The Thirteenth Chance

by Amy Matayo

  Thinking back on it, I’m at a loss to explain why I haven’t been out with those women before now. Especially considering I met someone.

  David Nichols asked me to dance. He walked up to me at Joe’s Bar, where I was standing in a corner clutching a ginger ale and wishing with everything in me that I could return home. I agreed despite myself, then followed him onto the wooden dance floor, my little black dress clinging to my thighs with each step. I had been self-conscious in it all night, but something about the way he looked at me made those thoughts slowly fade. We danced together through one and two and three songs. I was prepared to depart when the fourth song was a slow one, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me to him, and I didn’t resist. He was attractive in all the right ways—dark blond hair that curled a bit at the collar, tanned skin that suggested he spent a lot of time outside, woodsy cologne that had me feeling all kinds of things that have lain dormant for far too long, and a sense of humor that kept me and the other women in stitches for nearly two hours.

  When he asked me to go somewhere with him, I turned him down. But when he asked for my number, I gave it to him. What could it hurt? It isn’t like I’m currently seeing anyone. It’s not like I’m in a relationship that requires exclusivity or even partial disclosure. If he calls, I might agree to a date. Maybe even a second one. Maybe even a third. He was that charming, that memorable, that handsome.

  I’ve spent all day hoping that his name won’t appear on my phone screen.

  Conversely, I’ve spent the same amount of time hoping to see Will’s name light it up.

  With a sigh, I turn my phone facedown on my kitchen table to eliminate the urge to constantly glance at the screen, then try to distract myself with dinner. One look into the refrigerator tells me that except for a loaf of bread, some milk, and a bundle of yellowing broccoli, there’s nothing to eat in there. I close the door and lean against it, taking in the sparse kitchen and its meager contents. I’m hungry, but I refuse to go out. To go out means that Will might see me, and if Will sees me then my charade is up. I’m not ready to let go of it yet. The second I let go is the second I have to start lying again, and based on the last two weeks alone, I’m beginning to accept that my future standing in heaven is shaky at best.

  Pushing off the refrigerator, I open a cabinet to find what’s left of an old box of Cheerios. I pull one loop out and take a bite—not too stale—and then pour the contents into a bowl until the box empties. Just as I reach for the milk, my phone begins to dance across the table. I set the carton on the counter, then lunge for the phone on the third ring. I look at it with a mixture of excitement and dread. It’s Will. The relief at it not being David surprises me a little. I answer the call. He doesn’t bother to wait for my hello.

  “You’ve been home most of the afternoon. Are you planning on coming to get this cat anytime soon, or will I have to take him to the field again tomorrow too?”

  Crap. He’s mad.

  I knock the milk off the counter. Thank goodness the lid was still on the carton.

  “Did you win or lose?” I ask, pretending not to know the answer as I pick the carton off the floor and pour milk over the loops. When I take a bite, it’s dry. Grainy. Gross. I carry the bowl to the sink and fill it with water.

  “We lost both games, thanks to you. You better be at the next one. I won’t take no for an answer.”

  I’m not stupid; this time I don’t make fun of his superstition. I’m too busy trying to deny the little thrill that runs through me at his forcefulness.

  “I will be,” I say before I think better of it. Did I just agree without a fight? To a ball game and spectators and hot dogs? There’s a long pause as I wait, as he waits, as both of us wait for the other to speak up. Finally, I hear him sigh.

  “Darn right you will be. And Olivia?”

  “What?”

  “Come get your cat before I call animal control. He’s driving me crazy, and pretty soon I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

  I hang up the phone and head for the door.

  Will

  I watch her face as she walks through the living room. Even the scent of the three rib eye steaks I have warming in the oven fades away when she blanches. There it is, the look I was waiting for . . . the look that makes the whole weekend worth the trouble.

  She stops at the edge of the room and stares. And that’s when she whirls on me.

  “What did you do to him?”

  Her face is a mask of horror and anger, and both look prettier on her than I expected. Wrap those two emotions around the feistiness I saw from her a few days ago, and Olivia keeps getting more interesting.

  “Just let him play around, that’s all.” I shrug like I don’t know what she’s talking about. I mean, sure Perry is covered in caked-on mud that starts at his ears and ends at all four paws—had to flick a little out of his eye earlier, poor thing—but come on, the woman needs to lighten up. Although something tells me that won’t happen when she sees the bald spot on his—

  “What is wrong with his fur?” Her cold eyes travel between me and the animal. I grab my coffee to ward off her chilliness and take a long sip.

  “What do you mean?” The coffee burns going down. Oh man oh man oh man. Suddenly I’m hoping for third-degree burns, the kind that might rush me to a hospital and away from here.

  Olivia kneels down in front of the animal and runs a hand across his left side. “Where is his hair?” It’s a question, but it’s delivered more like a threat. Find his hair and return it to his back or I’m going to blow up this apartment with you inside. Find his hair and return it to his back or I’m going to join that chick and her lawsuit and tell the whole world about your mistreatment of animals.

  I rub the back of my neck and shift positions. “It’s on his body.”

  “Half of it is. The other half seems to be missing.”

  “Hasn’t he always been like that?” Dear God, I sound like a kid trying to dig his way out of a broken vase and ruined flowers. I have a feeling the only thing I’m digging is my own grave.

  Olivia whips around to glare at me. “No, it hasn’t always been like that! What did you do, Will? And don’t tell me it just happened!”

  I try. I try to come up with something, anything other than the truth of my own immaturity. But there’s nothing. So I tell her the story, leaving out the part where I did it on purpose, because so what if I’m immature? I play ball for a living, not the stock market. It takes only a minute and when I’m finished she just stares at me. Is there anything worse than a woman’s silent stare, especially when you know she’s using it to figure out the best way to physically harm you?

  “So you had to cut that thing off his back. Because it got stuck. After he rolled around outside in the mud. Even though he’s never done that in his life.”

  She doesn’t believe me. Time to deflect. Time to pass the blame. “We were on the field, actually. And it’s not my fault that he wandered into a mud puddle. It’s not my fault he had to come to the game today.”

  I leave out the part about all this happening yesterday. I leave out the part about how I practically tossed the furball into the mud and rolled him around in it myself, then dumped a little extra on his head just to make sure he was really good and dirty. When did I turn into such a child? And why is getting under Olivia’s skin so much fun?

  I force myself to stop overanalyzing my adolescent behavior and study her. She looks tired, like the weekend has taken its toll on her. Once again I find myself wondering about the boyfriend, about what I saw and heard last night when she came in from what looked like a very real date.

  “How was Chicago? What play did you see?”

  She hesitates, that fierceness wobbling for only a moment before she forces it back into place with a shake of her head.

  “Don’t change the subject. Do you have shampoo? You’re going to help me give him a bath.”

  I blink at the way she ignores my question because it’s an important one, one I’v
e thought about all day. “I have shampoo in the shower, but I thought cats hated baths.”

  “They do, and now you get to see firsthand just how true that is. Congratulations.” She scoops up Perry and holds him like a football in front of her—not bad form, but now probably isn’t the best time to hit her with that compliment—and walks toward the kitchen sink. Dumping him inside, she keeps one hand on his back and turns to look at me. “Get the shampoo, please.”

  I’m so busy staring at her backside that it takes a few seconds to register that she issued an order. I have the shampoo in my hands before I remember that I don’t take orders from anyone but my coach, but something tells me Olivia won’t want to be compared to him.

  “What will he do when the water hits his fur?” I stand back and eye the situation. What happens if his claws come out and he scratches my pitching hand? Too big an injury and it won’t matter that Olivia is at the game. It won’t make a difference if she’s sitting in my freaking lap reciting the Rosary if my hand is too marred and bloody to play.

  “I’m more concerned about what he’ll do when it hits his bare skin, but I guess you should have thought of that before you decided to let him get so dirty.” She turns on the spray nozzle and aims it at his back. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. You’d think twelve cats were being slaughtered, dismembered, and baked in my oven the way Perry screeches and protests. It’s a cat massacre gone horribly wrong—much worse than the leash—but it gets even more awful when Olivia looks at me and slams my ego with a few well-placed words.

  “Stop being such a coward and get over here!”

  I approach her cautiously. “I have no idea what you want me to do,” I say. “I’m not a big fan of cats, especially not this one.” It’s the wrong thing to say, and she shoots me a look. And then she shoots me with the spray nozzle, and now my shirt is wet. Holy crap, she’s hostile. I swear I see smoke coming out both ears and maybe even her mouth.

  Her mouth. If I leaned a little closer, I could take her lower lip between my teeth.

  I squash that thought before I can make a move. I might be a coward, but I’m not stupid.

  Reaching for the shampoo, I dump a mound of it on Perry’s back, making circles with my left hand while keeping my right hand out of the way.

  “Am I doing it right?” It’s a sincere question, but Olivia rolls her eyes.

  “You’re barely doing anything.” She swats my hand away and begins scrubbing the animal back and forth with a vigor that makes me wince. “And next time, before you take my cat to your work and dump mud all over his back, maybe you’ll remember this moment. Because next time I’ll make you bathe him by yourself.”

  And with those words, all I can think is . . .

  I like forceful Olivia.

  I like passionate Olivia.

  But I don’t like what I’m beginning to suspect. Olivia knows I did this on purpose. Olivia is slowly learning me. Pretty soon Olivia is going to have me dissected and figured out. If this keeps up, she might know things about me I don’t even know myself.

  Twenty minutes later Perry is wrapped in a towel and blissfully silent, and the fallout of the bath debacle is minimal. I have one scratch across my forearm and a couple of teeth marks on my left shoulder, but nothing that should affect my game. My ego, however, all but shattered the moment Olivia saw me squeal and jump back to avoid Perry’s wrath. Even though Olivia bore the brunt of it and is now covered in scratches on her neck, shoulder, and forearm, she hasn’t stopped laughing since, and I haven’t stopped resenting the sound.

  “For the love of God, knock it off.” I reach for a bag of coffee and begin scooping some into the filter. I have no idea if she drinks the stuff this late at night, but I add a couple extra scoops just in case and glance at her. “You need a Band-Aid. You need a dozen, actually.”

  She shrugs. “I’m fine, and I can’t help it. Turns out the big, strong baseball player is a teenage girl in disguise. I haven’t heard a sound like that since a seventh-grade slumber party, and even that wasn’t as dramatic as the sound you made.”

  She laughs louder at the same time my mind conjures up images of a young Olivia engaged in a pillow fight while wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Feathers and bouncing cleavage may also be involved. Unable to help myself, I glance back at her in time to catch sight of her rubbing Perry’s back with the towel, leaning down to plant a kiss on his nose. A slight wetness is suspended in both corners of her eyes. I’m not sure if it’s from the bath or from crying, but I find myself wanting to kiss them off to see if I taste salt. I turn away and continue the task in front of me, though my mind stays back there on Olivia.

  Something about that sight stays with me. Olivia, loving. Olivia, caring. Olivia, mothering that cat with a gentleness I haven’t seen from her before. It unnerves me and has me thinking all sorts of uncomfortable things.

  I’m shuffling around the kitchen, filling the pot with water, returning the coffee canister to its spot in the cabinet, when I realize Olivia has gone silent.

  Just as I turn to find out the reason, she hits me with a question.

  “Will, what are these?”

  She’s holding a stack of photos in her hand. Photos I meant to hide before she came over. When she looks up at me, there’s a question in her eyes. A dozen questions, even. Ones I’m not prepared to answer.

  Olivia just discovered a side of Will Vandergriff I work hard to keep hidden from the rest of the world. I’m not happy about it.

  Chapter 23

  Olivia

  Something inside me cracks at the sight of the photos lying on the kitchen table, and I know things won’t be the same. I can’t believe what I’m seeing, because it doesn’t make sense. What I’m looking at goes against everything I thought I knew about Will. Absolutely everything.

  “When did you take these?” I flip through them slowly, a deck of cards tucked one behind another. I count twelve Polaroids and then stop, figuring there are probably twenty in all, maybe more. All of them of Perry—most of him alone, a few of him and Will together, taken selfie-style in this apartment, at the ball field, in the grass just beyond the parking lot. For all his protests, I just discovered Will’s very soft side for four-legged creatures. Namely mine.

  He shrugs as though my rapidly beating heart isn’t resting in his hands. He shrugs as if I didn’t just discover that we have something very personal in common . . . as if it doesn’t make me like him even more.

  “This weekend while we were out. He was a cool companion. It’s no big deal.”

  No big deal. It’s no big deal that he just displayed more interest in Perry than anyone else ever has—more than my mom, my dad, my brother, anyone. I know he’s just a cat, but he’s been my one constant companion in a world that often finds me without one, due to choice or circumstance or old-fashioned yet all-too-common loss. “There might be more pictures over on the dining room table if you want to check,” he says.

  I feel my eyes widen. More? Unable to help myself, I wander over and pick up another five or six photos left sprawled out on the mahogany, all similar to the others. Except in one, Perry is wearing a Rangers cap and sitting on what appears to be the pitching mound. It’s adorable and I’m taking it home with me. I set the photos down—save for that one—and give myself a moment to think. Will has hit some kind of emotional nerve inside me that sits way below the ones concerned about appearances and what other people believe. This one is raw and deep—in a place where feelings reside and pulses trip and hearts wait to break. But the feeling isn’t unpleasant or uncomfortable. It doesn’t leave me wanting to flee like I once thought it might. The opposite happens, and suddenly I want to stay in this apartment awhile longer instead of scooping Perry up and heading for the Sonic drive-through like I had originally planned.

  I pretend to be thinking about something, then push my eyebrows together and look at him.

  “Do I smell steak?”

  Will rubs his hands together and glances toward his oven as
though just now remembering he stored steaks there. His eyes light up, and my stomach growls. It’s been hours since I’ve eaten, but that isn’t the point. The point is that Will heard the sound and glances at my midsection. Normally this would embarrass me; this time I’m pretty sure my stomach’s timing couldn’t have been better.

  “Steak, potatoes, bacon-wrapped green beans, and rolls. I made them earlier,” he says. “Want to stay for dinner?”

  “You made all that just for you?”

  He grins. “Well, I mean, a guy’s got to eat.”

  “He says to the girl who normally grabs takeout.”

  “That’s crap food. So do you want to stay?”

  I make him wait a moment, then make myself pause a moment longer. In a halfhearted tug-of-war, l tell myself to say no, that I love Sonic chicken strips with honey-mustard sauce and that they sound much better than red meat prepared by a guy who has probably cooked three meals in his life, because what professional athlete has time to hone that particular skill? I tell myself to bite down on those words and force them out, to grab Perry and head for the door.

  Of course I don’t listen to me. I never do.

  “Sure, since it sounds like you made enough for the whole building,” I say instead. “Is there anything I can do to help you get it ready?”

  The next thing I know I’m reaching for plates and setting them side by side on the kitchen table. Weighing the wisdom of that decision, I change my mind and move the plates across from each other—less intimate, less . . . close. It isn’t until we’re halfway through dinner that I wish I’d left them where they were.

  Because now I’m too far away.

  In the middle of dinner Will decided he wanted pie, so now we’re making one. Apple with a cream cheese middle and caramel oatmeal streusel something on top. I’m checking the recipe while I search for ingredients. Locating the oatmeal, I measure a half cup and pour it into a mixing bowl with melted butter while watching Will out of the corner of my eye. He’s like Julia Child in male form, complete with the bottle of red wine sitting to his right. He pours a little into a glass, takes a sip, then reaches into his own mixing bowl and begins to knead stuff together. The girl inside of me can’t believe he actually knows how to make a pie crust—with shortening and flour and salt—and that he’s doing everything I remember seeing my grandmother do. It’s surprising and more than a little charming to watch. And I could watch, for hours even.