“Davis Blake? I don’t know if he’s retiring.”
“You should talk to the guys at Roy’s Tavern. They all know it. They say that the quarterback you have as a back-up doesn’t have the arm strength or the smarts to take over the starting job next year.” I was actually quoting Roy directly, except he’d said, “The fucking smarts.” It hadn’t been very polite.
“Thorning is a great player.”
“You’re not watching Kayden Matthews?” I asked again. “You absolutely should. He’s made an amazing turnaround, and not just on the football field. In his whole life! Did you know that he’s a mentor to an eleven-year-old boy who worships him? He and Jamison worked like dogs on his science project and J got a sixth-place ribbon, which was a very pretty shade of aqua. I shouldn’t say they worked like dogs, because sometimes dogs are very lazy. I mean that they worked extremely hard, like beavers. The old saying about those guys is true.” The scout nodded at me. “Kayden’s paying Jamison’s doctor bills, too, from when he broke his arm. Which was an accident and not at all Kayden’s fault. An accident means it’s not anyone’s fault,” I stressed.
“I had heard about that incident, that it had been a fall.”
I stared. “You did? How?”
“I spoke to someone at the Junior Woodsmen. He explained how Kayden had been teaching a kid how to play baseball, and how there were some dangerous things to climb on at the Woodsmen practice facility. I didn’t know about the medical bills.”
“I didn’t either until today,” I confessed. “Unfortunately, Kayden was a very, very poor money manager before when he had money to manage. He’s supposed to be saving now, for his future and for things like eating and buying gasoline, but then he paid for Jamison because he and his mom hardly have anything, and he paid Emma’s vet bills so I don’t have to.”
“Emma,” he agreed, like that name meant something to him.
“She’s my dog who was ill, and not just tummy issues this time,” I said, and realized that I was getting off track. “Anyway, about Kayden. Have you seen how many of his throws people have caught? How many times the ball has been in the end area?”
“A lot of completed passes in the end zone,” he said, correcting my vocabulary.
Right, end zone. “I just wanted you to be aware of all the positive changes that your—that Kayden has made in his life. I didn’t really know him before he cleaned up, besides seeing him in a bar in Oklahoma and meeting him briefly at my house last summer. From what I do know, I would say that he’s almost another person now.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s good. I’m glad he’s changed.”
I nodded back, but then stopped. “No, hold on. What I said, it’s not right. I think this person was always inside Kayden. I don’t think he was evil or anything. He made a lot of bad choices, really bad, but he wasn’t some kind of demon.” I was thinking of what we were currently reading, Pitchforked in the Heart, which had a real demon named Mandrake who had red eyes. “He did things that he regrets a lot. Like what happened with your wife,” I said.
Ben Matthews looked at me. “You know who I am.”
“You and Kayden are just alike. Not so much your features, not exactly. It was the look on your face when I first saw you. He makes exactly the same expression.”
“Did he tell you everything? Everything that happened between us?”
“I think so. He told me the worst things he could about himself because he thought I should know the truth. I think he also wanted to scare me or because he’s so ashamed, he wanted me to pile on and punish him more. He doesn’t remember what happened with your wife,” I said. “He just remembers waking up and seeing you disappointed and angry and sad.”
Ben looked away from me, down at the field. “He’s coming on to play.”
We both watched and I tried to peer over at what Ben was jotting down on his clipboard. Good things? One of the yellow players, a guy from the other team, zoomed across the lines and ran into Kayden, hitting him on the side where he couldn’t see it coming. I jumped up and Ben did, too.
“He’s all right,” he told me. “He’s ok.” Another of the big players on the Junior Woodsmen lifted Kayden to his feet and slapped his helmet, which I guessed was supposed to be comforting. I realized I had clutched Kayden’s brother around the arm with the grip of a coconut crab.
“Sorry,” I told him, and let go.
“I’m guessing that you’re Kylie.”
“What?” I stared. “How did you know that?”
“I told you I talked to a player for the Junior Woodsmen.” He checked the paper on his lap. “I spoke for a while with Rami Nour.”
“He’s Kayden’s friend. At first, they were rivals, but now they’re friends.” My forehead scrunched. “What did Rami say about me?”
“I asked him about my brother’s life and he said you were a big part of it. But I heard from Kayden, too. He called me today and left some very, very long messages.” He rubbed his face. “I get that you’re on his side, given how he feels about you. But what happened between my brother and me was a long time coming. We’ve always been in competition—”
“No.”
He looked my way. “Excuse me?”
“No, Kayden has never been in competition with you. It would be like a sand cat trying to keep up with a snow leopard! He worships you,” I said. “He thinks that you’re the best, most wonderful person in the world. He doesn’t think he could ever compete.”
“He’s better than I was,” Ben told me. “He’s a better player than I would have been, and he’s showing that today.”
“Well, of course he is, because I think he’s the best quarterback in the history of anything, but I’m not only talking about football. He wants to be a person like you, exactly like you. You’re his ideal, not his competition. Kayden loves you so much.” I heard my voice catch a little. “Even if you don’t think you can ever forgive him or want to be around him, you should know that.”
“I do know that.” And Ben’s voice caught too, and he swallowed and looked away from me. “I was so glad to hear from him today. I’m really, really pissed at him, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love him, too. I miss him. I miss my brother.”
I removed my hands from his arm, which somehow I’d grabbed again. “He misses you, too.” And I was going to miss him, so much. How was I ever going to leave?
Ben and I sat back down to watch Kayden win the game.
∞
Kayden
I looked up in the stands where two voices were chanting my name. Loudly.
“We love you, Kayden,” Jamison screamed, and three of the linemen cracked up.
“You have a fan,” one of the DEs told me.
“Nice to be noticed,” I agreed, and jogged across the field to where my supporters waited behind the chain-link fence. One had a broken arm and a runny nose, and one was wearing a coat about ten sizes too big and a hat that looked like a squashed potato. I was thrilled at the sight of them. “Game’s over. Go home, you two,” I tried to order them, but I was smiling a lot, so they didn’t seem to take me seriously.
“Kayden, that was wonderful. Was it some kind of record for the most touchdowns ever?” Kylie asked me. She pulled off her mitten, which I was glad to see her wearing, and reached through the fence.
I had my glove off to reach back for her before Jamison could start arguing, “No, I already told you that I looked it up,” he said. “The most touchdowns was in 1975 in a game between the Orange County Sunsets and the Big Apples,” and he continued to clarify that point. I was more interested in holding Kylie’s hand. I kissed her palm, too, because I couldn’t help myself, and she stepped closer to the fence.
“Kayden, I’m so sorry about last night,” she said quietly. “I’m not sorry it happened, but I’m sorry how it ended. I didn’t want it to end.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Jamison asked.
“Uh, nothing. Where’s your mom, buddy? You need to get out of the
wind before your cast freezes. Can you get a ride to work with her, too?” I asked Kylie, but she shook her head.
“The tavern is closed for the night, because Roy isn’t feeling well.” She bit her lip. “His girlfriend is with him, taking care of him. He told me that she already went over to hang up a ‘shut down due to cholera’ sign in the window. It’s going to make it hard for him to hire a new waitress if people think there are communionable diseases running around the bar.”
“There probably are,” I said, but mostly I was thinking about why Roy would need a new waitress. “Wait for me in my car then, and run it, ok? I’ll be out as soon as I can.” The kid and I slapped hands and I gave her palm another kiss before they took off.
There were no members of the press to talk to, and without a lot of heat in our locker room, the coaches tried to wrap up the postgame rituals as quickly as they could. Still, it was much too cold in my car by the time I made it out there.
“Gas savings,” Kylie explained, and shivered.
“That won’t be a problem for much longer,” I mentioned. “I’m going to sell this and get something smaller. Cheaper.”
“I heard that from Jamison. But you love the Bentley.” She ran her hand over the dashboard, and yeah, I did.
“Sure, but other things are more important. Like mileage. And it would be easier for someone to learn to drive on a car she wasn’t so scared about crashing. Don’t you still want to learn?”
“Yes, I really do. It’s making me more and more frustrated that I don’t know how, like when there’s just a little bit of jelly left in the jar but it won’t stay on your knife to get it out? Just like that.”
Good, I had one reason she should stay, the jelly issue. “It takes a while to get a license,” I mentioned casually. “You could stick around here until you do, give Emma more time to recover. And let the rumors about cholera in Roy’s bar die down so that he can hire someone new to replace you. There might be some more games you’d want to see, if you’re interested in football, too.”
“I love football now,” she said. “It’s so exciting when you keep throwing it into the end zone.”
“I’ll keep doing that,” I promised. I would have promised just about anything.
“There were scouts at the game from the United Football Confederation. From the Woodsmen team,” she told me, and I nodded.
“Rami said some were coming. I saw them across the field and I thought for a minute…” I shook my head.
“What?”
“I was going to say that one of them looked like my brother, the way he was standing.”
“It was,” Kylie agreed. “I talked to him.”
I almost ran off the road. “It was Ben? You did? What did he say?”
“He told me that he misses you. He’s angry at you still, but he loves you a lot.” She put her hand over mine on the wheel. “Are you ok?”
No. I was about to lose it again, like I had after I’d left the messages for him that morning. “Do you think he’d want to see me?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and I couldn’t say it very loudly.
“I think you need to give him more time, but I think he wouldn’t have come today and he wouldn’t have talked to me if he wanted to cut you out of his life forever. He knew who I was,” she said, and it was definitely a question.
“I called him and I may have mentioned you.” I tried to think what I’d said about her before I got cut off, called back and said more. I knew that I’d told him that I loved her.
“He said he’d never seen you play better. He thought it was being clean but I don’t think it’s just that.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, nodding. “A lot of it has to do with you.”
“With me?” She sounded shocked.
“Yeah, because I’m happy being around you.” I was. It had shocked me at first, too. “I’ve been pretty sad for a long time.”
“And if I leave, you’ll be sad again. And maybe…”
She’d said “if” about leaving, but I still had to correct her. “No, you can’t worry about my moods. And you can’t control if I use again or if I don’t, or how I play football, or if Ben and I make up. I have to be in charge of those things. I have to be in charge of my own life. But having you in it, that’s wonderful. It’s amazing, and it makes me very, very happy.” I reached across the car to take her hand. “Can you tell me why you want to go so much? Is it something I did?”
“No. It’s the same thing with me, ok? You aren’t responsible for this.” I felt her hand shake and she gripped my fingers. “I’m afraid…” She jerked in a breath.
“What? What are you afraid of, sweetheart?”
“I’m think I’m sick,” she answered, but her voice was so soft, it was hard for me to hear it. “I’m sick, like my mom.”
“Do you mean you think you have lupus too?” What did that mean for her? “Is it hereditary?”
“Not necessarily. But I have symptoms.”
My heart beat harder than it had in the game. “Like what?”
“I’m tired.”
“You work nights, and you’ve been up with Emma,” I rationalized.
“And my joints hurt. And I had a rash on my face, and other stuff. But maybe if I go where it’s warmer, that will stop. Maybe it’s just the cold weather.”
“What did your doctor say?”
She didn’t answer, just looked at the ugly hat in her lap.
“Kylie, are you serious? You take Em to the vet when you think she has a hangnail!” I exploded.
“Well, I’m too scared!” she shot back at me, and turned bright red. “I know how dumb that sounds, ok? I understand that! I’m scared that I have it and I’m too scared to find out for sure. It’s ridiculous!”
It was, but I understood it. “I was too scared to go to rehab, not for real,” I told her. “I didn’t think I could stop using and I was afraid to find out if I was right about that.” I removed her fingers from her hat, which she was unravelling. It was horrible, sure, but I thought she’d regret it. Also, we’d thrown out all the extra yarn that had been in Great-aunt Maude’s boxes, so there were no supplies to knit another one.
“My mom just got sicker and sicker and I watched her die,” Kylie said. “She was stuck in the stupid city for her whole life and the only way she got to live was through our books! And I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to get stuck somewhere and die and I never really lived.”
“I think you’ve lived.”
“Sure,” she sighed. “I got in a car accident in Idaho and broke my pelvis and I got chased by coyotes in Moreno Valley and it’s really hard to run carrying Em. It’s better in the books, it just is. Nothing in real life can come close! You know Great-aunt Maude and Ronnie? In his last letter, he dumped her! He told her that he wasn’t going to come up north for another summer because he had some stupid internship, and since she wasn’t ever going to leave Leelanau County to join him, he wasn’t going to be able to see her anymore. He returned all her letters and asked for his signet ring back. Now he’s retired in Tampa with two ex-wives and about sixteen grandkids and she died alone and rotted. It’s so unfair. It’s so unfair!”
“Did you really think things would be like Lord Aubrey and Lady Lilac or that demon guy we just read about, Marmalade?”
“Mandrake!” she told me furiously. “No, I didn’t think that but…but I wanted something better than reality! I’m running away from reality and if I stop too long, it’s going to catch up with me. I’m not some heroine, I’m just me, a probably-diseased waitress with only a dog for a friend, and I’m scared that I’ll die just like my mom.” She was looking out the window but I thought she was crying. She did it so quietly, so secretly, it was hard to know.
“That’s not true.”
“Why would his name be Marmalade?” Kylie demanded. “That’s ridiculous!”
“No, the rest of what you said, that’s the part that’s wrong. You don’t know if you’re sick with anything more than so
me kind of skin allergy, and we’ll go to the doctor together to find that out. And yeah, it’s not like you’re Lady Lilac, but who would want her? She faints all the time and slaps that poor guy silly.”
“Aubrey did deserve it, most of the time,” she pointed out.
“Sure, but I wouldn’t want a woman like that. I would want a waitress who fights with her boss but brings him sandwiches she thinks are healthy and hides his cigarettes. I would really like a woman who makes friends with a gawky, eleven-year-old kid because he needs it.”
“Jamison is great,” she said. She’d turned, so I could see one tear still tracking down her cheek.
I nodded. He was. “I would love a woman who’s not just friends with a dog, but friends with everyone she meets. I would love her,” I repeated. “I do. I love her.”
“You do? You love me?”
I stopped in front of our house. “I love you. I don’t want you to leave.”
She put her hands on my cheeks, holding me still to look into her eyes. “What if I do have it?”
“Do you think I’m perfect? I’m a bust of a football player, dropped by my family, a cokehead, a drunk. Am I what you want?”
Slowly, her head nodded up and down. “Yes. Yes, because I love you too.”
“It isn’t going to be anything like a book, because, yeah, this is reality. I’m for sure going to fuck things up, but I can fix them when I do,” I promised her. “Whatever I do, I’ll make it up to you, Kylie.”
“I don’t think you’ll fuck things up. But if you do, I can help you fix them.”
“If you’re sick and you need me, I can help you. I always will.” I leaned so that our foreheads touched.
“I guess I shouldn’t be running away from real life, then,” she said. She closed her eyes and rested against me.
“I guess if you go, I’ll have to come along.”
“Are you sure, Kayden? I’m never going to be a Bentley and purple fur coat kind of woman.”
“It turns out I’m not that kind of guy, either.”
She sighed and then smiled. “I’ve been remembering what we did last night. I think part of our relationship is going to be exactly like one of our books,” she told me.
The Bust Page 27