It had been nearly impossible for me to watch, especially the last time it had happened. Nico had been running down the sideline and his defender had tripped him then shoved him in the back so that he hit the ground with a huge thud. It was an obvious penalty, but the ref had been blind to almost everything regarding Nico during the game. He had fallen almost right in front of where I was sitting and I had actually jumped to my feet, my heart in my throat. Nico had lain there without moving for a few seconds and I fought with myself to stay in the bleachers. But just as I took a step down, he rolled to his side and got up. As he jogged across the field to the bench while digging a clod of dirt out of his facemask, I had slowly sunk back down and clutched the blanket around myself, wanting to kill someone.
“That’s my husband there,” the woman next to me said, and pointed to one of the steaming figures on the Junior Woodsmen sideline. He was on the offense, then, because the defense was currently playing, if that was what you could call what they were doing. Now that it was the fourth quarter, every guy on the defensive side looked exhausted. But despite getting a lot of time to practice their craft, they were also terrible. They had allowed six touchdowns, and it would have been more, but the other team had put in what looked to be a 12-year-old quarterback, their third or fourth string. Or maybe he wasn’t an actual player, but just a kid who happened by the field today, because he didn’t look much bigger than I was.
Ok, yeah, he was bigger than I was. The stray cat that had run across the field and livened things up in the first quarter was practically bigger than I was.
I tried to pay attention to the woman talking to me now, because she was the only one there who had, through three and a half quarters and a halftime show. That was supposed to have been a local elementary choir but it was too windy for them to come out to sing, so someone had blasted AC/DC over the loudspeakers and then made announcements regarding the brimming lost and found. “You’re married to one of the players?” I asked, and tried to smile at her.
She nodded, and maybe smiled back, but I couldn’t see much of her face behind the giant scarf she had wrapped around her head. “I’m Juliet,” she said, then yanked down the scarf with a mittened hand, which she then offered to me to shake.
“I’m—” I said, but I stopped myself, swallowing. I had spent a lot of the game imagining myself in different roles. I was going to be Hetty Prentiss, a sportswriter from New York who was there to report on Nico, and who would send back scathing posts to my editor about the coaches and other players on the field, making them the laughingstock of the entire nation. Or I would be Gertrude Vorschrift from the United Football Confederation Office of Officiating, there to fire the terrible referees after bitching them out for letting Nico get mauled and nearly murdered on the field that day. Or I would be…it didn’t matter. I had a role to play here, and it was Tatum, dutiful girlfriend. Frozen, dutiful girlfriend. “I’m Tatum,” I said sadly. “Tatum Smith.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Juliet told me, and I said the same. Both of us watched another touchdown easily run in as the Junior Woodsmen defense put their hands on their knees and panted. “Oh, no. Was the first half like this?” she asked, and I nodded. It had all been generally dreadful. Was there no strength and conditioning program for these guys? How did they expect to move up to the big leagues playing like this?
Juliet pointed at my chest. “Hooters?”
I stared at her. “Excuse me?”
“I meant, are you with the Hooters team? I’m a Woodsmen.”
Right, the opposing team did have the worst name in sports. “Oh, no, I’m not with the, uh, with those guys. No, my boyfriend is a Woodsmen. A Junior Woodsmen, I should say.”
“We usually leave off the ‘junior,’” Juliet whispered, leaning forward so I could hear her over the whistling wind. “It kind of makes them sound like they’re kids or something. The other wives just say Woodsmen.”
But they weren’t Woodsmen, because the real Woodsmen were the professionals. They were pros who made millions and starred in commercials and had a stadium with seats with padding, and they made these assholes, the ones trying to hurt Nico, look exactly like kids. Like stupid, ridiculous kids. I opened my mouth to tell Juliet that when she leaned forward again.
“My husband is number seventy-four, Braylon Hellar. He was so excited to come today because they’ll get to see the new guy in action, that one.” She pointed at Nico. “You know who he is, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said coldly, and waited for her to start trashing him so I could tell her what exactly was up.
“Braylon is so excited to get to play with him!” she repeated. “Nico Williams is one of the best wide receivers in the game. The pro level game,” she informed me. She squinted up at the poorly-lit scoreboard. “But it doesn’t look like Teddy has been throwing to him much today,” she said.
No, the quarterback had been acting like he had a blind spot for whatever place Nico happened to be on the field. But her words had cheered me up. “Really? Your husband was excited to play with Nico?” My heart warmed to her.
“It’s an amazing opportunity! Braylon may never get the chance to be on the field with someone so talented, not ever again in his life.” I swelled with pride. “Oh, here they come,” she said, eyes trained on the players. The Junior Woodsmen offense was finally ready after a timeout. They were down by 52 points; was a fourth quarter discussion really going to make a difference in the game? Maybe not, but it sure felt like it might make a difference in whether I lost some fingers to the cold or not.
The Junior Woodsmen clustered around their quarterback for a moment and then spread out along the line of scrimmage. “I hope they can score this time,” Juliet said fervently. “Which one is your boyfriend?”
“Number twenty-two,” I said.
She stared at me and her mouth dropped open. “But, that’s…”
“Nico, here we go, oh jeez!” I watched as he ran down the field, totally open, with the defense trying to catch him. He stopped, waving his arms at the quarterback, and you could hear him yelling. “Throw it! Throw it!” I shouted at the field. The quarterback hesitated, hesitated, and then finally let go of a wobbling pass that made it to Nico’s hands only because he leaped about ten feet in the air for it. And just as he caught it, he was leveled by the cornerback. I covered my eyes, unable to watch.
“He’ll be ok, Tatum,” I heard Juliet assure me. “The trainer is going over now.”
I opened my eyes, sure that the trainer was some idiot with a band-aid and a singular piece of ice, but it looked like a real professional heading out onto the field, or at least she ran confidently and wasn’t tripping or anything. But Nico hadn’t moved on the ground. “He was already all bruised up from practice yesterday because the other guys were going after him then, too,” I said, but my voice was slurry and strange, not like my own.
“They were?” Juliet sounded concerned.
Slowly Nico sat up, with the trainer’s hand behind him, and slowly, with only the trainer’s help, he got to his feet. No one on the sidelines started clapping, no one on his team came over to help, even though the trainer was closer to my size than Nico’s. The coaches ignored the entire incident.
And that was it for me. “What’s wrong with all you people?” I furiously asked Juliet. “What’s the matter with you?” I clutched the blankets around myself and turned to the mob of players’ wives and families. “That’s a first down!” I hollered over to them. “I think it’s the only one in the whole game, right?” I clapped as loudly as I could as Nico walked toward the bench, supported only by the small trainer. Then I cupped my hands at my mouth. “FIRST DOWN, NICO WILLIAMS!” I shrieked. All the people on the sidelines and the players and coaches across the field could hear it, even with the wind, because I could be loud when I wanted to be and I currently felt like screaming my head off.
I stomped down the bleachers, away from stupid Juliet and the other stupid Junior—because they absolutely were Jun
ior—Woodsmen families. I stood with my fingers through the chain-link fence that kept us from rushing the field to help the players or running out to kill the referees or whatever else the fans might have done for the rest of the terrible game.
It finally ended with the Junior Woodsmen defense out huffing around on the field as the Hooters’ quarterback ran in circles to avoid the sack and kill the clock. They couldn’t catch him and kept slipping on the slick, frozen grass, and the whole thing looked a lot more like a circus clown act than a football game. The wives were all checking their phones and gathering up their things as finally the time ran down to zero and the useless, hopeless, stupid waste of Nico’s talent was over.
After their football games, the real Woodsmen players always went from the field back through a tunnel to their locker room, where they would shower, change, have a brief talk, and then come out to meet their families in a special lobby with comfy furniture and snacks. These dipshit, counterfeit, high-school caliber Junior Woodsmen walked right across the field to talk to the people in the frozen stands. I had to wait behind the fence for Nico to slowly make his way over to me. He wasn’t limping, but he was not moving with his usual gait or speed. I rattled the chain-link as I waited, wishing I had brought my wire cutters in my purse. For the next game, I’d be ready with them, and also maybe also my slingshot and a handful of rocks cued up for the players’ wives.
Nico pulled off his helmet as he reached me. “First down,” he said, and he grinned at me. “I think they heard you back in Miami.”
“How can you smile right now?” I asked, so angry that I was hopping up and down. “They treated you like a punching bag instead of a teammate! That quarterback hung you out to dry on the last play—”
“Shh.” He tapped the fence in the direction of the other women on the bleachers. “One of those ladies is probably his girlfriend.”
“Maybe she can teach him how to throw! I’d be happy to!”
Nico laughed again. “Come here,” he said, and when I leaned closer to the fence, he bent and kissed my forehead. “Tatum, as always, I’m very glad you’re here. I’m going to go take an ice-cold shower and talk to the trainer again. Go wait in the car, honey. You look icy yourself and by the way my hip feels right now, you’ll be driving.”
“Ok. Hurry up, though. We need to go home.” I felt a strong urge to get away from this terrible, frozen tundra of a field and the heartless, soulless people surrounding it. I watched him walk away, then gathered my blankets tightly around myself and swept past the crowd of wives and girlfriends and family members that had ignored me earlier.
“Bye, Tatum,” I heard Juliet say, but I was deaf to her and to her stupid Junior cohorts. And I was going to install facial recognition cash registers at El Asturiano También (I was still working on the name) so that none of those people would ever be able to buy our delicious pastries. They would have to suffer, watching through the windows as everyone else feasted on mango pastelitos. I started thinking about the bakery and that calmed me down quite a bit.
I had the car nice and warm by the time Nico came out of the building and he eased himself into the passenger seat. “I’m fine,” he said, when he saw me looking. “Focus on the road. I just had the wind knocked out of me and got some bruises.”
My anger revved back up but I managed to say pleasantly, “Your team sucks and I hope they all get bitten by brown recluse spiders and pit vipers.”
“Please don’t make me laugh.” He held his hands over his ribs. “I talked to the quarterback about that pass. He and I are going to work on things. He’s coming over to the apartment tomorrow.” Nico reached across the seat to touch my cheek. “I don’t want him ending up with any spider bites.”
“We’ll have to see,” I said grumpily.
“Teddy’s first words to me after the game were an apology,” Nico said. “He got nervous. I made him nervous.”
“That was why his only pass to you was a mile over your head, thrown just as the defense got there? You’re being very generous to him.” I glanced over suspiciously. “In fact, you’re in a very good mood for someone who just got run over.”
“I’m happy,” he told me. “I’m glad to be playing.” We drove a little down the road before he explained more. “You know what I thought when I got booked at the police station in Miami? First, how disappointed my parents were going to be, for sure. Then I thought, I’ll never play football again. And now I am, and that makes me happy, no matter how much the team sucks.”
“Have they ever run before?” I asked. “Maybe jogged? Or even a brisk walk would have been an improvement over how they moved today.”
“I think the defense was tired from yesterday due to the full-contact scrimmage, with how they had to chase me all around the field.” He hesitated. “Teddy admitted that the coach told him not to throw to me.”
“He did? That son of a—”
“Yeah, he is,” Nico agreed, and I seethed. “I saw you sitting by yourself during the game,” he said. “I’ve hardly ever seen you alone. Usually you’ve attracted a few friends or new acquaintances, or at least security guards.”
“Well, those people there, the other families, they aren’t very friendly,” I said. “Only one woman talked to me and I think she was some kind of stooge they sent to test me. But they’ll soon learn to regret it.” I explained my plan to refuse to sell pastries to them at El Asturiano del Norte (that name wasn’t right, either). “I’ll have to get one of those signs to put up next to the register, ‘We reserve the right not to serve people we don’t like.’ Maybe I’ll add, ‘We mean you, Junior Woodsmen and families.’ I’ll get one in Spanish too so that the message is perfectly clear.”
“Huh. I’m sorry they treated you that way. I didn’t like to see you alone like that, covered by all those blankets so that you looked like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.” He smiled at me. “You could ask Daisy to come to the next home game.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “I did enjoy the time alone to think and plot.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said. “You must have more friends here in Michigan, though.”
I thought. “I do, I guess. It seemed like…” I considered this more. “Everyone has changed a lot lately. Some of them were getting married, like Daisy, or some of them were moving away. One of my friends from yoga class became a nun. Not, like, a Catholic one, but you know.”
“Huh?”
“And then some of them kept being the same,” I continued. “They were still going to bars and popping pills and stuff, and I’m not so interested in that anymore.” I’d had a going-out issue a few months before that had scared me straight a little, and my friend Daisy wasn’t into parties and things very much. The more time I spent with her, the more I seemed to enjoy doing other activities that didn’t involve the bar circuit. “And now I’ve gotten so serious about my businesses, you know, you and the bakery. I don’t have much time for,” I paused, searching for the word. “Silliness,” I finished.
“Tomfoolery,” Nico supplied. “High jinks. Monkeyshines.”
“Exactly.”
“Is that why your dad got so angry with you? That’s why you haven’t talked to him since you left? The monkeyshines?”
“Years of monkeyshines,” I sighed. “And I’m not so pleased with him, either.”
“Because of him getting married?”
I hadn’t really let myself think too much about Chelsea, my future stepmother. “No, I want him to be happy. I hope he is with her.”
I could feel Nico looking across the car at me. “Then why—”
“Speaking of parents, your mom called while I was holding your phone,” I mentioned. “Have you talked to her lately? To anyone in your family?”
He didn’t answer those questions. “You still have my phone?” he asked instead, and reached into my purse. “Is it in here? Wait, what is this?”
I saw that he had unzipped the black fabric case I was carrying in my bag. “Nico, that’s
my personal property. Put it back!”
He stared at the silver tools he had uncovered. “Please don’t tell me that this is a lock-picking set.”
“You recognize it?” I plucked the case from his hand and dropped it back into my purse. “Your phone is in the outside pocket.”
“Is picking locks part of your plan for how to get your seed money for the bakery? El Asturiano Dos, or whatever you’re calling it now?”
“I needed the practice with my lock skills, that’s why I’m carrying the tools around!” I defended myself. “I have a lot of ideas for getting money for the bakery.” And that wasn’t a bad name…
“Tatum—”
“You know, I’m very impressed with you, Nico,” I said.
“Because I identified your burglary tools?” He shook his head. “I’m keeping this,” he told me, and removed the case from my purse again to put in his coat pocket.
“No, I mean because of the game,” I corrected him.
“Nice change of subject. Did you enjoy my take on a crash-test dummy? Thanks,” he said, and pulled on my ponytail.
“I didn’t like that part at all, but I like all this.” I waved my hand over his body. Yep, I definitely liked that, but it wasn’t just the muscles. “What I mean is, you acted like a real asshole in Miami. All the women, the going out, not taking care of your body. The stupid shit you put online for everyone to see and judge.”
“Are you getting to the part where you’re impressed?” He frowned at me.
“You’ve never once complained about being here,” I said. “About playing with these jackasses. About the pay cut, about the weather. About it being a giant step backwards in your career.”
“Wow,” he said, frowning harder. “When you put it that way…”
“You just kept your chin up and did it, and that shows a lot of character, according to me. And I’m very impressed.”
The Comeback Route Page 16