The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  “Well, it was feeling fine until you landed on me.” He patted my own hip and left his hand there. “Everything is fine. Where have you been?”

  “No, I need details,” I insisted, and he filled me in on the practice. Apparently, due to some unspoken macho agreement after Nico had taken the hit during the game and gotten back up, the players were now warming to him. Even the offensive coordinator appeared to be more accepting, although the head coach remained aloof. “An asshole,” I filled in. “He’s still an asshole.”

  “Exactly. The trainer looked at my hip, and says to keep icing it and it will be fine by Saturday.” That explained the cold bump pressed against my inner thigh. “Now tell me what you’ve been doing and where you took all the cookies you baked last night.”

  “I left plenty for you! I went to talk to someone about my bakery idea to get an outside opinion. He likes it,” I said simply. “But I have more work to do. Tomorrow I’m going over to Emelia Schaub College to talk to some more people there, and to see Daisy at her office. But I’m excited because Archie got cautiously excited, too.”

  “Archie?” Nico asked.

  “He’s one of my father’s friends.” I traced the U and T on Nico’s shirt. “Archie asked me if I had talked to my dad since I’ve been back.” I made a face. “Maybe I should call him.”

  “Why don’t you want to?”

  “I tried to explain it to Lucy. When someone disappoints you, it’s hard to make that back up. Like how you’re afraid to talk to your parents,” I offered.

  He shifted under me. “I’m not afraid. But I’m not going to discuss my parents with you.”

  “What about your brothers and sisters? They follow your social media, you know. They say nice things about your new pictures.”

  “Do they?” Nico suddenly seemed interested. “What do they say?”

  “Just that you look happier than you did before. They say that they love you, and they also get into fights with the people who comment rude and mean stuff. Especially your sister, Junia. She’s a tiger.”

  “She’s my youngest sister. I don’t want her getting into it with strangers.” He frowned. “I’ll call her and talk to her about that.”

  “She and your brother Jude are the ones still in college, right?”

  Nico nodded. “You know a lot about me, Tates. I don’t know so much about you.”

  “I’m an open book, except for the things I don’t want to talk about. Ask away,” I told him.

  “Ok.” He looked up at me with his gorgeous blue eyes. “You use a lot of aliases. You’re always giving people some name, some story. Why do you do that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s interesting. It’s more exciting to be Philomena Ashcroft, international benefactor to the baking arts, than to be just Tatum Smith, who worked in a bakery for a few weeks and now wants one of her own.”

  “Please don’t tell me that Philomena Ashcroft is the name you gave the guy you met with today.”

  “No, I’ve known him since I was a little girl. It was too late to be Philomena, but I’ll save her for another time.”

  “I think you’re plenty interesting,” Nico told me. He gripped me with this other hand, too. “What about you isn’t absolutely fascinating?”

  “You’re just teasing me,” I said, with a little crumpling feeling inside.

  “I’m not at all. Think of what you’ve done in the last few weeks. You rode the bus away from practically everyone you know and started to make a new life for yourself in another place. You kicked my ass around Miami, too. And now you’re starting again as a multi-state businesswoman. I meant to tell you, I recommended you to Teddy as a life coach. He’s a mess.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure,” Nico agreed. “Look what you’ve done for me.”

  “You didn’t listen to me. After I moved to Miami, you got arrested,” I reminded him.

  “That wasn’t your fault. Anyway, I did listen to you, but I didn’t act on it as quickly as I should have. You showing up at my apartment made me think pretty hard, Tates. Even if at first you pissed me off royally and I almost threw you out, and even if I thought you were insane for quite a while.”

  “You’re welcome,” I told him.

  “Did I say thank you?”

  “In your own way. You make me very proud, as your life coach. I’m going to highlight your story on my website, when I start that up. I’ll talk with a web designer at the college tomorrow.”

  He laughed. “As a budding business magnate, you can’t have that pay by the minute phone anymore.” He rolled under me a little, which was quite a pleasant sensation, in order to reach into a bag next to the couch for a white box. “I picked up a new one for you, when I got mine.”

  “Really?” I gleefully removed the top to take out the shiny new phone. “Oh, this is so nice! Thank you!”

  “It’s all ready to go for you to use it,” he said, and showed me how to start it up.

  “I thought you were saving money,” I reminded him. “What if I go to Tanzania and start making a lot of international roaming calls?”

  “Are you really going to Africa?” Nico asked.

  “No. I like it here right now.” I wiggled a little, because I was so happy, and also because he felt so good underneath me. “But I don’t want you to spend a bunch.”

  “I can afford a phone for you. I…” He had to stop talking, because I kissed him. Just a peck, but on the lips for sure.

  “Thank you,” I repeated.

  “Come here,” he told me, his fingers tightening on my hips and butt, making another pleasant sensation tingle through me. I bent to kiss him, this time with a lot of tongue, but he let go with one hand to take my head and cuddle my face up into the nook under his chin. Sigh. “The next game is away in Toledo,” Nico said. “We leave on Thursday. On a bus.”

  “Really? I can give you some tips for that.” I nuzzled deeper into his neck.

  “I’m sure you can.” He rubbed my back. “Different from the private plane we used to fly as Woodsmen. You know, I didn’t appreciate any of it. I did, when I first came into the league—I could hardly believe all the excess. I didn’t grow up with a lot.”

  “Six siblings,” I noted.

  “Six siblings, my dad with a ministry trying to support us all and my mom staying home with the kids. There wasn’t a lot of money for extras. I used to sweep the studio…”

  “What?” I picked up my head. “What studio?”

  “The dance studio. Where I used to do ballet, I used to help clean up there. They gave us a break on the tuition and I tried to do my part.”

  “How did you get started with that? With ballet?” I asked.

  Nico played with my hair. “I saw people dancing on TV once when I was pretty little, and I told my mom that I wanted to do that. She took me seriously and brought me down to the only ballet studio in town. They were very generous with us, so I would stay dancing there. It was just because there weren’t a lot of boy ballet dancers to round out the casts, not because of some huge talent I had,” he quickly explained.

  “I bet you were good.” I snuggled into him again and his arms went around me. “I bet you were really good, because you’re so graceful on the field.”

  “The word you’re looking for is agile. Or quick, strong, tough,” Nico suggested.

  “Sure, but also graceful. The way you can jump for balls…didn’t you have the highest vertical jump of any rookie the year you came into the Confederation?”

  “Highest of any rookie in ten years,” he corrected me, then tickled my ribs. “How do you know all this stupid crap about me? Ok, I guess I also owe a thank you to ballet. But I did have to quit, despite the sweeping. I was too old for their classes and I needed more training, so I was going to have to move to a bigger studio in the next town. I couldn’t get there and back with school and taking care of my brothers and sisters. What are you doing to my ear?”

  Petting it. “Nothing. Did you want to continue?”


  “In a way. But I was getting a lot of crap for being a ballerina and wearing tights. And even though I was no stranger to riding the bus either, it was all just too much. Too much distance, money, commentary. Football at the high school was close and free, so there was more time and there were more resources for other things. Like my sister Lydia taking a class in welding.”

  “Really? Welding?”

  “Really. She’s an industrial engineer now. Smart girl,” he said, his voice warm and proud.

  And he had paid for her to go to school. “I’m glad you found something you liked as much as ballet,” I said. “I’m glad you started playing football, because if you had stuck with the tights stuff, I wouldn’t have met you. But I wouldn’t have minded seeing you in them. The tights, I mean. Did you have to wear a short shirt? Or maybe, no shirt?”

  I shook around as he laughed underneath me.

  ∞

  I kicked the door with my foot, and then, when no one responded, I balanced the tray of coffee and tea from the Campus Canteen on my head so that I could knock.

  “Tatum!” Daisy said when she opened the door to their attic workroom at Emelia Schaub College. “Is it safe to put hot liquids so high up there?”

  “It’s not so high,” I reminded her. “I’m not very tall.” I got a familiar feeling in my nose. “Quick, take it! I’m going to sneeze.” After the second one, I blew my nose. Stupid cold. I blamed Teddy Hayes and his bad aim for it, even if Nico told me that rain and mud didn’t give you viruses. Teddy couldn’t have helped.

  “Tatum!” her boss called. I loved the professor and happily hugged him and kissed both his cheeks. “I’m glad that you’re back home,” he told me. “Daisy and I were quite worried, especially when you called and mentioned going to the Everglades to capture specimens.” Professor Amico’s forehead wrinkled in worry. “Specimens of what?” he asked me.

  “I ended up running out of time to do that, and anyway, I’m home now and everything’s fine,” I soothed him. I plucked a cup out the drinks tray and handed it to him. “I brought you a half-caff with no sugar,” I said, and he grimaced but took it. We were all trying to help him clean up his diet and increase his exercise, after a near-heart attack the previous summer. “You get chamomile tea with honey because I was reading all about its calming properties,” I said to Daisy, “and I get the extra-large caramel mocha with double whip.” I slurped up a sip. “Yum.”

  Neither of them looked as happy about their drinks after seeing mine, but they both said thank you. “Tell me what you’re doing here at the college today, Tates,” Daisy requested. She pushed some hair out of her face and wiped a streak of grey across her cheek. They were going through crates and boxes of old, ancient art stuff, looking for a valuable painting that someone had donated to the college. It was seriously dirty work.

  “I came to talk to a woman I know in the Computer Sciences department about developing my website for my life coach business. I’m calling it, ‘Tatum Takes Charge.’ Then I took my plan for El Asturiano del Norte…no, that’s still not right.” I paused for a second. I had to decide on the name. “Anyway, I took my plan over to the undergrad business school and suggested they use it as a case study in one of their classes and get back to me on what they come up with as problems or positives. Then I went down to the Academic Dean’s office to see if I could get reinstated to finish up my communications degree. I struck out there, but I can reapply to the school, and I guess I will. So I went to Financial Aid to ask about a scholarship if I get in, and they pulled up my transcript, and that doesn’t look good.”

  Daisy was nodding. She had been on me a lot to study or even maybe to attend class, but I hadn’t been in that headspace. “I’ll have to wait until my businesses really take off and I can pay for everything myself,” I said. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, although now that I say that, I’m thinking that I could drive to this farm I used to volunteer at in California and pick some of their Meyer lemons to sell here in Michigan. I bet I could make a mint on those little yellow beauties. If I drove straight through, there and back, maybe—”

  Professor Amico turned, interested in the lemons and me going to California, and knocked over his full cup of half-caff, unsweetened coffee. It spilled down his shirt and pants and splashed onto and into one of the opened crates. It seemed like the cup had held about a gallon of liquid.

  “Porca miseria!” he exclaimed, and Daisy immediately went into action with the stash of towels she kept handy for exactly this purpose. He lost a lot drinks this way.

  “It’s ok, I’ve got it,” she told him. “Domenico, why don’t you go change into your extra shirt and get yourself another coffee at the Canteen?”

  “He seems a lot more relaxed,” I commented, after he went one floor down to his office to change and we soaked up the spill. “I’m kind of sorry that I got him an extra-large now.”

  “Yes, I always order small coffees to limit the damage,” Daisy agreed. “And he is a lot better. We’re both ok with the fact that it’s going to take us a long time to go through the art collection, and we’re enjoying the process of the search. We’re trying to do that,” she amended. “It’s hard, though, believing that we have a piece like a Pisanello portrait somewhere in these hundreds of crates, and not being able to find it.”

  She started to talk again about the painting they were looking for in all the boxes, and the artist, an Italian guy from the Renaissance. A very wealthy person had bequeathed his art collection to Emelia Schaub College a hundred years or something ago, and it turned out that he had probably thrown some stolen pieces in there.

  One of those stolen pieces was the extremely valuable and rare painting by the artist Pisanello that Daisy and the professor were constantly hunting down. For months, they had been searching for it, talking about it, getting filthy as they dug through the old crates the art was packed in to find it.

  Now, as she worked on the puddle on the desk, Daisy told me about the church in Italy where this painting had been stolen in the 1900s. I took a new towel and started to wipe the wooden box that had taken the brunt of the coffee spill. Daisy and the professor were obsessed by finding the portrait, and to spare the rest of the world from having to hear about it more, I hoped they unwrapped it soon. “Oh, he got some in the typewriter!” she suddenly lamented, and picked up their old machine. Coffee poured from it. “I never understand how that small amount of liquid travels as far as he gets it to go.”

  “It’s in here, too,” I commented. I lifted a wrapped object out of the big wooden box and dabbed at it with my towel. “I wonder what this is.”

  “Tatum, be careful with that stuff, ok? That crate says ‘luggage’ on the side but you never know…oh, no, it soaked through the catalog of the pieces we unwrapped last week.”

  I took off the coffee-soaked paper covering the object I had lifted out, which did look like a little piece of luggage, some kind of small case. It felt like it was made of leather and the coffee had stained it. But it was pretty old and ratty already, and I thought that maybe Daisy wouldn’t notice. “This is the same lock as the one I just opened,” I commented. “Isn’t that funny? Yesterday I cracked an old suitcase but it just had motel towels inside.” I looked on Domenico’s crowded desk for a paperclip and shook the coffee droplets off it.

  “I’m going to have to retype all of this,” Daisy answered, looking at the sopping pile of papers in her hands. “If I can get the typewriter working, that is.”

  “Here, I got it. These old locks are so crappy! I need more of a challenge.” The leather lid creaked as I opened it and suddenly detached in my hand, and oops, the case was now in two pieces instead of one. I looked up at Daisy but she hadn’t noticed. “That’s wonderful, the coffee didn’t get through the leather,” I said, giving the good news first. “Wow, this is one unattractive gentleman.”

  “Huh?” She was doing something to a long black piece of tape, pulling it out of the inside of the typewriter. “Oh, no. This is totally shot.
”

  “What a weird hat. But the frame is very nice. Hey, this looks really old to me, Daisy.”

  She picked her head up out of the typewriter. “Tatum, what are you talking about?”

  “The leather protected this thing inside from the coffee, so don’t worry. And I bet if we take the case to a bag repair place, they can get the lid reattached. Like they were able to patch my purse when by mistake I stabbed through the leather with my stiletto, meaning my knife and not a high heel.”

  She hurried over. “Tatum. Oh, my God!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to break off the lid, and that’s not true about getting it repaired. I think it’s broken for good.”

  The door to the attic workroom opened and the professor bustled back inside, his clip-on tie fastened to a new, clean shirt. “This time I got fully caffeinated. But no sugar, Daisy, so I’m halfway there.”

  I didn’t think she heard him, because she was staring at what I held in my hands. “Tatum! That was inside the bag?” Very carefully, she took it from me and lifted it up.