Oh. My own throat clenched up. “I…I…”
“If you don’t want it, say so. I’ll look for some other charity case to foist it on.”
“It’s not that! It’s just, I was going to leave. I am leaving. Em and I are leaving Michigan soon. I was planning on telling you today so you could advertise for a new waitress. I can help you so it’s not just a sign in the window asking for someone hot to apply.”
“You’re leaving,” he repeated. “Why in the hell would you do that? You have a house here, don’t you? A job, a boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. This is what we do, Em and I. We don’t ever stay in one place very long and I’ve been here for months! I have to keep going on, Roy, it’s not because of you or the bar. It’s…” It was complicated.
But we pulled up in front of my house then, and after I went inside, I forgot about Roy’s offer. My plans were about to change.
Chapter 13
Kayden
Nothing. No grunt and groan, no collar jingle, no scratch of toenails on the wooden floors I’d exposed under the grimy carpet. I’d pulled that up and hauled it away in the Bentley.
“Hello?” I called softly, and put down my stuff next to the front door. Then I rethought that, since I’d brought some chocolate for Kylie, and I balanced my bag on one of the few boxes left of Great-aunt Maude’s crap. Emma had a nose for anything that wasn’t on the special diet assigned by her vet, chocolate included. But where was she? “Em?” I asked the quiet house. The couch was empty. I walked first into my bedroom, where she liked to hang sometimes. I’d stacked pillows so that she could climb up and sleep horizontally across the bed, but it was empty. The quilt was rumpled but just as I’d left it before I’d taken off to Colorado Springs for my game.
Quietly, I turned to Kylie’s tiny room, because it was late enough that she would be back from the bar. Now that I was in the devo league, team travel was all commercial and as cheap as they could get it, so we’d first taken a bus then had two more legs of the trip to get home. Our flights had been delayed in both Denver and Chicago by bad weather and I’d been texting her to let her know, but the last thing she’d sent back was a few hours ago. I’d played so well and she was so proud, she’d written. She’d never seen a quarterback so good. Even though I was aware that I was the only quarterback she’d ever watched, that still felt very nice to read. I’d asked her to write again when she got home so I knew that Roy had dropped her off, but there had been a long period of silence instead.
Some light from the setting moon shone through the small window high in the wall of her room as I looked down at her. She was curled into a little ball on the narrow, blow-up mattress, her face pressed into the pillow, and she was alone. Something about how she lay there made me worried and I wanted to go in to check on her better. But I couldn’t, not while she was asleep. I stood there watching, which was freaky enough, but there was something—
“I’m not asleep,” her voice came from the bed. She didn’t move her face out of the pillow and the words muffled.
I jumped. “I’m home,” I whispered uselessly. “Sorry I woke you up.”
“You didn’t.”
I frowned now, more worried. “Is everything ok?” I squinted toward the dark corner where she’d set up a dog bed, a nest, really, but that was also empty. “Where’s Emma?”
“At the vet.” I saw her body twitch. “The emergency vet.”
“What?” I walked fully into the room and my voice rose. “What happened?”
She twitched again but she didn’t look up. “I came home after your game and she was sick.”
I found myself sitting on the edge of the thin mattress, my hand on Kylie’s shoulder. “Is she ok now? What’s wrong?”
“They don’t know,” she told me. “I called her name and she didn’t come, then I found her in here and she couldn’t get up and Roy and I carried her to his car. They said they’d have an update in the morning. I wasn’t allowed to stay the night with her.” I could feel her shaking, her whole body moving with tremors.
“Kylie.” I realized I was gripping her shoulder but I didn’t want to let go. “I’m sure…” I’d started to say that I was sure that her dog would be fine, but I wasn’t. How old was Emma? Kylie had told me the story of seeing her in the department store window—had she been thirteen then? So Emma was eleven, and what did that make her in dog years?
“Did the vet say anything at all?” I asked. “Is there any diagnosis?”
“They just said that they’d let me know.”
I finally forced myself to loosen my fingers, but she reached back and put her hand over mine. Then she tugged my arm until she was hugging it against her chest, and l let myself do what I’d been wanting: I gathered her up against me, holding her tightly. I felt her shake even harder as I lay down next to her.
“Kylie, sweetheart, it’s going to be ok,” I told her, and started saying all kinds of things, like how I was sorry I hadn’t been home but that I was here now and that I wouldn’t leave, not ever. That I’d do anything to get Emma well.
She flipped over and buried her face against me and carefully, I brushed back her silky hair. Tears streamed down her cheeks and wet my shirt, but she didn’t make a sound even as she sobbed, not one little murmur or whimper. I’d never seen her cry and it made an ache form in my chest under where she pressed against me. So I kept talking, stupidly saying every thought that came into my mind, not even aware of what the words were except that I meant them. I had to help her and make her better, that was all I knew, and that was the only thing I cared about. The fact that Rami had been thrilled over our win and had spent the seven hours of buses, flights, and delays talking strategy to me like we were friends—that was nothing. The nod that I’d gotten from Coach Márquez, the celebration of the offensive line that had included me, the text of congratulations that had come in from a coach I’d had several years before on the actual Woodsmen team—nothing.
“I’m going to take care of you, you and Em. I’ll always take care of you. Kylie, please, I’m here. Please don’t cry, it’s ok,” I whispered, and I said it that last part over and over until her tears slowed. “It’s going to be ok.”
“No, it won’t. What will I do without her? She’s it. We’re a team, Em and I are always together.” Her voice broke again. “I can’t leave without her. I can’t make her move all around the country, either, not with her...” She gulped. “What am I going to do?”
“Stay here,” I said. “We’ll all stay here until she gets well, and we’ll make the house easier for her, like building ramps everywhere, and we’ll get a car for you so that you don’t have to depend on Roy if she needs to go to the doctor. You’ll both stay here and—”
She was shaking her head. “I can’t. I can’t!” And the tears started up again.
Finally, just when the sky was lightening up as the sun rose on the cold morning, she fell asleep in my arms. I didn’t let go to return to the bigger bed with the actual mattress, although by that point my ass was asleep and so was most of my leg. I rubbed her back and talked to her about how things would be better today and I hoped that it was true.
∞
“It was a family emergency.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“Rami,” Coach Márquez warned, and Rami shook his head and frowned, looking away. He was the team captain so he got to be here to share in the interrogation, which actually had made me feel better than facing the head coach alone.
“This is exactly what we were worried about from you.” Rami waited a beat, like I was going to come up with an excuse, but I only shrugged. It was what I’d been expecting from myself, too. “Well, if it wasn’t bullshit, then what?”
“It was a family emergency,” I repeated. “Again, I’m sorry I missed the team meeting, but I had to be somewhere.”
“And that’s all you’re going to say about it?” The coach had been tilting back in his chair, and now he let the front legs slam down.
“You know what we think you were doing.”
“Test me. Please, go ahead. I’ll piss in a cup, you can take blood. Hair, part of my liver, I don’t care. I didn’t miss the meeting because I was fucking around, not sleeping in, not out with friends, and definitely not because I was using. I’m clean. But I had a family emergency—”
“So tell us what it was. You don’t get any privacy, Matthews. Not with your track record,” Coach Márquez told me.
I would rather have had them take part of my liver than explain where I’d been. I stared at them and they stared back.
“God damn it.” I sat forward and leaned my elbows on my knees. “It was my dog. I mean, it was my roommate’s dog. She’s been sick and we got her back from the vet on Sunday.”
“Yeah?” Rami held up his hands. “So?”
“I mean, she’s been really, really sick. We didn’t know if she was going to make it.”
Márquez stared at me. His expression also asked it: so?
“She’s doing better but they’re still trying to figure out what’s wrong. She’s not eating right and it’s obvious that she feels bad. If you could see the look on her face, you’d understand.”
“Are we still talking about a dog?” Rami asked.
“Yeah, the dog. Emma,” I explained. “She’s Kylie’s best friend. Like her sister, actually. Emma was in the vet’s office for almost twenty-four hours and they can’t be apart for that long without both of them getting really sad. Kylie was so worried that she was almost sick herself.” It had been a terrible day on Sunday, waiting to hear. One of the longest days of my life, as I worried about Emma and watched Kylie twist her hands together and stare into space. I had tried to get her to nap since she hadn’t slept, to eat since she wouldn’t touch food. To unpack the bags she had started to shove things in, in preparation for leaving Michigan for parts unknown. But she’d kept repeating that she had to—they had to leave.
“What, exactly, does this dog have to do with you missing the team meeting on Monday morning?” Coach Márquez asked me.
“Uh, well, on Sunday we got Emma back, and she could walk some but I carried her to the car and inside. She’s sleeping on my bed with Kylie because it’s the most spacious and she can stretch out, even though Great-aunt Maude died in there—but not recently, that’s not what I’m saying. Like, a while ago, but Kylie still hadn’t wanted to use the room even though the mattresses are different…”
Shit, they were looking at each other now, like they were exchanging some kind of mind message asking if I was crazy. A mind message? I rubbed my eyes. Maybe I was. No, I was just tired from my long shift of watching Emma the night before. We were taking turns sleeping so one of us could be awake and monitoring her at all times. I hadn’t woken Kylie when it was her turn because she’d been so exhausted, with big circles under her beautiful eyes. She still looked beautiful, of course, but so tired. I thought I’d be better with less sleep, that all my years of partying had accustomed me to it.
“Matthews?”
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, Emma was better on Sunday,” I continued. “but not totally healed. Not eating right or wanting to do anything, although she’s very elderly and she doesn’t ever want to do very much. Like, she’s definitely part retriever but if you throw a ball she won’t…sorry. Sorry, I’m pretty tired,” I tried to excuse myself. I’d almost fallen asleep in the car on the way over, and maybe those years of partying had actually caught up to me. Or maybe it was that I was very worried, and not just about Emma. Kylie refusing to unpack her bags, saying that she couldn’t leave now but she had to, and what was she going to do…
They were staring.
“Sorry,” I said for the hundredth time. “I think I was saying that it was obvious that the dog was still sick. So, on Monday morning, right before the meeting, Kylie talked to the vet and he said that we had to get a sample to give them for testing.”
“A sample,” Rami repeated.
“A sample,” I agreed. “Kylie was getting the medicine together because Emma will only take it disguised in some kind of special peanut butter cookie that I don’t know how to make and so I had to walk her on a leash around the neighborhood, which she hates. Both the walk and the leash. But I had to wait, wait until she…” I stopped and they stared at me. “I had to get a stool sample, ok? I had to wait until she gave me one, and then I had to collect it and take it to the doctor. It got messy.” That part, I didn’t like to remember. Messy wasn’t a strong enough word for what had gone on.
“You missed the team meeting because you were following a dog around waiting for it to take a crap so you could pick it up,” Rami clarified. “For Kylie.”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I tried to text her to come and get Emma and I tried to get in touch with both of you when I realized that I was going to be late. There’s terrible service up at our house and I couldn’t get through.” Besides the bad service, I’d also had to switch to a cheaper data plan that apparently only got a fraction of the reception, and on top of that, Jamison had been playing with my phone and opened it up to see what was inside, which I didn’t think had helped it at all.
“That’s another thing, Jamison,” I heard myself telling them. “His baseball tryout is next week and he’s not ready for it. It’s only a middle school team but they make cuts. Does that seem right? Shouldn’t they all get a chance to play, even the ones who suck? He’s trying his best.” I stopped and rubbed my eyes. “Sorry. I’m tired. I should have just stuck with saying it was a family emergency.”
Rami made a weird sound and I looked up at him. He was laughing? “What the fuck?” I asked him.
“It’s not funny that the dog is sick, man, and I shouldn’t…” But the asshole kept it up, trying to cough it away and hide it behind his hand. “If someone had told me the first day I met you—the first day when you rolled up to our team tryouts in your Bentley, wearing the mirror sunglasses and carrying the Gucci gear bag,” he said, and coughed for a second until he got control of his voice. “If someone had told me that you’d be the guy following an old dog around to pick up her shit…” He pushed a knuckle against his mouth but the laughter surged out past it, and now Coach Márquez’s moustache was twitching a lot, too.
Well, screw them both. “Are you going to fine me?” I asked the coach. I really hoped not, since these vet bills were already going to sink us.
He also coughed for a moment before he spoke. “No, not this time. I’m glad to know that it wasn’t what we were thinking, Matthews. I hope your dog gets well soon.”
Rami followed me out of the office, blowing on his hands to warm them up before we walked out into the snow. Coach had a few space heaters but the room still had ice frozen on the inside of the glass. “My son Ayman’s trying out for baseball, too,” he mentioned. “It’s not his thing, either. Sports in general are not his thing, but he keeps looking for one that suits him. We’ve done basketball, skiing, volleyball, tennis, shuffleboard—”
“Shuffleboard? Seriously?”
He went on. “Ice skating, ice hockey, lacrosse, and of course, football.”
“You don’t have to be good at sports,” I said, which was what I’d been saying to Jamison too, and went against every single principle I’d been raised on.
He nodded. “He’d love to have someone his age and skill level to practice with. My family liked Jamison a lot.”
“Yeah, he’s a good kid.”
“We should get them together, if you’re not too busy with the dog shit.” He started laughing again. “Sorry, sorry, I get that you had to do it. Just wait until you have kids of your own and get into diaper changing. Some of the stuff in those blew my mind.”
Me, having kids? “I don’t think that will happen.”
“Trust me, it will be much worse than a dog,” Rami said, missing my point. And then, unfortunately, he described what he meant about the diapers. “Anyway, enough of that. We were talking about baseball, right? One of the security guards for the Wood
smen team is my neighbor and he can get us onto the indoor field here.”
“Inside the practice facility? I thought that was for the real Woodsmen only and we weren’t allowed to touch it.” It would have been great if the Junior Woodsmen could have practiced inside on the field behind our locker room, since running plays and drills in the wind and snow and guys practically losing their fingers to frostbite wasn’t a great environment for learning.
“We can only use it because of Lyle, my neighbor,” he told me. “I bring my kids to play soccer sometimes, and we could meet up with the boys and hit some balls.”
We were almost to our outdoor field. “Sure, let’s do it.”
He nodded and started motioning the team over to talk about what we were going to run that day. I listened as he spoke to them, calling everyone by name and sometimes calling them out, but also having fun and laughing. I wondered if I would ever be able to lead them like that. Not today, for sure, since I was about to close my eyes and lie down on the place where the fifty-yard-line should have been, if there wasn’t so much damn snow and if anyone ever bothered to maintain this field.
Despite me being half-asleep, practice was fine. The second it was over I ran back to the locker room, got out my phone and shook it to get it working, and called Kylie.
“Oh, Kayden, I’m so glad it’s you,” she said when she answered. “I’ve been thinking about you the whole morning and how you must be so tired since you didn’t wake me up for my turn watching Em. Are you ok? Was practice ok?”
“It was fine,” I assured her. “Are you? How is Emma?”
Better, it seemed like, but she talked for almost ten minutes straight while first I sat on the bench in front of my locker, then I started hopping and jogging in place to stay warm. Words poured out of her, how Emma might have warm paws and she’d been searching online to see if that was a sign of illness, how she was afraid that it was something in the house (mushrooms) that had been toxic so that she had poisoned her best friend, how the vet was very nice but maybe he wasn’t as up on advanced techniques? Were there continuing education classes that veterinarians had to take, like maybe for dogs of advanced age? Dog octogonarians, as she called them.
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