in Portland,” he noted.

  “No, it’s totally different. I don’t know, I’ve always picked this shit up pretty quick.” I turned the page. “Makes it easy to change teams, lucky for me.”

  “You’re smart. I guess that’s what it takes to succeed in the big league.”

  Smart? Me? “You forget that I didn’t succeed. I’m here, aren’t I?” I reminded him. “I’m in the development league, not starting for the Rustlers anymore.”

  “That was because of the drugs,” he said, “not because you sucked as a QB. You had serious skills. Still do.”

  No, I’d sucked, and what did it matter what the reason was? “I’m out of the league now. I’m here.” I tried to close the binder and its cover stuck to the table. Rami noticed.

  “We were making brittle and you know how kids get with cooking,” he said.

  I didn’t know how that was at all, but it seemed to have turned his entire kitchen into a hazmat area. It reminded me of Kylie’s house.

  He got up and found a spray bottle of something under the sink. “So, how long have you been meeting with Jamison?”

  I looked at him before I answered, trying to figure him out. “Are we supposed to be friends or something?” I asked after a moment. “Is this just small talk, or are you trying to pick apar
t my weaknesses?”

  He just stared at me. “I’m giving you my team, man. I’m going to be sending in the plays to you from the sidelines. I wanted to get to know you a little.”

  “You’re ‘giving’ me the team?” I shook my head.

  “I led these guys for four years,” he informed me. “They trust me and respect me. If you want to succeed with the Junior Woodsmen, you’ll need to get that from them, too.”

  Trust me? Respect me? I swallowed, because I already knew that those things wouldn’t happen. “Whatever, Rami. I’m going to do what I do. You’re not ‘giving’ me anything, the coach picked me because I’m better. Not that I want some bullshit team, but that’s what I’m getting.”

  Now Rami slammed the cleaning bottle onto the table. “Bullshit? Fuck you, Matthews! Fu—” He stopped. “Omar, what do you need?”

  One of his sons was peeking into the kitchen, his eyes big circles as he stared at his dad. “I was getting a snack,” he said, switching to stare at me.

  “I’ll get it for you.” Rami shoved in his chair but smiled at the kid.

  “What’s Jamison doing?” I asked.

  “We’re playing football in the basement. He’s being the quarterback. Daddy, are you mad?”

  His dad took a few tubes of yogurt from the fridge. “No, I’m not mad. If Jamison is the quarterback, are you the receiver? My fast little man. Let’s see you go.” He picked his son up under his other arm and Omar’s legs pumped as he giggled.

  “Dalila is the nose tackle,” he panted. “She sacked him twice.”

  “Tell your sister it’s touch football only.” Rami put his son down. “Share these. Not all for you.” He passed over the yogurt then turned to me as the kid scampered off. “I think we’re done here.”

  I peeled the binder fully off the table and grabbed the other two from the floor. “Yeah.” I walked toward the door but stopped. “Uh, thanks for going over this with me.”

  “Sure. Right. Hope you learned enough about the bullshit team to get you through. Practice starts in a week.”

  I nodded. I knew that and I’d been going for runs on the treadmill, lifting with as many weights as I could find, doing everything I could think of in the shitty gym in my apartment complex to get ready for it. I wasn’t ready, not at all. At times like these, I usually would have done a few lines, knocked back a few shots to take the edge off, to calm my nerves. Now, I just nodded again at Rami. “I’m ready.”

  He muttered something and I left. “Jamison! We’re out,” I called through the house, and he came bounding up a set of stairs, red in the face and with his glasses crooked.

  “Already? Ok, I guess we can go.”

  “Yeah, you’re not making that decision.” I walked out of the house and heard him puffing behind me.

  “I had a fun time,” he shared.

  “Great.” He started to give me every damn specific about their football game in the basement, but I was just trying to get us out of Rami’s short, bumpy driveway as quickly as possible. How was I going to do this? How was I going to step into this Junior Woodsmen team where he’d been in charge and have these guys follow along with me? But what did I care, anyway? It was a paycheck. I’d throw better than he did and the coaches would have to keep me as the starter, even if I wasn’t a leader, like my former Rustlers coaches had said.

  “Kayden? Don’t you think so?”

  I realized that Jamison had been talking, again, but now he expected me to respond. “What?”

  “I asked, don’t you think it would be fun to have brothers and sisters like that? I wish I did.”

  “It is fun to have a brother,” I heard myself say. “My brother is great.” Rami Nour reminded me of my brother Ben, actually, how they were both calm and organized, good with kids. “My brother was like my dad, too. He taught me a lot of stuff.”

  “He’s the offensive coordinator for the Woodsmen, right? I read about you on the computer at the Helping Hands building before you got there the first day. I have to come at six on Saturdays so my mom can get to work.”

  “Six AM? You get there and sit alone for hours until I show up?”

  “Miss Margulies comes early also to let me in. What did your brother teach you? How to be a quarterback?”

  “Uh, yeah. I learned from my coaches but I learned a lot from my brother. His mind is like a computer. He could run through his options faster than anybody I ever saw play, and he rarely made a bad decision.” Whereas, I had made nothing but mistakes. Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention to Ben.

  “Did you learn stuff today? Ayman said that was why you were there, so that his dad would teach you.”

  I pointed over my shoulder at the back seat. “See those big binders? That’s all the stuff I have to learn to run the team.”

  He turned to look. “Laila said you’re taking the job from her dad.”

  “No, the coaches are giving it to me because I deserve it. Were the other kids being assholes to you about that?” I turned to look at him. I shouldn’t have brought him with me.

  But Jamison only seemed confused. Confuddled, as Kylie liked to say. “No, they were really nice. They let me be the quarterback when we played and it was fun even though Dalila knocked me over a few times. Their house is so cool! They have all these games in their basement, like so much stuff you can hardly walk across the floor, and there’s a place on the wall where water leaked in and made a stain that looks like a jackalope. I wish I lived there.”

  We had different opinions about what made a house nice.

  “I can help you learn your stuff,” he went on. “I can memorize really well for school. Remember how I told you the first twenty digits of pi?”

  “How could I forget?” He’d recited it about a hundred times. “You really want to help me study the playbook?”

  “Sure.”

  “I, uh, I can help you with school stuff too, if you want. Even if you memorize well, maybe there are other things I could do.”

  He got very excited. “Yeah, I really want that! I have a science project coming up, and I’m going to try out for the baseball team too, and I could use your help with everything!”

  Baseball? I’d seen him throw, and science hadn’t ever been my thing. “Sure,” I found myself saying. “We could do that together.”

  “Awesome!”

  The kid looked so happy, I smiled back at him. “Let’s go do some science, then,” I said, and he nodded like he was a bobblehead. We drove to the sad Helping Hands building, but for some reason, I felt a lot better about the day. I thought that I’d let Kylie know how things had gone, since she was probably dying to find out. I was looking forward to talking to her about it, getting her opinion on the situation. Maybe she’d been right: we were friends.

  ∞

  Kylie

  “So, how did it go last night?” I gestured eagerly at Roy’s son. “What do you think about working here at the tavern?”

  Dexter frowned, a big one. Oh, ok. So, not great?

  “Not great. It’s a dive full of aging alcoholics,” he answered, and I winced a little.

  “Not everyone is an alcoholic! Yes, ok, they are mostly aging,” I acknowledged. “But there have been several recent improvements.” I pointed to the neon sign, which now had the S back to spell out “Roys.” “You must have noticed how clean…ish it is.” I’d worked my tail off to get it to that clean-ish state, but Dexter seemed unconvinced. It didn’t help that his dad was currently across the room, pouring a bucket of water on some vomit from the night before. “This bar is in a great location, right on the main street of town. You’re an architect, right? Can you think of any ways that you’d improve the building?”

  “Demolition springs to mind.”

  Oh, lordy. “Didn’t you find any positives while you worked here last night?” I pressed on.

  “You’re right that it is a great location,” Dexter said. “Roy has owned the building since before I was born, and he told me that it’s been paid
off for years. He keeps letting me know how profitable the business is. Actually, ‘minting greenbacks’ is the term he used.” He smiled and I did right back at him. He was way, way more attractive than his dad, who hardly ever made that expression. Plus, Dexter had all his teeth.

  “Minting greenbacks is extremely positive!” I encouraged.

  He stopped putting glasses away. “Why do you want me to like the bar so much? Both you and my dad, it’s like you’re trying to sell this place to me.”

  I looked over at Roy as he swore because some of the now-polluted water had splashed on his cowboy boots and thought about how to say things to Dexter without giving too much away. “Well, it’s a little like your legacy, isn’t it? Your dad started it, and things tend to run in families. Like male-pattern baldness.”

  His hand went to his hair. “What?”

  I tried again. “People like stuff to stay within the family, that’s what I mean. For example, I had a weird thing happen when my great-aunt passed away and left me her house—”

  “That’s what’s going on here?” he interrupted me. “You think I’m getting the bar?”

  “Uh…”

  “It sounds like that’s what you’re saying. Is that why he keeps trying to tell me things about it? He went into a long speech about keeping an eye on the sewer line last night, and I had no idea what he was talking about.”

  “I don’t know his plans, because he doesn’t tell me anything,” I answered. Yes, as far as I could tell, that was happening exactly: Roy wanted Dexter to inherit his tavern. I didn’t know why he was hinting about the pipes instead of just spitting it out to his son, but I wasn’t going to spill those particular beans myself. I knew the value of keeping my mouth shut, and it wasn’t a good idea to tick off my current boss, even if I wasn’t going to be around here much longer. “I just wanted you to like your dad’s business. I want the two of you to get along and have a good relationship. I think it’s so important for families to be close.”