Free Agent

by Catherine Gayle

  “Yes, that’s my job. For now.”

  BLAKE DIDN’T CALL me that night. Or the next day. He didn’t respond to any of my text messages, either, which had me really worried about him. But nothing concerned me more than the fact that he wasn’t on the bench for the Storm’s next game against Florida.

  I couldn’t think of a single game I’d watched with Dani over the last couple of years when he hadn’t played. Sick, injured, whatever—Blake would be on the ice. Now that I knew about his ADHD, I realized activity was something that he actually needed, not just something he enjoyed. For him to miss a game…this couldn’t be good.

  Or was I just reading too much into the situation? Was I making it into a bigger problem than it truly was? Quite possible, although I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that I was right, and this was a huge issue. The commentators simply said he was a healthy scratch and left it at that. No reason was given for his absence.

  Had the coaches benched him because he’d fouled up and taken too many penalties in the last game? I doubted it, because a couple of times they showed the other healthy scratches up in the press box, and he wasn’t with them. That meant something else was going on—something he didn’t want to talk about, if I took his lack of response to my messages at face value. And the fact that he didn’t want to talk about it likely meant it was exactly what he needed to talk about.

  Then again, there was a decent possibility that he might just not want to talk to me about it. If I kept trying to call and text him, would he see that as me nagging?

  We weren’t quite what I’d call a couple. Not yet, at least, and I wasn’t sure we ever would be.

  So far, we’d only gone on a date. Yes, he’d kissed me like I’d never been kissed before. But considering my lack of experience in that area, that wasn’t exactly saying much.

  Maybe I’d jumped the gun by getting my doctor to prescribe contraception. Maybe, now that he’d been close enough to kiss me, he’d also been able to feel my loose skin and lumpy, bumpy spots, all my flaws that my clothes tended to disguise, and he didn’t want to have anything else to do with me, but he just didn’t want to tell me so. Saying something like that to a person’s face wasn’t easy for anyone, and for someone like Blake, who already struggled with tact… He’d probably just want to cut me off without another word.

  But he hadn’t seemed disgusted by me. Had he? Was I just blinded by my own lust and therefore incapable of seeing the truth of the situation? That was a distinct possibility. My Male Interest Radar had never been trained to function properly, and it was a bit late in life to give it a tune-up.

  Honestly, I needed to talk to someone like Dani about this. Dating and relationships—these weren’t areas of strength for me. I mean, I’d had a date to my senior prom in high school, but we’d gone as friends—two outcasts who wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Since then? Nothing until Blake.

  Only, now that I thought about it, maybe Dani wasn’t my best option for that sort of advice. She’d likely flip out if I let her know that he’d kissed me.

  But who, then?

  I tended to keep my relationships with my coworkers strictly professional. We might ask one another how our families were after a long holiday weekend, or sometimes a few teachers would get together on a Friday for happy hour drinks and appetizers at a chain restaurant near the school before heading home for the weekend—but we never talked about anything serious beyond work-related issues: the latest testing requirements, our upcoming in-service training, a book that someone had read with great ideas for changes to disciplinary structure.

  Not anything real. Not anything about life. It was all about work.

  Before I could second-guess myself, I was reaching for my phone and dialing my mother’s number.

  “Beatriz,” she said, an admonishment in her tone. Like everyone in my family, she called me by my full name, pronouncing it in the traditional way. My friends and coworkers tended to shorten it and Americanize it. “You weren’t here for your brother’s birthday last week.”

  “I called him and wished him a happy birthday. I explained that I had to work. He understood.” And frankly, they should all understand. I lived and worked in Portland. I couldn’t just head down to San Bernardino in the middle of the week any old time I wanted.

  “Your abuelita expects you to be here next month for Paola’s quinceañera.”

  I rolled my eyes since Mama couldn’t see me do it through the phone. “I’ll be there. But you can let Abuelita know now that I won’t be eating any of her tamales, or any of her trés léchês, or anything else she makes. I’m going to bring my own food.” It’d be much safer that way—much less chance of me making myself sick by eating too much sugar or carbs or fat. I’d rather risk my grandmother’s wrath any day than suffer a bout of dumping syndrome in the midst of my niece’s big day. “But that’s not what I’m calling about,” I said, trying to shift the conversation in a (slightly) more favorable direction. Mom might not be on my side when it came to dealing with the family, but in the end, they all wanted the best for me. Or so I had to believe, and I did my best to convince myself of this on the regular. We just didn’t always see eye to eye as far as what that might look like and how I should go about getting there. “I had something I wanted to ask you,” I said.

  “Hmm?” she replied. She sounded distracted more than miffed.

  Understandable since she was planning my niece’s quinceañera.

  “I’ve started…dating someone, I guess,” I hedged.

  “Dating?” Suddenly, Mama’s tone was sharp and clear, and in my mind’s eye I could picture her sitting up straight and setting aside all the papers she’d been shuffling through. “Who is he? Have we met him? Your father and brother will need to approve of him.”

  Once again, I didn’t bother trying to stop my eyes from rolling. “My father doesn’t need to approve of anyone. And if he doesn’t get to do that, there’s no chance I’d let Miguel involve himself in my private life. None of you get any say in this, one way or another. I’m not a child.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Mama. That’s not what I’m calling you about, anyway, and if you intend to try to go there, I’ll hang up and call someone else for my advice.”

  She took a moment to respond, and I could practically feel the wheels spinning in her mind. Finally, she said, “Advice? What sort of advice do you need?” Her query was filled with the sort of curiosity that meant she was fishing for fuel to start gossiping about my private life with the rest of the family as soon as we hung up the phone.

  Which meant that now I needed to figure out how to word it…

  “He has to travel a lot for his work,” I started, avoiding the reason for his travel. Telling her that he was a professional athlete would be akin to inviting her disbelief and ridicule. Heck, even I had a hard time believing it, and I was the one experiencing it. “And something happened during his current work trip. I don’t know what. But he’s not at work anymore, and he’s not answering me.”

  “Men don’t like to be nagged, mija. They need their space. You know how your papa is when I try to remind him about mowing the lawn or raking the leaves.”

  “This isn’t— This is different.”

  “Nagging is nagging is nagging. Doesn’t matter what you’re nagging about—the fact is you’re doing it.”

  “But I’m worried that something is wrong.”

  “Men don’t like to tell their women about their problems, mija. They like to think they can handle them all on their own.”

  “But I want to help him with whatever it is,” I said. “I just don’t know what it is, so I don’t know how to help him.”

  “That’s when you have to use your feminine wiles. You’ve got to figure out the problem. And then you have to find a way to help him without him realizing you’re helping him. He needs to think he’s strong. He needs to believe he can fix everything himself—including you. But really, you’ll be taking care of him. That’s ho
w these things work. Men think they’re taking the whole world on their shoulders, but women are the ones holding them up and keeping them from losing their grip.”

  “I don’t know how to do that,” I said. Especially not if I couldn’t deal with my own issues. And we’d already established that, no matter how healthy I might be physically, I still had a world of problems to deal with on the emotional front. How could I be there for Blake—even if he finally answered—if I couldn’t deal with my own crap?

  But if he wouldn’t answer, I supposed the point was moot.

  “You’ll find a way. That’s what we do. We figure it out and make it happen, right? You need to come for a dress fitting this weekend,” my mother said, already putting my problems to the side and moving back into the realm of my niece’s quinceañera. “Paola wants all the women in the family to have dresses in the same color and the same fabric as her dress.”

  I groaned. “I’d rather have my friend make my dress.” Dani might be confined to bed, but having a project like this to work on would give her something to do—and I could be sure it would be something more appropriate for my age and body than whatever the women of the Castillo family came up with when left to their own devices.

  “You’re coming,” Mama said adamantly. “And you need to bring your man to the quinceañera. Your father needs to meet him. And so does your brother.”

  That could only be a disaster. Maybe it was for the best that Blake wouldn’t answer me, after all. I could save him the horrors of meeting my entire extended family and having to navigate those waters.

  Considering his ADHD and other issues, avoiding my family for as long as possible seemed like the best conceivable idea. I would be the only person in the bunch who had a tiny smidgeon of tact.

  It was a disaster waiting to happen.

  I had no intention of ruining Paola’s quinceañera in that way. My own quinceañera had been enough of a disaster to fuel the family gossip mill for decades.

  “YOU EVER GONNA answer all those calls and messages you keep getting?” Grandma demanded. It wasn’t a question even if she worded it as one. That wasn’t her style. Besides, she had always known she needed to take a firm hand with me, and that didn’t seem to be fading even though her health was.

  “They don’t matter right now. The only thing that matters is you.”

  “Could be your team.”

  “They know where I am and why I’m here. They were the ones who approved it and made this happen. It’s fine.”

  But that was a massive lie, whether Grandma knew it or not.

  The truth was that nothing was fine, but Webs and Jim Sutter had both promised me that going to sit with my grandma for a few days when she was this sick wasn’t going to cost me my place on the team. Webs had sworn he’d find a way to smooth things over with Bergy, even, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath on that score. Our head coach had decided I was pond scum, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change his mind.

  Grandma hmphed. “I’m not going to die any quicker or slower if you ignore the rest of your life just because I’m sick, you know.”

  I’d been here for two days, sitting by her hospital bed, laughing at her awful jokes and the way she kept flirting with her favorite male nurse, holding her hand while they dug around in her arms to try to get in a new line after one of her veins gave out, and silently begging her to hold on just a little longer every time she failed to eat more than three bites of any meal they offered her.

  “Don’t make a joke of that, okay?” I said.

  “Of what? Dying?”

  “That’s not a joke.”

  “Death is the biggest joke of them all. Everybody’s going to die. God’s going to get the last laugh.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not allowed to die just yet. And it’s not funny to me.”

  “Funniest thing going on in this room.”

  “No, the funniest thing going on in here is the way you keep yelling at your nurses because you hope they’ll think you’re a mean old lady so they’ll send Brett back in here to deal with you.”

  “It works, doesn’t it? Can’t blame an old, dying lady for wanting a pretty face to look at while she gets her ass wiped.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “What? You don’t like hearing about Brett wiping my ass?”

  “Stop saying you’re dying,” I begged.

  “I need to say it. Because you need to hear it.”

  I scowled to fend off the stinging sensation that was clawing at the backs of my eyes. “You can’t see his face when he’s wiping your ass, anyway,” I muttered, hoping to deflect her attention away from me.

  “Sure I can. I can see it in my mind’s eye. And he’s pretty nice to look at no matter what he’s doing.”

  “You’re a mess.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  I shot a look at her—the same sort of look she used to give me any time I was acting like a smartass around her. “Where do you think I got it?”

  “Who’s going to look after you when I’m gone?” she asked, flipping the subject again so fast I got whiplash from the speed of it.

  “You’re not going to be gone. You’re not allowed to die.”

  “I’d say you should take that up with God, but I don’t think He’s going to make any exceptions to His rules just because I’m worried about you.”

  “Why the hell are you worried about me?” I almost choked on the words. “You’re the one with cancer.”

  “And you’re the one I’m leaving all alone when I go.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “No, but everyone needs a parent sometimes. Even when they’re all grown up. Even when they think they’ve got it all figured out. Hell, especially when they think they’ve got it all figured out, because that’s when it all falls apart.”

  “The only thing falling apart around here is you.”

  “Liar.”

  The single word was full of so much love and heartbreak that I had to look away or else I’d fall to pieces and prove her point. I got up and crossed over to the other side of her bed and looked out the window, staring blankly at the season’s first snow falling softly on the bare trees outside her room.

  “You never have been able to lie to me, Blake. I’m glad that hasn’t changed.”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Almost everything’s changed. And it’s all changing again. But you haven’t.”

  Neither had she, nor her ability to see straight through me and get to the heart of whatever troubled me.

  “I just want to know that you’re going to be okay when I’m gone.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to be okay in a world without you in it?”

  “You’ll have to find a way.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it with a surprising amount of strength, considering how frail and weak she’d become. “And maybe some of those people who keep calling you and sending you messages can help. Seems like you’ve got someone who cares. Maybe a lot of someones.”

  I shrugged, but I found myself facing her again, my back to the window, as I took out my phone and unlocked the screen.

  There were several text messages and missed calls from a handful of my teammates, and one from Jim Sutter. I should probably listen to his message soon if nothing else. After all, whether Grandma lived or died, I needed to do whatever the hell I had to in order to keep my spot on the team.

  But the only messages I seemed inclined to listen to or look at were those from Bea. And there were a lot of them. She’d called and left me two voice messages, and there was a long stream of text messages from her. They’d started out with her being concerned and asking me if I was all right. But somewhere along the line, her tone had gone from concerned to downright pissed off. The most recent one had her threatening to hunt me down and cut off my balls with a rusty spork courtesy of Dani Williams if I didn’t respond to her soon, at least to tell her I was alive.

  For some reason, that instantly warmed
me up and made me laugh.

  “What’s got you smiling?” Grandma asked.

  “Just a message from this woman I’ve been kind of seeing.”

  “One of your groupies?”

  I raised a brow.

  “You know. Your groupies. Don’t you have any? I was sure you would.”

  “You mean puck bunnies? Chicks who want me just because I play hockey?” I did a double take. “What do you know about all that?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, if you haven’t noticed. I might have been a groupie, once upon a time.”

  “If you’re going to tell me you went on tour with the Beach Boys or some shi—”

  “Led Zeppelin,” she cut in. “But that was a long time ago.”

  I shuddered, thinking about my grandma getting on some skeevy tour bus. But then again, that sounded like exactly the sort of thing she might have done, once upon a time.

  “Bea’s not like that,” I said. “She’s different.”

  “Different how?” Grandma asked.

  Different in all the best possible ways. But all I said was, “She’s not chasing after me. I’m chasing after her.”

  Grandma narrowed her eyes and nodded. “I like the sounds of her already.”

  “You’d like her a lot, I think.” I sat on the edge of Grandma’s bed. The need to be as close to her as possible, for as long as I could, was heavy in my gut.

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because she doesn’t take any shit from me. She puts me in my place.”

  Grandma burst out laughing, long and full. She laughed so hard that she was gasping for air, and it set off several of her beeping machines, and the nurses rushed back into the room to make sure she wasn’t dying. She shooed them away once she’d recovered and they managed to get the machines under control again.

  One of them gave me a nasty look on her way out the door.

  “Ignore that bitch,” Grandma said. “She thinks that since I’m dying, I shouldn’t have any fun. But that’s bullshit. I want to go out having fun. I want to live every minute of the rest of my life the way I’ve always lived it.”