The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “At least she made it home. She’s watching you right now,” he told me, and pointed with his chin toward the window. But when I quickly turned my head to look, the dirty curtains twitched closed, and I didn’t see her.

  “At least she made it home,” I agreed, “and she knows that when she calls me, I’m going to come. Always.” I wiped my eyes again, and Gunnar took his hand off the wheel to put it over mine.

  Chapter 10

  I tapped the screen. “You only have two more problems to do. Please, let’s get this done.”

  Marley ignored me, like she had been doing for the past two days. She had shown up for tutoring and made a single remark about stalkers and snitches, then steadfastly refused to do anything related to school, refused to talk about what had happened, refused to even look at me.

  “Marley. Please!” I said, exasperated. “Look, I know you’re angry, but don’t let your schoolwork suffer because of that. I’m—”

  She stood up, grabbed her school-issued laptop, and walked out of the room. The other tutors and kids watched avidly as I stood up, too, unsure of what to do, not having one single clue as to how to make this better. I watched her disappear into the lobby, and a moment later, Linda came in.

  “I had her wait in my office until the bus comes. Just give her a little more time,” she advised me. “Things are very topsy-turvy in her life.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to forgive me,” I said, and my voice wobbled a little.

  Linda patted my shoulder. “She will. It’s easier to be angry at you right now,” she said. “I’ll see if I can get her to do some homework.”

  I picked up my own things and also all the stuff that Marley had left behind, like her backpack, writer’s notebook, and geometry text. I left her belongings outside of Linda’s office with a note inside the math book that included my cell phone number, because maybe Marley would want to use it to call me. I had gotten the phone repaired again and it worked, most days. At times.

  Today, it had worked sufficiently on the Wi-Fi of the learning center to receive a text from Gaby about the Woodsmen, and I got back to her once I was in the parking lot. “Hi,” I said. “No, I didn’t see the news about the long snapper eloping. That’s exciting.”

  “It’s so romantic,” she agreed. “Did you have a bad day? Your voice sounds weird.”

  “Marley,” I said, sighing as I walked around my car and checked for damage. I thought she might have been angry enough for some vandalism before she’d come into the building for our tutoring session, but it would have been hard to spot it under the dirt and previous dents and dings. The hood was still latched, I was glad to discover.

  “That girl,” Gaby said scoldingly, but then her voice changed. “That poor, poor girl.” Gaby’s heart was as soft as yogurt. “Maybe you should take her to the game with you this week instead of me,” she suggested.

  “I don’t think she’d want to go to the corner with me, but thanks for offering,” I answered, examining my gas cap for signs of tampering. “Unless you don’t want to come.”

  “No, I do! I really do. I could use some fun.”

  She sounded about as happy as I felt. “We both could,” I said. “How is everything with…you-know-who?” I didn’t know if I was allowed to mention her boyfriend’s name. Maybe I just should have called him “the cheating, lying, rat-bastard.”

  My question started a torrent of information: sad stories of missed moments together, lack of communication, tense moments at the office. Gaby didn’t say his name or the wife’s name either, although she came up a lot. Like that she was causing a variety of problems in his life and business, she was so unreasonable and needy and greedy for his time, she was a witch who didn’t deserve him.

  “It’s so hard,” Gaby said, repeating that phrase for at least the tenth time. “I wish she would hurry up and go back to Florida for the winter, but she’s sticking around while the weather is nice. It makes it impossible!”

  So many things made her situation impossible, but the beautiful fall weather wasn’t one of them. “The nights are getting colder,” I comforted her, but then asked myself why I was encouraging this crazy line of behavior. “Gab, why don’t you forget about him for a night? Go out and have fun with your friends.” I said. “Get your mind off it.”

  “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “I haven’t been hanging out with anybody lately. Are you up for doing something?”

  “Oh, well, I can another time. Tonight I have plans.”

  There was silence. “Hallie Holliday, you better not be holding out on me,” Gaby warned. “Do these plans tonight involve your gorge next-door neighbor?”

  “They do,” I admitted. “He’s coming over with groceries and we’re cooking dinner together. I got the oven working again.” I had done this by kicking it in anger, which had hurt my toe a lot, but also somehow had jumpstarted the power to the appliance.

  “OMG!” Gaby squealed happily, breaking out of her malaise. “This is amazing!”

  “No, Gaby, don’t do that. I don’t think this means what you think it means. We’re just friendly neighbors.” Friendly neighbors who had been texting and calling each other and who were now having dinner together. A friendly dinner.

  “Right, just neighbors! Will you tell me if anything happens? I mean, in the bedroom?”

  I imagined my little bed with Gunnar in it and my breath caught for a second. “Nothing’s going to happen in the bedroom!” I answered her.

  “If it does, please tell me. I need a pick-me-up,” she said, and I got the strong feeling that nothing much was happening for her either in that particular room.

  “Go out and have fun tonight,” I urged, but she would only say maybe. We made plans to meet the next day so I could assess her situation in person. She had always been a social whirlwind, for as long as I’d known her, and this lack of circulation made me concerned.

  I rushed home, now worried about two people in my life, and thought and fretted a lot while I battled in my bathroom using my weapon of choice, the flat iron. The fight against my uncooperative hair got so intense that I blew the circuit breaker three times, but something bad was happening to my entire electrical system so I couldn’t entirely blame my curls for the problem. Gunnar was already knocking by the time I came out, pulling the mostly-straight strands back into my usual ponytail.

  I quickly looked around the rooms as I walked to the front door, and the cottage looked better after the round of frenzied cleaning I’d done in preparation for this evening. I’d pretty much been working on it since he’d left a note early, early, early the morning after we’d driven to Marley’s house. Gunnar had dropped off tickets for his upcoming game and also invited himself over for dinner because he didn’t have a kitchen yet to call his own, but he also said that that he would supply the provisions and the manual labor for cooking.

  And he had also brought flowers, I saw, when I opened the door for him. “Hi,” I said, sounding like I had been running. He looked so handsome there, smiling down at me.

  “Here you go.” Gunnar held out the bouquet and…was he blushing? There was definitely a tinge of ruddy color on his cheeks. “I brought these, too.” In his other hand, he had four bulging bags of groceries.

  “Are you really hungry?” I asked doubtfully as I stepped out of the way and let him in.

  “I wasn’t exactly sure what we’d need. I’m not much of a cook,” he explained. He set down the bags on the kitchen counter and started to unload as I put the flowers in water. “I usually get meals delivered, which is how I’m able to live in the lotus pod without a kitchen and without starving to death.” He removed two gallons of milk. “Got a little cold there last night with the wind coming off the lake.”

  “It came in around the glass in my windows, too. I can’t imagine how you could do it with just those tarps. Why don’t you get a room in a hotel?”

  He removed a block of cheese that looked to weigh several pounds and three heads of lettuce. “Remember
how I wanted to go to the restaurant where you spotted your friend with the old guy? The place so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face?”

  “Yes. I didn’t really know what I was eating.”

  “It’s like that, with a hotel.”

  “You mean you want to go somewhere without lights?” I asked.

  He laughed. “I mean that I don’t want to be around all those other people, looking at me and noticing me. I would rent a house instead, but that would be a waste of money. I’m fine where I am until they get the construction done, which I really hope will be soon.”

  Not from what I had seen of the Feeney place. “You’re shy of people,” I noted. “Cheap, and shy. It’s an interesting combination for a guy who makes millions of dollars and plays football on TV. And if you don’t want attention, why did you do those sock commercials?” I had watched them at least ten times on the library computer and he had sold them for me. I had definitely wanted to buy them, even if they were men’s and pretty ugly.

  “I love those socks,” he told me seriously. “They didn’t even have to pay me, I just wanted more pairs. But no, I don’t think I’m cheap, I’m just not wasteful. I’m Midwest frugal.”

  “That’s a nice way to put it.”

  He laughed again. “I’ve been around the league long enough to see guys do some pretty stupid things with their money. Nico Williams, our old receiver, bought a star before he settled down. I mean an actual celestial object.” He set out a ten-pound bag of cornmeal. “Or maybe it was just shares in a star. In any case, he’s never going to see it besides on an astrological chart, and he named it something dumb. Although, I heard he renamed it after his wife when he got married. The Star of Tatum.”

  “Gunnar, uh, did you have a recipe in mind?” I asked, looking at the cornmeal and the array of food he’d unloaded.

  He studied the bunch of bananas now in his hand. “I thought, pasta? I usually have complex carbs, lean meats. High protein and lots of vegetables.”

  “Where do all these spices fit into that diet scenario?” I picked up one of the five or six jars. “Do you put cinnamon and nutmeg on chicken?”

  “No, I cheat with pie,” he admitted. “I was remembering my mom making apple pies. Do you know how to bake?”

  “We can look at my grandma’s old recipes. I know there’s an easy one for pie crust.” I sat him down at the kitchen table and handed him her recipe box, the metal one I remembered from my childhood when we’d baked together. “She used to love this old cooking show from Detroit with a woman who called herself the Kitchen Genie. We made her peanut butter cookies a lot and they were delicious.”

  While he thumbed through the old notecards, I started making pasta the way I knew how, which was to boil water, dump in non-complex carb noodles, and pour on a jar of sauce. I made a salad with about one-fifth of the lettuce he’d supplied, but I didn’t touch the dried mangoes, brown rice, or the green lentils. Gunnar looked impressed anyway.

  “This is nice. It’s nice to eat with here with you.” He glanced around. “In a real room, with a table.”

  “It’s not very fancy or anything,” I said, but was sufficed with pleasure at his words. In fact, I was so glad that he was here that I could barely stop myself from throwing my arms around his neck whenever I looked at him.

  “I don’t need fancy. I like your cottage,” he told me, but I noticed him taking a quick peek at the ceiling.

  “It will hold,” I said firmly. “And as soon as I get a new job, I’ll start saving for more repairs.”

  “How’s the search going?”

  “I stopped sending résumés out of state,” I admitted. “I need a little break from the rejection. I’m looking only in northern Michigan and I have a possibility at a bank for another part-time gig. The problem is making it fit with Marley.”

  “I take it from the look on your face that things aren’t great with her.”

  “No, not great.” I sighed. “But I’m not giving up on her, not when she needs someone more than ever. It would be so much better if she would talk to me, but as of yet, she’s mostly using her hands to express herself.”

  “Like sign language?”

  “Exactly.” I gave him the finger to demonstrate how Marley was communicating. “It actually speaks volumes. Linda told me that she’s out of her house and in a temporary place, and she’s probably going to have to move again soon. I can’t imagine the disruption she’s going through and I want to help her. She needs a permanent home where she’s safe. And loved,” I added.

  He nodded. “No matter what I’ve had going on in my life, it always helped to have a home. I knew I always had a place to go back to with my mom and dad.”

  “Exactly. Everybody needs something like that.” Even if the oven was iffy and the roof was unstable, I thought, and glanced up at the ceiling like he’d done. “How are your parents doing?”

  Gunnar looked at his plate for a moment and pushed around the last few noodles from the two boxes I had cooked. I had noticed how much he’d ordered when we’d gone out to dinner and had calculated my quantities accordingly.

  “Is your father ok?” I asked, concerned. When things had turned bad with my own dad, the end had come very quickly. I touched Gunnar’s hand. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know if he’s going to make it through the season,” Gunnar said quietly. “I wanted to take some time off and go visit for a while, but he said no way. He wants to see me play in a home game so I bought them an RV and I got a driver so they can come and not have to worry about getting here.”

  I took back the comment I’d made about him being cheap. “That’s a nice way to travel. I’m glad they’ll be able to come.”

  Gunnar turned slightly toward the window that faced the Feeney place, invisible through the trees and the darkness. “They’re going to be pretty upset to see that mess.”

  “No, they’ll see how great it’s going to turn out! And they can stay in warmth and comfort in the RV so they won’t even have to deal with all the holes where the stairs and extra doors used to be.”

  “I just hope it turns out like this,” he said, looking around the room.

  “‘Like this,’ as in small and falling apart?” I asked, following his eyes.

  “No, I mean that it feels good here,” he answered. “It feels like people, I don’t know, people really lived here.”

  “It’s the chipped paint,” I agreed. “It makes it homey. No, I know what you mean. My dad used to say that home is where the heart is, and that was trite but correct. We had a lot of love in this cottage. It still feels like it.”

  “I can understand why you didn’t want to lose it.” Gunnar got up and brought all the dishes to the sink, cradled in his huge hands. “I wouldn’t, either. That’s like the bookstore for you. It’s not just a building, or a pile of merchandise.”

  “No,” I said slowly. “No, it’s a lot more. It’s where my grandfather realized his dream and where my parents first met and I learned to read. It was…” It was my dad. “That was why it was hard to give up,” I concluded. I got a dishtowel to start drying as he washed.

  “Yeah. Yeah, ok,” Gunnar said. He turned off the faucet. “So then, I’m going to ask you something, but I’m afraid it’s going to make you upset. First, put down that knife you’re drying.”

  I gripped the dripping utensil harder. “What? Oh, no. Do you have the pinks to my car? Does my water main run through the Feeney property and you’re going to cut it off?”

  “Hallie, Jesus H. Christ!” He grasped the handle of the knife and pried it out of my fingers. “Do you really think I would repo your car or turn off your water?”

  I gulped. “No. But you look really serious and I don’t have much left to lose. What is it, then?”

  Gunnar turned back to the sink to wash and started to scrub the pasta pot so hard I thought he’d wear through the metal. “I wanted to know if I could hire you.”

  “Hire me?” I asked blankly.
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  “Hire you to work at the bookstore.”

  I stood in utter shock, and after a moment, he turned off the water again and looked at me. “You said that it was a place you love. I need someone to open it back up and run it. I think you’re that person.”

  I still didn’t speak.

  “You could work there when you’re not with Marley, and I think it gets quiet enough that you’d be able to send out résumés if you wanted to.” He waited, but I didn’t say anything. “You know the business better than anyone else, and I think you’d do the best job there. If you want to. If you aren’t insulted by me offering you a job at a place that used to belong to you.” He paused again. “Hallie?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I was, unless you’re planning on doing something drastic with the dishtowel that you appear to be twisting into a garrote.”

  I didn’t try to strangle him, but I did do something drastic: I leaped at him and threw my arms around his neck, hanging a foot off the ground and squeezing him as hard as I could. He held me too, his arms around my waist, and I felt him nuzzle against my hair.

  “Oh!” After a moment I started to struggle. “Put me down! I forgot about your back!”

  Gunnar didn’t listen. “My back is fine, and you don’t weigh anything. Is this your answer? If so, I’m going to have to assume that it’s a yes.”

  “I would love to be at the bookstore. Yes!” I pushed against him again, and he slowly slid me to my feet. “I had so many ideas for it, so many plans, but I ran through all the money I’d saved for business school so quickly to pay the bills that I didn’t have much to work with.” I paused. “I can tell you about all of that, if you want to make more of an investment in the place. I’m not trying to twist your arm into doing it.”

  “Thanks for not getting physical,” he said, and laughed. “No, I’d like to hear what you had planned. Let’s talk while we make the pie.”

  I tackled the crust using the Kitchen Genie’s three-ingredient recipe and Gunnar cut the apples, and eventually we had something that resembled what my grandma had done. Anyway, I thought that it would probably taste good even if it didn’t look quite as professional as when she had rolled out the dough on the kitchen table. I talked to him about the upgrades my dad had already tried to make to the store, like the fountain he’d installed that had caused a major leak in the biography section (I’d had it removed after trying to do a bit of the work myself, which had resulted in a finger that wasn’t quite broken). I’d also sold (at a huge loss) the expensive coffee machine he’d had shipped from Italy that no one had been able to get more than slightly tan water out of, no matter how many repairmen he’d had to pay for travel time to come up from Detroit to fix it.