The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “That’s good to get along with your boss.” I hadn’t enjoyed that kind of relationship with Mr. Lomperd at Atontado Capital Partners in Chicago. After two years of me working for him, he had never warmed up. In fact, he seemed to like me less as time had gone on, but all I had ever done was toil as hard as I could for the company, pulling long hours, and I thought, producing a lot of good work product for him.

  Gaby nodded briefly in response as she chopped tomatoes. “Can you grab the mozzarella out of the fridge?” I handed her the small white lump labeled “low-fat!” “And speaking of work, how did the tutoring go this week?” she asked.

  It made me tired and more than a little nauseated to think about it. Marley wasn’t name-calling, swearing, or openly threatening, but she still wasn’t learning anything, either, no matter what I did. “It could be better,” I admitted. “I’m struggling.” We were together for hours every day, and at the end of them I was as tired as I’d ever been leaving one of my marathon workout sessions back in Chicago. I could barely make it to the parking lot for my car.

  “You’re just learning the ropes,” Gaby said encouragingly. “You’ll get there.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to be a tutor for life, anyway. I should be done with it soon enough.” I’d had another phone interview that morning that I thought had gone well, but I’d already had a few that hadn’t led anywhere, so I was only cautiously positive about it.

  She slid the pizza into the hot oven. “Are you still planning to go back to Chicago? Because I ran into Carey Winslow and he mentioned again that you could work for him,” she started to tell me, but I quickly shook my head and held up my hand. I didn’t want to hear about Carey, even if he had the best job offer in the world. No way.

  “No, I won’t work for that man.” I refused to say the name “Carey Winslow” out loud. “Yes, I’m still looking for another position in the financial industry. I’ll move back to Chicago when I find something. If I live really carefully, I’ll be able to rent a little apartment far out from the city center and keep up with the mortgages on the cottage so I can hold on to it.”

  “You definitely don’t want to sell that place,” she told me seriously. “All the lakefront footage is real estate gold. It’s too bad your dad took out those mortgages.” She looked at me questioningly.

  I had told her about the notes on the properties, but had never gotten into the “why” of it. “It wasn’t really his fault. He lost a lot of faith and confidence when my mom passed away and he made some poor decisions.”

  “When did that happen with your mom?” Gaby asked, her eyes big with sympathy.

  “I was six. First grade.” I still remembered getting off the bus that day and my dad waiting. Crying.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  I bristled a little as I thought I understood her meaning, that he should have gotten over it. “Not so long for someone who loved his wife so much. He just…sank,” I explained, for lack of a better word. “Then my grandpa, his dad, died too, and he really lost control of things. I had no idea how bad it was, though.” When my dad had finally admitted to being sick and I’d come home to stay, I’d been shocked and appalled by the state of the accounting ledgers at the store (real ledgers since he didn’t like computers) and also the state of his personal finances. I’d immediately started to try to put things to rights, and thus began my slog to pull us back out of the hole. It had finished with my flop, when I closed Holliday Booksellers.

  “That’s a shame,” she commiserated. “I wish he had asked you for help before things went into the toilet, because I bet you’d have been able to do something. You’re so smart.”

  I rolled my eyes. Smart enough to lose the shop.

  “Or he could have gone to one of the credit counseling places!” she continued. “And I know Emelia Schaub College has a free service where they have accounting majors work with people to help manage their finances.”

  “Yes, I wish he had done any one of those things.” It had been hard not to get mad when I found the mass of papers neatly filed in the cabinets at the bookstore and realized the kind of trouble we were in. But my dad had been so sick by that point that I had closed the drawers and pushed the anger down.

  Gaby reached and squeezed my arm. “You’re getting things on track now,” she told me encouragingly. “Pretty soon we’ll get rid of that building and you’ll go back to your career in Chicago. But I’ll miss you!”

  I nodded. It would be hard to leave here again, now that I felt like I had settled back in. Coming home to Michigan had been unexpected but just seemed…right, in a way. Like how my tennis shoes were much more comfortable than my interview shoes, and I liked that, no matter what Gaby said about fashion having to hurt. I started to answer her but then caught Gunnar’s name from the radio. “I missed that. What did they say?” I asked, turning up the volume so I could hear Burt and Ernie, or whatever those announcers were called.

  “Locker room sources are saying that Christensen will be back on the field for the second half,” one of the old guys reported, “and I say, ‘Plop, plop, fizz, fizz!’ Am I right?” The other guy totally agreed.

  “What does that mean?” I asked Gaby, who shrugged.

  “They talk really weirdly sometimes,” she whispered back, as if they could hear her.

  “Here’s hoping it’s not the back injury that was tweaking him last season,” the other guy said, and they both discussed how important Gunnar was on the offensive line, how his absence meant that the running game couldn’t do very well. Or, as they said it, with the Woodsmen team captain there, it was “eggs in coffee,” but without him, “no dice.”

  I watched Gunnar carefully as I ate the hot pizza and Gaby picked at the mushrooms, to see if I could spot any evidence that he was in pain. I didn’t see it—not until the very end of the game, anyway. When they were coming off the field after the Woodsmen had scored yet another touchdown, he didn’t jog with the rest of his teammates. He walked, and pretty slowly and tightly, too. And the old guy announcers commented that he went back to the visitors’ locker room early, before the clock ran out and the Woodsmen won with their defense preventing the Glaciers from scoring.

  Gaby held out her hand and I gingerly gave her five. “Harder,” she said, so I smacked her a good one. She grinned. “First win of the season! We should go out to celebrate!” She jumped up and put on her Woodsmen baseball cap, as if she needed more orange. I wasn’t sure if there was another person in the universe who could pull it off, but she still managed to look pretty. “Let’s go!” she urged me.

  “I’m not going, not this time,” I told her, and nothing she could say could change my mind. Finally, she gave up trying and went off to meet her other friends, and I drove through the one street that constituted our downtown and circled back behind the bookstore building.

  Technically, the contents of the shop were part of the sale, but I wasn’t that concerned when I parked in the tiny lot at the back and I let myself in through the employee entrance. I stood for a moment in the semi-darkness of the office, looking around. I had already taken away all of the pictures that had been tacked to the bulletin boards above the desk, the newspaper articles about my grandparents opening the first bookstore our town ever had, pictures drawn by various kids through the years, and Christmas cards from our regular customers.

  I’d received quite a few sympathy cards from our regulars too, after my dad’s death. We’d had a little family of steady shoppers, some of whom I’d known since I was a baby, and they had tried to help me save the store. They had bought books and encouraged their friends to, also; they had written social media posts and written to the newspaper; they had even held a bake sale on the sidewalk in front of the store. But none of it had been enough.

  I shook my head and pushed aside the old, beaded curtain that my grandpa had called a relic of his beatnik days to walk onto the main floor of the store. It had been quiet in there for months, but now it was so silent that it felt l
ike a crypt. I ran my hand over the front counter, feeling the thin layer of dust, and then went to the right into our reference section, always the least-visited area of Holliday Booksellers.

  In a nod to our location, my grandpa had put in a small shelf devoted to the Woodsmen. I picked up several books about the team’s history, a few autobiographies and memoirs by some of the players and coaches, and most importantly, a very old volume I’d found shoved at the back called What Ho, the Gridiron!, which was all about football rules. I needed the help if I was going to be watching or even talking about the Woodsmen. It had seemed that Gaby was speaking in Dutch or Russian or Thai tonight, and I had never been good with languages.

  And then, on the way home, I found myself tuning the creaky old knob on the radio in the Bronco to the station that Gaby had recommended, the show with Herb and Buzz. I also found myself listening hard, so hard that I almost missed the turn onto my road. Learning about football was really like studying an entirely new discipline, like when I had started to get into descent theory in math, which had also been over my head but fascinating.

  And I hadn’t been lying to Linda at the tutoring center: I did love to learn. That had been one of the best parts about working in a bookstore, that I had been surrounded by information, and in the quiet moments between customers, I had lost myself in reading. I had always loved the concrete presence of a book. No matter how empty the store, or how quiet your cottage—no matter how lonely you were, you always had a friend there.

  I read my football books for a long time in the little bed I’d slept in since first coming out of my crib as a baby. But as the night wore on, I got restless and went to read outside, curled in an old sleeping bag on the back deck. It was so quiet that I could hear the soft sound of the waves slipping up on the shore, and I watched the fireflies as much as I read by the weak glow of the dying flashlight I’d fished out of a kitchen drawer.

  When that finally gave up the ghost, I lay back in the chair and looked up at the stars. I got like this at times, when I started to worry and couldn’t stop—sometimes, it felt like the determination that I used to push through each day failed me in the darkness and I couldn’t sleep. Going to Holliday Booksellers had done it tonight; the memories jangled inside my brain and my racing thoughts wouldn’t let me close my eyes.

  It was so quiet that I could hear the footsteps coming down the path from the old Feeney place well before the large figure emerged from between the trees and into the grasses at the edge of the beach. It was very, very late, actually the next morning by now, so the team flight must have come in on the orange Woodsmen jet that I had read about, and Gunnar had driven himself home. Now, instead of going to bed, he was standing at the verge of the sand and looking out at the water. I sat up and opened my mouth to call to him, but closed it and sank back.

  The thing was, he just looked so alone there. He stood for what felt like a long time, his shoulders slumped down, before he turned to walk back toward the Feeney place, and I saw how slowly he was still moving. Almost limping, really. I watched until he disappeared into the trees again, and then I went to try to get some sleep before the sun came up.

  The next day was Saturday, which was a wonderful thing: it meant no Marley. I wasn’t sure what she did when I wasn’t trying to force some knowledge into her, but holding up banks and terrorizing babies and senior citizens were two activities that were probably on her to-do list for the weekend. Since I still hadn’t noticed her learning anything—not one thing—I spent a large part of this morning prepping for the coming week, making my own supplementary materials for what I now knew she was supposed to be studying. She had failed three classes last year and summer school was her way of moving to tenth grade. I wasn’t betting on that happening, based on the lack of progress I’d made with her and her utter lack of motivation. She just didn’t care about school, which I just didn’t understand.

  But the whole time I worked outside on my deck, I kept an eye out, and both my ears were tuned, too. So I managed to get myself down to the beach, as if I was just casually taking a stroll on the shore, well before Gunnar reached it.

  “Good morning,” he said, and I looked up in feigned surprise.

  “Oh! Hello.” I studied the stone in my hand like it fascinated me, but really, I was watching how he moved. More loosely than the night before, but still very carefully as the sand shifted under his feet. “Are you coming down to scuba dive and scare people?” I smiled to show that I was joking, but he just eyed me.

  “Not today. Are you going to throw that rock at me?”

  “Not today,” I answered, and smiled again, because I was just such a pleasant person, I wanted to show him. I was not going to start an argument or clock him with my fist or with the piece of granite that I held in my hand. In fact, I ostentatiously dropped it so that he wouldn’t feel threatened.

  “Good,” Gunnar said, and even smiled back, just a little. “I was hoping to run into you,” he told me.

  I felt my heart beat harder. “Really? Well, I was hoping to run into you, too. I watched your game yesterday.”

  “I thought you weren’t a football fan.”

  “I’m not—I wasn’t,” I corrected, “but my friend Gaby is, so I went to her house.” Also, because she had a TV, and I hadn’t managed to fix the antenna on my roof that made mine function. “You played really well.”

  He laughed slightly and seemed to relax. “Did I? Thanks. What were your metrics for determining that? I remember you were pretty interested in those the other night.”

  “Your metrics looked great,” I told him, and took a breath before I continued. “We argued on the way home after the Silver Dollar and I think it was because I insulted you about the metrics, but really, I didn’t mean to. I was just speaking in general, in theory, but I made it sound personal and I’m sorry, because of course, it’s personal to you. But I watched the game and you don’t look like you’ve declined or degenerated or whatever. You were amazing.”

  “I appreciate you saying that,” he told me, and smiled. I smiled back at him, a genuine one this time. His slowly faded as he looked at me and his face got very serious. “I was looking for you, though, because I wanted to talk about something other than football. I got the final report from the surveyors, and I talked to my title company about the property lines. And to an attorney.”

  I felt my stomach drop. “An attorney? Why? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row. The lawyer said she would send you a letter, but I thought it would be better to talk face to face, since we’re neighbors.”

  “Talk about what?” I demanded. “Why would your lawyer send me a letter? What are you trying to say?” Gunnar held up his hand in a gesture of calm. “What?” I repeated.

  “They’re going to come back today and put stakes in where the actual property line is so that you can see it. I asked them to hold off, because I thought it might be upsetting to look at what the deed from last fall had granted to the Feeneys. It seemed like you weren’t aware of how much they got.”

  “Deed?” I asked. I heard how loud and sharp my voice was so I lowered and softened it. “What deed do you mean?”

  “Lib and Ron Feeney purchased a significant part of this land last fall.” He swept his arm out toward my house. “Henry Holliday deeded it to them. Didn’t you know?”

  I gulped but my mouth had gone totally dry, so the swallow caught and made me cough. What had my dad done? “A deed?” I repeated blankly. “I want to see it. I want to see all of this.”

  “I have a big packet of papers at my house.” He held up his hand again, this time offering to let me go first on the path up to the Feeney place.

  I walked blindly. A deed? My dad had sold some land? There was nothing in the files he’d left about that and I’d gone through them all, unraveling all the financial tangles he’d been creating for years. No, this couldn’t be right, I told myself. This was wrong. I stumbled on a branch in the pat
h but righted myself. This was just wrong.

  Gunnar’s house was in a state of total disarray. There were moving boxes everywhere and piles of furniture, as well as guys walking around with tools and rolls of plans in their hands. Also, the front yard was gone. There was just dirt and a mud pit in place of all the ugly landscaping that Lib Feeney had picked out and tastelessly arranged for her gardener to plant. I’d heard noise coming from this direction, but nothing could have prepared me for the destruction. “What’s happening here?” I blurted out as I stared around at what had once been a hideous, yet structurally sound place of residence. Now there were holes in the walls, more like the inside of a honeycomb than a house. “It looks like a war zone!”

  Gunnar scowled. “I was remodeling a little but it’s turned into a bigger project. Come with me,” he said, and walked slowly up one of the many flights of stairs and into a bedroom. It was painted an ugly greenish-tan that reminded me of vomit, and through an open doorway, I glimpsed another room, silver this time, with a jacuzzi. Not a jacuzzi bathtub, but a full-sized, multi-person hot tub in an indoor room next to the bedroom. He saw me staring. “I guess they had big parties here and went hot tubbing. You could easily fit fifteen regular-sized people in that,” he said, indicating the jacuzzi. “People still show up sometimes asking about it. Weird people.”

  “I remember all the cars parked out on the road some nights.” I looked around the room, at the boxes and general disarray. “What do you have to show me about a deed?”

  There were papers everywhere, but eventually Gunnar unearthed a thick file and handed it to me. “This is what I got about the sale. It’s in there.”

  The file included all kinds of information that I didn’t think I should have seen, like the contract with exactly how much he’d paid (in cash, the full asking-price) and even one of his bank statements which had a balance that I found astounding. But eventually, I got to the report from the title company, which contained all the public information on the property, like liens, easements, and deeds. And there it was.