A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  Except that now, again, she was.

  When Alyssa got home, Caryn was in the great room, triangulated in downward dog. Alyssa flopped on the couch and watched her mother realign herself under the skylights, which hung, black and rectangular, like the eyes of a carnival mask.

  “Long day!” Caryn exclaimed, once she was fully upright. “I was beginning to worry.”

  Her yoga mix swelled with woodwindish voices, making the room seem full of people rooting for Alyssa to win.

  “The CEO came,” she blurted. “He wants to see my resume.”

  “The CEO?” Caryn was instantly ecstatic. She pulled Alyssa to her feet and hugged her in the middle of the sticky purple mat. Her beautiful mother, smelling of eucalyptus and talc. She hadn’t always given the best advice, but there was no one in the world who cared about her more, no one in the world more elegant.

  Before Alyssa went to bed that night, she emailed her resume to Teddy Bailey.

  Dear Mr. Bailey, she wrote,

  It was my great honor to meet and learn from you today at Democracy Mall. It was definitely the highlight of my year. You asked for my resume so I’m attaching it to this email. I look forward to speaking with you about my professional career and your theories of fashion success.

  Sincerely,

  Alyssa Wilkins

  P.S. I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I left college just like you because I didn’t think the classroom could nurture my talents. Fashion is not about lectures and assigned reading. It’s about knowing what makes people look good and what makes them feel good about how they look. You have to touch fabric every day to know those kinds of things. I know I have so much to offer if you’ll only give me the chance.

  For a moment after she hit send, she regretted the line about touching fabric. It was possible he didn’t think about things metaphorically as she did, or that he’d misconstrue it as a comeon. But he didn’t strike her as that kind of creep, and it really was how she felt.

  She checked her email first thing the next morning. There was an alert from the college registrar and a sale announcement from a rival retailer, plus a joke forward from a high school friend with the subject “21 Clues You’re Tanked.” Nothing yet from Teddy Bailey. She went to work and unpacked a shipment of three dozen v-neck sweaters. For lunch she got a cup of vegetarian minestrone, which she ate on a fern-flanked bench by herself.

  There were no emails from Teddy that night, or the next day, or anytime that week. The next week, she helped her mom organize a mostly vegan Thanksgiving. Caryn wouldn’t shut up about Teddy Bailey. “The CEO,” she kept telling Ellen, as though he were a new brand of organic yogurt she wanted everyone to buy. Alyssa wore her blue Bonnie cardigan over the new Donegal mini-dress, and tried not to feel humiliated. All night long, she couldn’t even look at Steve, who made his usual dinner speech about gratitude. She felt genuinely grateful she hadn’t had a chance to tell her dad.

  The days dragged on through Christmas, and into the New Year, 2013. Alyssa bought a hooded parka with her discount and every morning watched her breath disappear while she waited for the car to warm up. She went to work. She folded. She sold alpaca sweaters and gabardine trousers and calf-skin boots with buckles. She even sold a few mohair sweaters, now that they were on sale.

  With time she recognized that nothing had happened—despite Obama, despite the promise in Teddy’s handshake that he would take care of her, despite the energy he had directed her way. Even her mom had forgotten, back to sending her transfer applications to various colleges closer to home. She felt like a team snuffed out in the playoffs after a miraculous end-of-season run. Her dad had had seasons like that, in a way it had been the story of his life; it was certainly the story of his final season, in which he’d also suffered a herniated disc. Yet each time, after the initial disappointment, he’d told her it wasn’t so bad. “I’m still going to work for the team,” he’d said when he retired. “I’m still a lucky man.” He didn’t end up working for the team, and that, too, seemed to be a disappointment, but in the end, he said it was for the best, because real estate was a much better bet.

  Designers from headquarters eventually paid a visit, and one morning when Alyssa came in all the displays had been rearranged. The jewelry case where Teddy had examined the brooch was gone, but in its place was a rack of petal-colored blouses that heralded the new season. In the center, a nylon tree plumed like an umbrella over a gathering of crop of waterproof galoshes. Alyssa stood beneath it in the quiet minutes before opening and felt almost exalted to see the branches disappear in the blazing lights above.

  The cash wrap, of course, still stood, and during the slower periods of the day, she still liked to stand beside it, flipping the pages of the latest catalog, traveling with the models from a covered bridge in Vermont to a lavender field in Provence, from a Moroccan bazaar to a zesty peel of Pacific beach. These were real places she might go one day in any of her own real clothes. In the meantime, the pictures gave her comfort. They were landscapes like the finest milled cotton. She’d wear them onward into spring.

  11. MITCH, 2019

  In the end, Mitch came back to Monacan, where he could finally be himself. He had the right wife in Julie Matthews, and he had the house he’d always wanted, with Blue Ridge Mountain views. But Monacan turned out to be different without his mom living there, and it was even more different without Tim.

  Less than a year before, Tim had been alive. More than alive, he’d been coaching, and having weekly dinners with Mitch. Then he’d shown up at Thanksgiving with a cough, and then he was dead by May. Lung cancer. It seemed unfair after the scare he’d given them the year Mitch retired: the sudden weight loss, the odd stomach pains that turned out to be nothing, just a manifestation of stress. But that, Mitch knew now, was not an escape. It was a warning. No one stays in your life forever.

  He’d had to break the news to his father by phone. Joe took it with his usual mysticism, responding first with somber condolences, then with a YouTube of people hugging and crying while a British voice proclaimed death an honorable thing, because it made room in life for others. He took Joe’s point but he was pretty sure Tim wouldn’t have. Tim had fought the end until the end, lobbying the doctors for another round of chemo, literally gasping for his last hour of breath. Tim was only sixty-seven. He had wanted to live.

  Mitch had offered to fly Joe and Tammy out for the funeral. Or even just Joe if Tammy felt she had to look after the dogs. But Joe declined, said he couldn’t leave Tammy alone with so many—they were fostering half a dozen that month, most of them crippled or old. Mitch knew his dad well enough to know he was bullshitting, but not well enough to call him on it. You could only get so far with occasional phone calls. To really know a person, you had to coexist. You had to spend at least a little time occupying the same space.

  Anyway, he had his hands full as it was, being a rock for Tim’s family, not to mention his mom, who took the loss especially hard. She’d had a romance with Tim long ago but he’d expected her to be over it by now, not calling him from Maryland every night to tell him she couldn’t stop crying.

  “Focus on helping Alyssa,” he told her. “Focus on Journey.” Cindy went where the babies were, and the newest baby was Alyssa’s three-year-old in Bethesda, so for the first time in his entire life his mother was not just a shout away. Journey. Of course Alyssa had to pick something weird, as though a baby were a mantra and not a person.

  “I’m trying,” she said. “But every time I look at him, I just see you, and then I see Joe, and then I’m right back to thinking about Tim.”

  He could hear her gulping for air. “Jesus,” Mitch said. He wasn’t used to being the one to comfort her; it generally worked the other way around. But after all his years on the receiving end of her efforts, he guessed it couldn’t hurt to try. “Do Journey a favor and just try to see him as him.”

  She sniffled, clearly piqued. “Well, aren’t you the wise man all of a sudden? Parenting ex
pert.”

  “Basically.” He liked when she got feisty and called him on his crap. This was intimacy, even on the phone, earned in all those years they’d spent as a two-person unit, coexisting, sharing space. It was also a sign she was coming out of her funk.

  “That’s not funny,” she said, but she was laughing. “Parenting is not a joke.”

  In his defense his life had never been easy. Not when he played, not even now. A part of him had always known he’d struggle after football, and not just because he’d miss being at the center of the action. Maybe his back would hurt. Or his foot. And they did hurt, both of them. But not as bad as his eyes, which fizzed all day and then refused to sleep at night. That was one consequence of playing that hadn’t even crossed his mind.

  His specialist called the daytime condition photophobia, which did not, he assured Mitch, actually mean that he was afraid, only that he was extremely sensitive to light. Mitch had gone all the way to Baltimore to see Dr. Heller, and though afraid was not a word he would ever use to describe himself, he was relieved it wasn’t a brain tumor. He’d been squinting involuntarily for years, wearing sunglasses even indoors, but only in Monacan had the headaches become insane. In desperation, he’d signed away his brain to research. He thought what any rational person would think after three wives, four kids, and twentysome years of head-on collisions. He thought he was going to die.

  But he wasn’t. At least, not yet. Instead, he got remade. Heller fitted him with photochromic electrical stimulation goggles that gently shocked his supraorbital nerve. They were ingenious things. Combined with illicit weed, they really kept his headaches in check. And Heller’s team had even better therapies in the pipeline, most excitingly a bionic stimulator, which they would actually implant inside his head. Mitch sort of liked his X-Man look—Ricky Franklin called him Cyclops and joked about avoiding his optic blasts—and he sort of liked the way certain shapes popped forward, making a 3-D movie out of life. But in the goggles, his world was always a little pink, and the straps a little too tight on his head. He looked forward to a full-color world. He looked forward to going bionic.

  In the meantime, he did his best to keep busy. After the NFL, he’d finished his bachelor’s online, then went back and got his MBA, and now he owned a couple of car dealerships that actually turned a profit. He spent his days walking the lots checking the stickers, then in parts checking random bins. He made sure he studied the daily operating control, and heard from his managers, and reviewed their processes, and took Ricky, whom he’d hired out of lifelong loyalty, to lunch. He took discreet hits from the vape when he needed it, and he took customers for test-drives himself. Since he was up all night anyway, he made himself useful then, too, bidding at auction while the competition slept. In his constant hustle, he was a little out of place in Monacan, where most people just sat in their plastic chairs, drinking sweet stuff from plastic cups, but it had to be that way to keep his mind off the pain. And it wasn’t bad for business either.

  Sundays he tried to take it easy. Go to church just to be there, play a round of golf just to walk the course. Then he’d come home to Julie, his little boss, and the house they’d custom-built for his oddities—the doorways wide, the windows affixed with heavy motorized shades, the television powered by organic light-emitting diodes specially designed to be gentle on his eyes. It was a steady place that was also a steady action, property guaranteed to appreciate, assuming he didn’t let it rot.

  Since Tim’s passing he didn’t have much stomach for football, but he had to make some exceptions. Tyler’s freshman homecoming game, for one. At the end of September, he and Julie flew to Syracuse, then drove an hour to watch Tyler make a few decent D-III plays. It was good to see his son, the wide receiver, and over dinner at a Chinese restaurant, he made sure to praise his speed. He couldn’t tell how much Tyler cared what he thought; the kid talked more about the party the team was hosting later that night, which featured an ice luge emblazoned with their founding father mascot. “Trust me,” Julie had said. “He cares.” Either way, Mitch came home the next day beat from the cramped, back-to-back connecting flights, and collapsed in his poolside recliner.

  The hour was good, approaching dusk, when long shadows covered his lawn, and the sun was at an angle he could tolerate, even without his goggles. He took a hit from the vape, looking forward to the massage Julie would give him later. He felt a little bad about that sometimes. As punishment for falling in love with him, she’d had to give up her glamorous New Jersey client base, Eagles owner Greg Goldman included. She now worked lazy Virginia hours for even lazier Virginia rates, and on top of that took care of him for free. But she seemed to like it; she never complained. She’d use her best creams, her sharp elbow, and her tiny, deep-sensing hands that seemed to triple in size on his back. Then they’d lie in bed together smelling lavender until she fell asleep. Sometimes he’d watch her for a few minutes in her daily death, her body breathing, her naturally red lips puffed, her piercing blue eyes safely hidden beneath their lids. It could have bothered him how flagrantly she nodded off, but he had no resentment. He admired her for making it this long without letting life rough her up.

  The secret was not having kids. Had to be. That was football for women. He’d seen the wear on his mom when he was a kid, and on Caryn and Lori, too. But Julie was thirty-five now. Wouldn’t she want one soon? She swore she didn’t, said she loved her freedom, said she wouldn’t be able to take her time in the mornings or keep up her Taekwondo if she were always running around after kids, said her older siblings had the next generation covered, two nieces and three nephews being more than enough for her—but he didn’t believe her. Every woman he’d ever known had wanted a baby, and he didn’t know what he’d say when she inevitably changed her mind. He had kids already, four of them. He was almost fifty years old.

  He put the vape down and heard an air horn, jolting him upright in the recliner. It sounded repeatedly, a sound of panic, and it seemed to be coming from inside his hip. He patted himself down, shifting and groping until his hand finally fell upon his phone.

  Obviously his phone. He pressed the button and resumed reclining. Someone—meaning Tyler—must’ve switched the ringtone when he wasn’t looking. As pranks went, kind of lame. D would’ve done something better.

  That was his thought. It really was.

  Which seemed so improbable a moment later when he actually looked at Hardy’s text.

  He lay there thinking maybe he’d gotten the order wrong. Even without weed it was sometimes hard to see things as happening in an order.

  But, for sure, there it was, the text from Hardy. Hey Man, it said. Did u hear?

  And then in the next bubble, About D.

  They drove to Philadelphia for the funeral, past all the familiar horrors. Entering the city from the south was like entering Mordor, the oil refinery belching smoke beyond the bridge, the bridge itself quaking and full of holes. He wished they were driving to Toms River, where the little murderer lived. A seventeen-year-old kid, they wouldn’t even release his name. He’d grown up on the shore, had his boating license and everything. He probably loved the Giants, probably woke up that morning feeling superhuman and ready to jet ski, no idea his idiocy was about to end a great Eagle’s life.

  At dinner in Center City, where everything was a building instead of a tree, Mitch kept seeing D through the street-side window. But then it was always not D. It was a dark white guy, or a tall woman, or just a black guy with similar features. He felt grateful he lived in Virginia, where he knew everyone and wasn’t likely to confuse them with someone that he knew was dead.

  The service was held on the field at the Linc the next morning, with all the punishing extravagance of a halftime show. They’d erected a stage in the end zone and covered it with flowers like a parade float, two giant 53s made of roses doing their best to upstage the closed casket. There were too many people to clasp hands with: former coaches, former players, even Eddie Hatchett, who’d distinctly told Mit
ch he’d always be welcome in Philly, then met with him twice after he retired, but never offered him a job. “We miss you around here,” Eddie said, same as ever. Easy for him to say; he was still GM. What was Mitch supposed to do? He looked in vain for Moore and Kohler, and the others from his team, but his eyes kept finding the current guys. Most were recent Super Bowl champs, an achievement that used to mellow guys out. Not anymore, if these kids were any gauge: brainwashed and jumpy as any college team, sweating anxiously without the weight of their headphones and cross-body duffels, young men with pimples and casual smears of facial hair, playing dress-up in their best black suits. Oh, who was he kidding—he was jealous. All he had to do was blink to see what everyone else saw: vigorous men, at the very center of life, no idea what lay ahead of them, even here, at a football funeral. They’d head straight from the service to Carolina to get ready for Sunday’s game.

  “There’s Greg Goldman.” Julie pointed at the owner in the front.

  It was Goldman who’d first sent Mitch to Julie after he pulled his back in the owner’s box. Possibly the most humiliating moment of his retirement, getting injured watching other guys play. He and Goldman had been working toward a friendship then; Mitch had even asked him for advice on a steakhouse venture that never quite got off the ground. But after Mitch found himself clinging to Goldman’s liquid white sideboard, his spine snarling as Goldman smiled, almost paternal in his unworried compassion, they never managed to have another conversation that didn’t leave Mitch feeling winded and cranky and sort of duped. Goldman was right about Julie’s massages—the best in the region, right there in Jersey—but a lot of other things about him now seemed wrong.