“I don’t know about that,” I answered when she paused for breath, “but I think the vet seems very capable. He cares about Emma.”
“Who wouldn’t?” she asked, and I had to agree. Then she heaved a big, deep sigh. “I’m so, so glad to talk to you, Kayden. I wish I didn’t have to go to Roy’s so that we could hang out together.”
“Me, too. Um, maybe, if Em’s doing ok, I’ll stop by later.”
There was a silence, odd for Kylie. “To the tavern?” she asked finally, her voice full of doubt.
“I can go into a bar without becoming a drunk again.”
“That just,” she started, then paused again. “That just seems like tempting fate, doesn’t it?”
“I want to see you. You were asleep when I left this morning, and it’s not only that. For the past few weeks, we’ve been missing each other. We never get to really see each other.” Except when I’d gotten to hold her Saturday night, when she’d cried in my arms and then had dreams that made her frown and shake.
“I know, we’ve been like ships passing in the night. Like in The Trials of an Unmarried Miss when Sara Jane and Lord Percival keep almost meeting, and it never works out until the end!”
Then when they’d finally gotten together, it was instant love and marriage, followed by instant sex with many, many orgasms. We’d both read that one. “Exactly. So I’ll come later after Emma is asleep and she won’t even know I’m gone.”
“Well, if you feel like it’ll be ok for you at the bar, and Emma’s paws have cooled and you think it’s safe to leave her, then I’d like to see you, too. I’d really, really like that. I guess that some alcoholics can be around drinking again after they quit. They can even own their own taverns for years and years and stay clean, that’s what I’ve recently heard,” she said.
Did she mean Roy? “Sure, I’ll be fine. I’m coming home now and we’ll miss each other again, but I’ll be at the bar later.” We said goodbye but I held onto the phone and thought about how fast I’d have to drive to get home before Roy came to pick her up, as he’d been doing lately. I couldn’t ever make it, not matter how fast I booked off the field after practice, and it made me realize again how much I wanted to see her in person. Maybe she’d want me to hold her some more. I didn’t want her to be upset, and if she needed—
“Matthews.”
I put my phone in my bag, remembering what Rami had said about how fancy it was. Maybe I’d get another one, plainer, when I had some extra money. “Yeah, what?”
One of the receivers stepped around the side of the lockers, a second-string player who’d caught one of my passes in the fourth quarter of the last game when he’d come in for some garbage time. Without his helmet and pads, he seemed younger than I thought I’d looked in eighth grade.
“I’m having a party this Friday,” he announced.
“Yeah? During the season?” Now, why would I have said that? My day job had never interfered with parties in my own career.
“No, not a party,” he said quickly, “not really. My girlfriend’s telling me to ask all the guys over to our house because she’s getting her friends together that night. She wants to be a matchmaker.” He laughed. This guy, this prepubescent teenager, he was living with a woman already? I could be old enough to be his father, right?
“Want to come?” he asked me. “It should be fun. You don’t know most of the team yet, not like buds.”
No, I didn’t. I hadn’t known that I wanted to. “Uh, yeah. Thanks, Trey.”
His grin got wider. “Yeah, I’m Trey! All right, I’ll get you my address, Kayden.”
Maybe I’d go, maybe not. I wasn’t sure about myself at the bar tonight or at a party, but it did feel pretty good when I walked out and I heard a bunch of “see you, Matthews,” and other stuff like that, and Rami told me to hold up and we’d leave together.
“My kids want to get a dog,” he said as we went to the parking lot. “Maybe if I tell them that it will involve picking up and transporting bags of shit, they’ll change their minds about it.” He made himself laugh with that remark, and then we made plans to meet the next day for baseball practice and I shook my phone open put it into my schedule, and added Trey’s party, too. I drove back home thinking about my calendar filling up.
Emma was better. Not totally herself, but she did seem ok as we spent part of the afternoon hanging out and clearing the last few boxes from the living room because Kylie had been afraid that something in that mess of papers and yarn was what had made her friend sick. Then we lay together on the couch and talked about sports, what the pro baseball season was going to look like, what Jamison’s chances were for making his middle school team. Em was a great listener.
“Feels like things are going pretty well with the Junior Woodsmen, after all that I worried about it,” I mentioned. “I never would have thought it. But we’ve only won one game.” She looked interested. “Yeah, I do think that it’s the start of something good. We’re kind of jelling, if you know what that means.” It seemed like she did. “I got two invitations today to hang out with guys. The only time I was social on my old teams was when I was paying for drinks. Or drugs,” I added. “Rami hangs out with them, I know he does. Maybe that’s how he’s friends with them all. No, he’s not friends with everyone, but they all listen to him,” I tried to explain to her. “They respect him. It didn’t work out for wins last season, though. As much as he knows football and gets the team around him, they were still losing. He lost his starting job to me. So what does that mean?”
Emma didn’t seem to know, either. She stretched out, putting her head down on my chest.
“You have to be a player like my brother was,” I told her, and scratched her head. “You have to have all the knowledge that Rami has, all his skills in leading people, but you also need football talent. It’s so rare, but that was Ben. If he hadn’t gotten hurt, I think he would have been the best quarterback to ever play in the league. No, I’m serious,” I argued, when her dark eyebrows went up. “Better than Warren Wilde, better than Davis Blake, better than that asshole Teddy Hayes. Ok, yeah, he’s not such a bad guy,” I conceded. I played with her soft ears, which reminded me of Kylie’s hair. Not that she was like a dog, but she was sort of silky in the same way, and she had cuddled pretty hard with me. Clung to me, more like, as if she’d needed me there for her.
Emma huffed a low bark and I broke out of my thoughts. “You hungry? I can make us dinner.” Her tail thumped. A few minutes later, I sent a picture to Kylie of Emma eating the food in her bowl, and then I headed for the Bentley and over to Roy’s Tavern.
It wasn’t so busy mid-week in the winter, but there were other cars in the parking lot and the little “yeah, we’re open” sign was in the window under where the neon spelled out “Roy.” Looked like the S was out again. I took a breath before I opened the door and smelled the booze and cigarettes, and the combination made my heart beat harder. This was ok, though. Just because I smelled it, or saw it, or even tasted—no, I wouldn’t taste it. But I could be around people drinking and handle myself.
Kylie had her back to me, serving a table when I went in. The only way I saw her clearly was by the bright pink shirt she wore, which stated, “I drink at” on the back. She turned and the “Roys” showed across her chest, and then she spotted me, too, and I saw her white teeth in the darkness. She came right over and stood close.
“Hi,” she told me. “Hi!” She patted my chest with the hand that didn’t hold her empty tray.
“She ate her whole dinner and I waited to make sure that it stayed in her tummy,” I said immediately, and Kylie looked even happier. Her hand moved to my cheek.
“I’m so glad! And I’m so glad to see you. I saved you a table in the corner. It’s the best one, farthest away from the bathrooms and from Roy.” She interlaced our fingers to pull me over. I spotted Roy’s eyes on me, peering through the darkness like a tarsier. Kylie had told me about those little guys and their good nocturnal vision.
&nbs
p; “I’m going to get you Jamison’s favorite drink,” she said when I’d sat down. “He had about six of them while we watched you play.” She hadn’t let go of my hand, though. I nearly pulled on it, to tug her down to my lap. I was very, very glad to see her, too, but being here, inside Roy’s Tavern…
“Ok, Kayden?” She smiled at me again.
I had no idea what she’d said, but maybe about a drink? I wasn’t going to drink. “I don’t want anything. Can I just talk to you?”
She glanced back at Roy, who was glaring in our direction. “He wasn’t so thrilled about you coming. Hang on, I’ll be right back.” I watched her walk over to him behind the counter and get into what looked like an argument, with a lot of exasperated hand gestures from her and a lot of scowls and eye-rolling from her little gnome of a boss. Then Kylie looked back at me and held up her arm to signal something, but in the darkness I couldn’t see what it was. She disappeared through a door behind Roy.
I waited and watched the other men there—they were mostly men, and mostly older. Maybe this was what I would have become, a guy sitting alone at a bar on a Tuesday night. As I looked around the empty chairs at my table, I realized that I was already that guy. I saw the man closest to me tilt his beer mug and pour the liquid down his throat and I swallowed along with him, imagining the taste. Beer had never been my drink of choice but if someone offered it to me right now…Roy and Kylie were back behind the bar, and if I went up and asked him to pour me one, I could have it. What would be the big deal over one, single beer? I watched the man finish what was in his glass and hold it up, signaling to Roy that he wanted another. He also signaled by bellowing, “Another!” to which Roy answered, “Keep your damn pants on, you fat lush.”
“Here you go!” Kylie placed that guy’s next drink on his table and then put down a glass in front of me. “I even put a cherry in, and it’s fresh, too!” She sat at one of the empty chairs and I was no longer the loser alone. I reached across the table to pick up the soda but picked up her hand instead.
“Do these guys ever bother you? Maybe at the end of the night when they’ve had a few too many?” I asked.
“Roy has his bat,” she answered, which told me that the answer was yes. “Also, I’m no wilting flower.”
“You’re indomifisible,” I remembered she had told me.
“I looked that one up. I’m actually indomitable.” But her hand clenched around mine and I pressed it to my cheek. “I guess I don’t feel that way right now,” she admitted quietly.
“Why not?” She didn’t immediately answer. “Does it have something to do with why you want to leave Michigan? Can you tell me why you want to go? Why won’t you unpack those bags?”
She looked at me, eyes so big and shining and soft that I leaned forward, drawn into them. “I—”
“This right here is why I didn’t want your boyfriend to come,” Roy said. He slammed a glass on the table, making liquid slosh over the top. “If you want to play kissy, head outside and I’ll dock your wages. The paying customers are getting sick.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that he could go fuck himself, but Kylie spoke first. “If anyone’s getting sick, it’s because the furnace is broken and we’re all sucking in poisonous gases from it. Are you planning to get that thing fixed?” They argued for a moment before she pointed to the glass he’d put on our table. “Is this whiskey for Lou? And you brought it to me, so I could bring it over to him?” She picked it up, shaking her head. “Lazy,” I heard her mutter, and a few more choice words as she walked a few tables over to serve the drink. Roy gave me one last glower from under his caterpillar eyebrows before also muttering, something about an asshole that I thought was directed at me.
Motorcycles roared outside and a moment later a big crowd came in, big for Roy’s Tavern on a Tuesday. Kylie got busy with them and could only come to say hello every so often until closing time, so this visit didn’t work out like I’d been anticipating. Mostly I sat and studied the puddle of whiskey left on the table from when Roy had spilled it. It was cheap crap for sure, but I could still imagine the taste of it on my tongue, in my throat, all the way to my stomach. I touched it with my fingertip and studied the tiny drop of liquid there. When it was finally closing time, I wiped it back on table and waited until Kylie got her bag to drive her home. She fell asleep in the car under my coat and I tried to stop thinking about the whiskey.
The next afternoon, after practice when Kylie was already at work, I picked up Jamison and brought him over to meet Rami and his son, Ayman. A guard waved us past the gates that I’d first gone through what seemed like a lifetime ago, when I’d been a rookie with the Woodsmen and meeting the team for the first time at their practice facility. That morning, I’d been coming down off a high from the night before that had left me with a dry mouth, paranoia, nausea, and twitches. I remembered driving past the guard at the gate, walking out onto the field with my hands shaking so hard I’d had trouble holding a football.
We parked in the same lot I’d used then, the paved one with no giant ditches and ruts, where the Woodsmen players left their Porches and Range Rovers and Lambos when they came here for their preseason practices. “This is great!” Jamison crowed. He leaped out of the car. “This is awesome! It’s where Davis Blake plays, and César Hidalgo, and Jory Morin, and…” He named most of the Woodsmen team as he started toward the huge building.
“Hold on,” I told him. “Come, Em. Come on, please?”
She looked at the leash attached to her collar and growled and she didn’t stir a damn inch. I’d taken her with me rather than leaving her home alone because I started to get worried that she’d be lonely, which made me sound exactly like Kylie.
“Jamison, grab your gear out of the trunk,” I said. “Come on, Emma, good girl,” I coaxed, but she still didn’t make a move to get out of the back seat.
“I see Ayman!” Jamison yelled, and took his stuff and ran across the parking lot.
I saw him too, standing next to Rami. And Rami saw what I did next.
“Can I help you?” he asked me when I made it over to him.
“I’m fine,” I answered, and shifted the load in my arms.
“Man, what’s that smell?” He pulled up his collar over his nose.
“Emma has some tummy issues,” I told him, and she picked her head off my shoulder to give him a very pissed-off stare. I shifted her again.
“She’s still sick? How much does that dog weigh?”
Enough that I didn’t want to stand here holding her much longer. “Let’s just get inside, ok?” I told him, and he kept laughing but he did get the door for me, since I didn’t have a free hand. It seemed like the diet that Emma was on hadn’t been that effective.
The boys started playing catch right away, their version of it. That meant that they lobbed the ball to places where there was no one standing and if, by some miracle, they were in the neighborhood of a throw coming in, missed it completely with their gloves.
“This is great!” Rami told me. “Look how Ayman’s getting into it. It’s hard for him at home, with his big sister so athletic. She just gets annoyed when he drops the ball all the time.”
I was busy settling Emma down on the blanket I’d brought in one of Kylie’s old backpacks, a bag covered with patches of some of the places they’d traveled. There was hardly any room left on its canvas surface. I’d been afraid that it was going to be cold in here for Emma and would make her stiff, but apparently they heated the empty, unused Woodsmen practice facility field instead of the locker room and staff offices in the same building that the Junior Woodsmen had to occupy. Come to think of it, I definitely remembered having hot water in the showers in the Woodsmen side of the building, too.
We played baseball for a while, and Rami was almost as good at coaching this game as he was at football. “I volunteer as much as I can with the kids’ teams,” he explained when I mentioned this. “Soccer and track, swimming, you name it.” He told me all about his kids and that led t
o talking about his wife, who, according to him, was pretty much a goddess put on this planet by mistake. I remembered her as a nice woman with frizzy hair and a dirty shirt, but I just nodded. Emma had gotten up and found herself an old football to chew, and Rami found one for us, too.
While the boys played “baseball,” he and I tossed our ball back and forth and talked Junior Woodsmen strategy, stuff about the coaches, and a lot about our teammates. It turned out that he didn’t like the offensive lineman who’d almost knocked my lights out at the first tryout, the one who threatened that he wouldn’t block for me. “Loeb? That dick,” he summed it up. “What is he doing with his hands?”
“More like what’s he doing with his feet?” I asked. “It’s like they’re set in cement.”
“Kayden, look!”
We both turned to see Jamison. He’d climbed to the top of some bleachers that had been pushed against the far wall, where I remembered journalists watching us on press day when I’d been a rookie.
“J, didn’t you see the sign on those?” I yelled back. “It says, ‘Do not touch.’ Get down from there!”
As the last few words left my mouth, the bleacher he was standing on wobbled and Jamison did too. I was running towards him before I knew it and got there a second after he fell.
“Jamison? Jamison!”
“My arm hurts,” he moaned.
It was bent at an angle that arms weren’t supposed to go. “Shit,” I swore under my breath. “I know it hurts, buddy, I know. I’m sorry.”
“That’s a fracture,” Rami announced. “I’ll go get my car and we can take him to the hospital.” He and Ayman ran toward the exit as Jamison moaned.
Emma joined us and pushed under my arm to lick his face. “I’m going to pick you up,” I told him. “Here, hold your arm—”
The Bust Page 24