The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “It’s no problem.”

  “Will you be tired for your game tomorrow?”

  He looked at the clock on the dashboard and shrugged. “It’s not so late. It seems like you jumped the line a little in the ER. Is it because you know everyone there?”

  That, and also probably because I had brought a Woodsmen with me. “Maybe.”

  “How many times have you been in as a patient?” he asked.

  “More than a few,” I admitted. “I told you that I have a problem with my reaction time. Also, my vision isn’t great when I wear my contacts. I do better with glasses.”

  “Why don’t you wear those, then?”

  Because, despite everything, I did still have a little vanity. “I do, sometimes.” At night and when I was by myself.

  “My sister Tove wouldn’t let anyone outside of the family see her in her glasses,” he commented. “We knew that she was going to marry her boyfriend when he happened to mention something about her wearing them in front of him.”

  “Growing up with a lot of girls must have given you the inside scoop on women. I mean, there can’t be many mysteries left for you,” I mused.

  He smiled. “I’ve seen some things,” he agreed.

  “That must give you a huge advantage over other men. Not that you need it, because as a Woodsmen, you must already be able to have any woman you want,” I said, forgetting my dad’s advice to give two shakes before I allowed words pour out of my mouth. “Being so gorgeous probably doesn’t hurt you, either.”

  Gunnar barked out a laugh. “I’m going to chalk up that remark to whatever pain medication they gave you,” he said.

  Aspirin. That had been all I’d taken at the hospital, aspirin and ibuprofen. Me saying that about him getting women and being gorgeous was the product of a totally clear mind. He reached to turn on the radio and left it kind of loud, which prevented any further conversation between us. That was absolutely fine with me because I had embarrassed myself enough.

  I was just going to have to learn to watch my mouth with him. And I would also have to stop myself from having wild fantasies in which Gunnar and I were somehow more than neighbors who helped each other sometimes. I wouldn’t let myself even dream that what Dr. Crumpler had thought was true and we were “together.” Because obviously, that was never, ever going to happen.

  Chapter 6

  She looked me up and down, lip curled. “I thought you looked bad before with the old clothes and the black eye. What happened to you now?”

  I frowned back at Marley. “I did some yard work this morning,” I said gruffly. It had taken me much, much longer than I’d thought it would to move myself around, and I’d gotten close to nothing done except to get very, very dirty. In fact, it had taken me so much longer than I had planned, that I hadn’t had time to fix my hair and I had been almost late to meet up with Marley. That was another of our ground rules: we were both supposed to be timely. At least I’d gotten here before her so that I’d been able to hide my bandaged foot under the table, and my long sleeves covered the damage to my arms from the bush that had stopped my fall. But I couldn’t do much to disguise the scratches on my face and presently my hair was in…a state.

  “Is that why you dress like that?” she asked, her lip curling as she looked at my shirt. “You’re a part-time gardener or something?”

  I looked up from my copy of the “The Yellow Wallpaper,” ready to defend myself, but Marley actually looked sincere, like it had been a serious question. “No, I’m not a gardener. I am looking for another job, though.” I had decided to start looking for a second part-time job here in Michigan, something where I could be seated due to my ankle not healing as quickly as I wanted it to. While I waited to get a bite on the revised CV I was sending out to re-start my career, I needed more money. Cash, in my (currently) dirty hands.

  “You’re not going to be my tutor anymore?”

  I looked at her again, narrowing my eyes. I hadn’t heard any excitement and glee in that question, but I knew that it had to be lurking somewhere behind her words. “No, sorry to tell you, I’ll still be your tutor. Did you read the short story your English teacher assigned for the weekend?” I pointed to the pages.

  “I read the title,” she told me, looking at her phone. “I was busy.”

  I, personally, had been busy sitting on my butt and internally whining about how much my ankle and various scratches and bruises hurt. It wasn’t actually that bad, but being alone and immobile had given me the time to focus for an unhealthy amount of time on my aches and pains. One distraction had been listening to Herb and Buzz’s broadcast of the game on the radio, my grandpa’s old emergency one that I kept having to crank to keep going. Gunnar’s name hadn’t come up more than a few times and when they mentioned him it was all good things, for sure nothing about him looking sluggish and tired from sitting in the emergency room with me the night before.

  I had thought he might have come over, maybe just to say hello. He had seemed concerned when we were at the hospital, and definitely before we’d made it there. In the car, he’d asked me a thousand times what day of the week it was and had me repeat a string of words. I’d carefully straightened my hair to be ready the morning after his game, mocking myself the entire time, but taking the two hours to get it done well anyway. But Gunnar hadn’t even gone down to the beach since the day I’d fallen off the roof, so I hadn’t seen him at all.

  “Hello?” my student said loudly, and I jerked out of my reverie. “I said that I didn’t read the story, because I don’t care about decorating.”

  “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ isn’t about decorating.” I breathed out, irritated. “If you’d looked beyond the title, you’d know that it’s the story of a woman losing her mind.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marley looked interested.

  “Let’s read it together,” I suggested, and we did.

  “That wasn’t bad,” she admitted when we’d finished. “You have a good voice for reading.”

  A compliment? “Thank you. I used to do readings at the store,” I told her without thinking.

  “What store?”

  “My family owned the bookstore in town, Holliday Booksellers. But my dad died, and I had to sell it because I couldn’t fix the business,” I explained to fend off any more of her questions. It was getting easier to say it, the more times I repeated it. “That’s why I’m looking for a second job, because I don’t own my business anymore.” I held in the sigh. I had received another terse email today informing me that I was no longer in consideration for the last position I’d interviewed for over the phone, working on a very small hedge fund outside of Miami. Another day, another rejection, and I tried not to take it personally.

  “Do you wish you still had the bookstore?” Marley asked.

  I looked at her carefully, wondering if I was walking into some kind of verbal trap. “Yes,” I finally said. “I really loved working there and running it but I didn’t really realize that until I left Michigan.”

  “Why did you leave? You said you got a scholarship to college, right?”

  She had listened to what I’d said? I shrugged. “I did get a scholarship and I had to take it. You can’t turn down opportunities,” I told her. “I wanted to broaden my horizons a little, too. I’d never really been anywhere besides here.”

  “Yeah.” Now she shrugged as well. “I’ve never been anywhere either. Like, just once in eighth grade, my class went to Lansing for the day to see the capitol, but that’s it.”

  “I did that field trip, too.” I hesitated, but I felt like I had to be honest with her—not about field trips to Lansing, but why I had left for Chicago. “It wasn’t just about the scholarship. I also needed to achieve something. My dad really believed in me and thought I could do whatever I put my mind to. And other people here did, too—I did really well in school,” I explained, “and I felt like I had to keep going. I felt like I had expectations to live up to, theirs and my own.”

  Maybe I had said too m
uch. Marley looked at me for a while before she nodded. “I get it,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. That was why my brother joined the service, because my dad had when he was eighteen and he thought that my brother should, too. So Bo signed up because, like, it was expected. But he didn’t want to. Right?”

  “Yeah, expectations are hard,” I agreed, but then corrected myself. “But I really liked my old life a lot, when I lived and worked in Chicago. Mostly I did, even if I was lonely sometimes,” I amended. Pretty lonely, when I really considered it. “But I would have stayed if my dad hadn’t needed me here.”

  “I get it,” Marley said again, and I wondered. We worked more on English and the short story and studied a lot for her final exams, and when our time was up, she didn’t drop her pen and run. She gathered up her stuff and then said, “Bye,” before she walked out at a totally normal pace. I walked out even more slowly, because I hadn’t brought my crutches. I hadn’t wanted to show any weakness in front of her, but I had just done exactly that without any mobility aids. I had admitted that I’d failed with the bookstore and also that I’d been a little ambivalent about leaving home. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared all those things.

  But I had learned more about her, too. I smiled a little as I limped to my car. That hadn’t been so bad. I wondered about her brother and her dad, and why they weren’t helping her out with school when she needed it.

  I stopped at the NGS, Martha’s grocery store, on the way home to pick up some things. I also wanted to confirm that she still wasn’t hiring, even though she wasn’t worrying now about any competition in town. The other grocery store that had opened under new management was not turning out to be as rodent-free as they’d advertised. “Disgusting,” I commented when Martha shared the latest rat news, and I then saw something equally gross through the plate glass at the front of the store.

  Carey Winslow was standing on the sidewalk in front of Roy’s Tavern and talking with Roy himself, a man who rarely emerged in the daylight. “Great,” I muttered.

  “Hallie?” Martha prompted. She pointed to my grocery bag, and I realized that I was holding up the line. I walked slowly toward the exit, but Carey was still standing there when I got outside. I averted my eyes and picked up my pace, moving as fast as I could on my ankle, but he spotted me. With my hair, that was always hard to avoid. It was somewhat of a beacon, especially since I hadn’t had the time to fix it today, and I had it piled in a big, red lump on the top of my head. I resembled a flaming spore, and “spore-like” was not the look I was going for when I ran into Carey Winslow.

  “Hallie? Hallie Holliday?” He jogged across the street, moving with the confident gait he’d used when he’d been the three-sport varsity athlete back in high school. Carey had been good at everything. Almost.

  I realized that my face was pulled into a scowl and I made myself return to neutral. “Hello,” I told him.

  He actually moved forward, like he was going to hug me or something, and I stepped back quickly enough that I caught my tennis shoe on a crack in the sidewalk and wobbled.

  Carey grinned as he caught my arm and I yanked it away. “Still the same old Hallie,” he said. “How long has it been? I don’t think I’ve seen you since the day you made the speech at your graduation.” He laughed. “Remember how your cap wouldn’t stay on your head?”

  Yes, it had been a very windy day and I hadn’t been as good with my straightening techniques back then. A gust had taken the cap and tossed it above the spectators like a frisbee. I took another step away from him, without tripping this time.

  “I heard from Gaby Carter that you were back in town,” Carey said. He waved at a car that honked as it went by, as popular as he had always been.

  “I am here, temporarily. I have to go now,” I told him.

  He smiled at a woman who passed us, who blushed and smiled back. It pained me to admit it, but it appeared that Carey hadn’t lost any of his attractiveness to the opposite sex. I’d been hoping for pustules and gangrene. “I also heard that you were looking for a job,” he mentioned, ignoring that I was edging away. No, he had seen me trying to escape, but Carey Winslow didn’t pay attention to whatever was counter to what he wanted. “Things didn’t work out in Chicago for you?” he continued.

  “Things worked out great,” I answered, lowering myself to enter into conversation with him because I felt like I had to defend myself. “Things were wonderful. I came back because my dad got sick.”

  Now Carey schooled his features into false concern. I knew that look, too. “I heard. Sorry. And you have to sell your building because you’re in debt,” he continued.

  “How do you know that?” I asked, furious. Had Gaby spilled that news to him when she’d blabbed that I needed a job?

  “Everyone knows,” he assured me. “I looked into buying your store for my dad’s company, but it’s not worth what you’re pricing it for, and that’s what I told Gaby. I did a walk-through and checked it out,” he said, and the thought of him poking around my bookstore was enough to make me want to throw a rock at him, but purposefully this time.

  “I wouldn’t sell it to you for any price!” I heard myself say spitefully, and he laughed. He laughed at me.

  “Same old Hallie,” Carey said again, and waved as he walked away. He left me standing there, and not the other way around. I should have been the one leaving him in the dust, but instead I just stood there, staring at his back until he stopped to talk to someone else. Then I pivoted to leave, trying my best not to show any limp at all. I wasn’t the same old Hallie, I told myself. I wasn’t that dumb girl in high school, not anymore. I slammed the car door as hard as I could but it did nothing to relieve my feelings and only made me afraid that it would fall off the hinges, like what seemed to be happening to the front door of my cottage, and also to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and all over the place in the kitchen.

  I was still furious, still brimming over with anger, so I turned down the road to my cottage much too fast and nearly had a head-on collision with Phyllis in her postal van. She gave me the finger (she existed in a permafrost of a bad mood, but this time I did deserve it) and I stopped at my mailbox to grab the letters she had just left. For a few weeks after my dad’s death, I had been afraid to open it because there had been a few surprise bills that had given me a lot of pause, but as of late it had returned to the usual junk.

  Except for today, when I found a white envelope with my name on it, made from the nice paper I’d wished I’d had to print my résumé on. It also had the return address of a law office. I swallowed before I opened it, feeling like there was no way that this could be good news.

  “Damn him!” I howled into the receiver a few minutes later when Gaby called on the yellow rotary dial phone in my kitchen. “How dare he?”

  “What—”

  “I thought he was kind, like Dr. Crumpler said. I thought he was considerate, from the way he kept giving me cognitive tests!” I seethed. “But he’s a backhanded, backstabbing, backbiter! And other words with back, too, that I can’t think of right now!”

  “Are you talking about Gunnar? Why was he giving you cognitive tests? What did he—”

  “He’s underhanded! He undercut our agreement. He certainly underestimated me!” I stopped. The repetitive prefixes were getting to be a little much, but reading this letter on top of running into Carey Winslow in the street had driven me over the brink. “Gunnar said that he wanted us to get along as neighbors and then he sent me a threatening letter—he had his attorney send me a threatening letter. She basically told me that I better not try to challenge him in any way, not over the deed or the property line or anything. She hints that he has deep pockets and that he’s prepared to spend infinite amounts of money and time to beat me into a pulp.”

  “The attorney used the word ‘infinite’ regarding his money and also said she would beat you?’” Gaby asked doubtfully.

  “Not exactly, but the threat was there. Why wou
ld he do this? I thought we had some kind of friendship,” I told her. “At least we were neighborly and congenial. I mean, he helped to pull me out of that bush! He went with me to the emergency room and stayed the whole time. He had my roof tarped where my leg went through. You would think that would have bonded us somewhat.” I shook my head angrily.

  “Gravy, Hallie, what? What bush? Why were you in the emergency room, because your leg went through your roof?” Her voice had gotten higher. “What happened to you?”

  “I had to go to the hospital for falling off the roof, not because of my leg getting hurt. Well, part of my leg did get hurt a second time, my ankle, due to falling into the bush. The bush was actually very helpful.”

  “What?”

  “You know, it’s a long story.” I sighed out some of my anger and a lot of the burst of energy it had given me left my body too. I walked outside, stretching the old phone cord, to feel the breeze from the lake on my hot face. “I had an accident but I’m ok now. I just don’t know why Gunnar would have had his lawyer write to me this way. I already told him that I was sorry for getting upset with him over this whole issue, and I thought he understood that I don’t have the money or the inclination to try to fight him over the property my dad sold.”

  “Maybe he was just trying to put the whole thing to rest, legally. Just to make his position totally clear. That makes sense to me, right, Hallie? Real estate is too big an investment to shake hands and trust that someone isn’t going to come after part of what you own. Right?”

  “Yes, but…” It was hard to explain that this felt like a betrayal. I felt like we’d established something between us, but I had been wrong. Yes, Gaby was totally correct, and I also remembered Gunnar suggesting that I consult an attorney myself over the deed issue, that it was important to seek legal advice to get things right.

  I sighed. “Yes, that’s true,” I told her. “And I guess I wouldn’t trust me either, not after the way he’s seen me behave. But let me read part of the letter to you, to see if you think it’s as bad as I said.”