The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “Why would you wash dishes? Isn’t there anything else?”

  I tried to flip the omelet, which was mostly successful. “The shifts they could give me at the restaurant worked with what I’m already doing at the learning center. My original plan had been to tutor until I could find a full-time job in Michigan, then to do the full-time job here until I could leave for Chicago to get back to my old career in financial services. But now I don’t know when I’m leaving.” I carried in a glass of water, which was my fanciest drink if he didn’t want a snort of my dad’s scotch. I lingered, watching him, but then I smelled something a little burn-y so I hurried back to the stove.

  “I have a hard time keeping up with your job search,” Gunnar said. “Explain this to me again?”

  “I had to find a job this summer, any job, to keep myself fed,” I answered. “I took the part-time spot at the learning center just to have something, anything. But even though I didn’t mean it to be permanent, now I see that I have to stay there as long as I can. It’s good for Marley to have one person who keeps coming back every day. Also, I don’t know who else they could get who would stay after meeting her, and she needs the help.”

  “That nice,” he told me. “That’s good that you’re there for her.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how much good I’m doing, but yes, I’m there. Unfortunately, it’s not bringing in enough money, so I got the other job doing dishes to supplement until something permanent comes through with my career and I have to move.” I held up my hands to demonstrate the damage from the dishwashing and dropped my spatula on the floor by mistake.

  “Besides your fall due to the lotion, how’s the restaurant work going?” he asked cautiously.

  “Terrible,” I admitted, rummaging for another tool to get the eggs out of the pan. “I’m the worst employee they’ve ever had. There’s already a help wanted sign in the window and I know it’s for my job.”

  Gunnar was trying not to laugh. “Sorry,” he muttered, and performed some very odd-sounding coughs, then cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that, but I think your talents are better used elsewhere.”

  “Jobs don’t grow on trees around here,” I said. “Especially with the tourist season winding down, and especially with me trying to work around Marley’s schedule once her school starts.” It would start soon, whether she was back to being a freshman or was moving on to sophomore year. I hoped for sophomore status. “I just don’t understand why I’m not getting any offers from all the phone interviews I’ve done and with all the résumés I’ve sent out. I not trying to brag, but I’m a fairly adequate candidate.”

  “Calling yourself ‘fairly adequate’ doesn’t sound like a brag. Let me see your résumé.”

  I brought it over along with the omelet, which he thanked me for and then devoured in two or three bites as he checked over my qualifications. I sat in the tiny space left on the other side of the couch and watched him read, his dark blonde eyebrows drawn down, his full lips pursed and serious.

  “You’re more than fairly adequate,” he said, and rattled the paper as he looked up at me. “You’ve done amazing things in school, with grades and awards and jobs. It looks like you had a significant responsibilities at…” He squinted at the page. “Atontado Capital Partners,” he read. “I’d hire you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you really believe that the interviews are going well.” He raised his eyebrows now and I wanted to reach out and touch them like I’d done to his hair. What would he do if I suddenly petted his eyebrows as if he was a giant, beautiful cat? Look before you leap, Hallie, my dad had told me. He had been discussing me trying to get over a large crevasse, but it also applied to randomly touching Gunnar’s face, so I folded my hands in my lap.

  “The interviews really are going well,” I said, returning my mind to the conversation. “At the end, they always say things like, ‘We look forward to talking again with you,’ or with the last one, the woman even said something about me flying to San Diego to meet with the rest of the partners. But then…nothing.”

  “Maybe it’s the lack of industry experience. You don’t have a ton of that,” he said, running his eyes down the page again, “but you’re young, so it makes sense. You’re so young,” he repeated, and put the empty plate on the arm of the couch. “And I feel like I’m a hundred years old tonight.”

  “Why?” I asked. “You played so well. You play like you just got out of college.”

  “Do I?” He smiled at me. “You know what the guys who just got out of college look like?”

  “You look good to me,” I answered. More than good. Strong, powerful, tough, and so handsome up close like we were now, that I could hardly take a full breath in.

  Gunnar rubbed his eyes. “I’m getting old but the game isn’t, not to me,” he said. “I still love it. I love every moment of it. I love to practice, I love the guys. I love to walk on the field and hear the crowd, I love to play football.”

  “Do you have to retire after this season?” I asked quietly.

  “If I don’t, I’m going to do so much damage to my back that I’ll have trouble walking in a few years. I have to quit while I’m slightly ahead, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to give it up.” He leaned back against the couch, resting his head on the wall. “Now that the season started, I feel like I’m watching the clock tick away. I’m in a countdown until it’s all over and the last whistle blows, and I don’t want it to end.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s very, very hard to give up on something.” I thought I could understand his feelings, and sympathy was coursing around my body, making me almost cry.

  “It’s my whole life,” Gunnar continued, his voice low and rough. “It’s what I’ve done for so many years, with so much focus. Every day there was a plan, a schedule. I’ll wake up next January and there won’t be anything. I’ll be alone in that lotus pad house with empty days for the rest of my life.”

  I was shocked. Even when he was angry at me, he was usually close to a smile, too, but now…

  “You won’t be alone,” I said softly. “You have your family a plane flight away. And didn’t you say that some of your best friends will still live here in Michigan, too?”

  “They have their own lives. Wives and girlfriends, kids. And they’ll still be playing, but I’m too old.” He closed his eyes. “It really hit me tonight that this was my last season opener, the last time I’ll go out on the field with the guys.” He sighed. “Sorry to whine to you like this.”

  “Well, who else would you whine to?” I asked reasonably. “Have you told anyone else here yet that you plan to retire?” He shook his head. “Can you talk to your family? Do they help?”

  “I haven’t mentioned it to them. My mom will worry, and my dad’s been sick for the past year. I don’t want to give her something else, you know?” He opened his eyes. “My dad is very sick. He’s hoping to make it to the end of the season, to see me win a championship.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him, and now the tears did well up, because I understood losing someone. Unfortunately, I understood it perfectly.

  “Hey, no,” Gunnar said, sitting up straight. He rested his big palm carefully on my leg. “No, I’m sorry. I’m down because I’m tired, but there’s no reason for me to lay all my problems on you.”

  “You can lay yourself on me anytime,” I said. “In fact, I’m just going to hug you now.” His eyes widened slightly but then I couldn’t see them anymore, because I had buried my face in his neck, against the poky whiskers there, against his skin which smelled so, so good. “You’re going to be ok,” I whispered. “You don’t see it right now, but it’s like your house. I know that it’s going to be fine in the end. I just know it.”

  He stayed still for a beat, but then his hand patted my back a little, and then I felt him breathe out, his chest swelling under me and his body relaxing as he expelled the air. His arms enfolded me and his chin rested on my head.

  “This is wonderful
,” I thought, and by mistake, I said it out loud, too.

  “It’s pretty nice,” Gunnar agreed, and his arms tightened. “Pretty nice.”

  Chapter 9

  And then he was gone.

  It wasn’t really like he disapparated or entered the Witness Protection Program. After a while of hugging on the couch that night, he disengaged himself from my clinging arms and draping body and said goodbye. And then I didn’t see him for what felt like forever. He didn’t attend the real estate closing for the bookstore as I’d thought he would; instead, his attorney represented him, briskly flipping to pages and pursing her lips with dissatisfaction when I swallowed hard every time I put Gaby’s pen to the paper to sign my name. Ainsley Evette wasn’t just efficient and thorough, she was also beautiful—like, rivaling Gaby with her hair and face and figure, and I felt even worse because Gunnar’s attorney was so perfect. It didn’t really mean anything, or made any difference, except at the moment that I was signing away my store, it did to me.

  Ainsley made a definite noise of disgust at the end of the meeting as we gathered up our papers, because I was fully crying by that point. “It’s less than two-thousand feet of commercial real estate, located…in this town,” she said, looking around Sterling Standard Realty’s conference room like it smelled bad, but Gaby couldn’t help it if the windows opened out onto the dumpster, and our town was great. “If you were my client and I cared enough to offer personal advice, I’d tell you to move on,” Ainsley added, shaking her head slightly, and that made Gaby speak up.

  “She’s my client, and you can move your own self right through the door!” she told Ainsley, and when the lawyer was gone, Gaby hugged me. It was very different from hugging Gunnar but also very comforting that she was my friend. Then she insisted on taking me out for a long lunch, which included wine since it was Marley’s week off and I wouldn’t be tutoring later. The afternoon ended with me more than a little tipsy and sleeping off the tears and the alcohol in my small bed, not hugging anyone at all.

  But I did get extremely good news the next morning after that low-level debauchery, in the form of a call from Linda at the learning center: “She passed summer school! Marley passed with a C, a C plus, and even a B minus. I’m over the moon!” She sounded like she really might be. My job was safe there, and more than that, I felt a glow of pride. Marley had done it, and I had helped her. She was moving up a grade.

  So Marley started the year as a sophomore, and the Woodsmen continued their regular season with two away games, and I knew from all the books I’d read that Gunnar was busy with practices, meetings, walk-throughs, visits with the trainers, and everything else they did to win. I thought he was also probably trying to enjoy every moment of his final season. Those things, along with the fact that his house still wasn’t exactly livable, meant that he never was around, as hard as I looked for him. So instead of seeing him in person, I watched him play on Gaby’s TV and heard Buzz and Herb comment on how well he was doing, how he was playing like a house on fire and other expressions which meant that they were very impressed.

  “This is the Christensen we know and love,” Herb had noted after the last game.

  Knew and loved. Right.

  I looked for him at the beach and I often walked through the trees to watch the construction continue and the lotus pod slowly, slowly start to take shape into a house. I still had serious doubts about him living there when it started to get colder, which it would any day now. As for my house, the roofers repaired the hole where my leg had gone through, but only after I had to actually beg them. At first, they had refused to touch it, and when they were done, they made me sign a paper saying I wouldn’t sue them when the rest of the roof fell in around their repair.

  “I think it will hold,” I said confidently, and kept my fingers crossed that it was true. And I emailed more résumés, now looking for anything that would somehow use my degree, the one I’d worked so hard for and now seemed more like a worthless piece of paper that might be better used for patching the roof.

  I tried to keep my chin up.

  I was sitting on my deck under an old sleeping bag late one afternoon, working on supplemental lesson plans for Marley for the upcoming week, when my phone rang—the ancient phone on the wall of the kitchen where my grandma had chatted with her friends, and where the doctor had called me to tell me to come back to the hospital, right away, for my dad.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Hallie? Hallie Holliday?”

  “Yes?” I asked suspiciously, because I thought I recognized the voice through the static that always messed up calls on this phone.

  “I figured it had to be your house because there aren’t too many people named Holliday. You know you’re actually in the phone book? It’s under Henry Holliday. Who is that, your dad who died?”

  “Marley? Where did you find a phone book, and why are you calling me at home?” I demanded.

  “I’m at the NGS in town. The old lady who works here let me use the phone when I told her I was lost and I was too poor for a cell phone and she has a ton of these old directories. And she also has a lot of pictures of cats in this office.”

  “Don’t touch anything in Martha’s office. Do not!” I said immediately. “Why are you calling me?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t know. I’m bored because I don’t have my phone for real. There’s, like, nothing to do in this place, right?”

  “Go home,” I advised. I racked my brain to remember exactly where she lived. Out, far out of town, was all I could remember about her address. “Wait, how are you going to get there?” She was too young to drive, and if she was begging to use the phone at the grocery store, then she was alone.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said sullenly. “I thought you could help me.”

  “What’s wrong? Do you need me to come?”

  Another pause, longer. “Yeah,” Marley said. “You should come.”

  She sounded like a scared little girl. “I’m on my way,” I told her. “Stay there at the grocery store.” As soon as I hung up, I hurried out to the driveway as fast as I could on the leg that had been giving me a little trouble since I’d slipped on my last day as a dishwasher. I had whacked it, hard, on the kitchen’s fire extinguisher, inconveniently placed at my knee-level on the floor. And then the extinguisher had started to go off, spraying the room a little, but I couldn’t blame myself for that. I had already been fired, so they couldn’t do it again, but I did stay to help clean up.

  When I turned out of the driveway, a wave of dust flying off my tires, I came very close to a silver car I recognized, and I definitely recognized the huge, blonde man in the driver’s seat. He had both hands on the wheel to yank his car out of the way of mine but I managed to wave before I sped off toward the town. This was the first time I’d seen him in so long that I turned around to look back at him, but his car was already pulling down his driveway. Anyway, it was better to face forward when you drove.

  Marley was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the NGS, eating a lollypop, and I saw Martha’s worried face in the window watching her. I waved to Martha to show that the situation was in hand as I stalked up to my student.

  “You’re limping again?” she asked, taking a bite and breaking the candy with her teeth. “What happened now?”

  “A fire extinguisher. Where did you get the sucker?”

  She pointed over her shoulder at Martha. “Is she still standing there?”

  “Yes. Let’s go so she can relax.” I waved again and the face disappeared as we waked down the sidewalk. I thought fast, because I wasn’t exactly sure what to do now that I had gotten there and seen that Marley was physically ok. The blue rules binder that Linda had given me, the one that Marley had memorized and made fun of at our first meeting, had clearly stated that we were not supposed to have contact with our students outside of the tutoring center unless it was preapproved. Even then, they discouraged it, but allowed things like us attending graduations. Not things l
ike us driving around to watch our students finish a lollypop.

  Marley dropped the stick on the ground and I stopped. “No, pick that up,” I told her, and she did, frowning and muttering something. But she threw it away, too.

  “Is that yours? That building?” She pointed across the street at the window that still read “Holliday Booksellers.” “You know you spell your last name wrong, right?”

  “That isn’t mine anymore because I had to sell it, but yes, that was the bookshop my grandfather started. He always loved to read and he saved for years and waited for something to come up for sale. That building used to be the general store when this town was founded. See the date at the top in the bricks?”

  “Great,” she said, not looking up. “Who owns it now?”

  “A guy,” I said vaguely.

  “You don’t know? You don’t have his address or something?”

  “Why do you want to know his address?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Because we could go do something to him,” she said, like it was so obvious. “We could make him sorry for taking it away from you when you loved it so much.”

  I stopped walking and shook my head at her. “It wasn’t his fault and he didn’t take it away from me, I lost it.” To Gunnar, it would be something to maybe keep him occupied when he was retired, that was all. But also, he’d said he thought it would be a relief to me when he bought it, like maybe he was trying to help.

  “But to you, it’s important!” Marley’s voice rose. “You told me how much you loved it. You told me that your dad read to you there!”

  I had? I guessed I had revealed more than I’d thought to her.

  “You should still have it. It’s not fair that some random guy should own it instead of you!”

  “Marley!” I put my hands on her shoulders and felt her body jolt. “Calm down, ok? I’m not worried about the bookstore anymore. What’s going on with you? Where’s your phone? Why did you call me? Why did you need me to come?”