The Last Whistle

by Jamie Bennett

  “You saw the inspectors’ reports, so you know about the plumbing problems, there’s questionable ventilation in the back rooms, and the floors need serious repairs, especially where there was that water damage from the fountain.” I’d done a temporary fix by covering the warped boards with a rug. “The whole building could stand to be painted, inside and out. I did some but I had an issue when I stepped in the can and sprained both my wrists when I fell, so I had to stop,” I explained. Gunnar nodded thoughtfully.

  There were so many things that could have been fixed and improved physically, but I had even more ideas about how the store should be run, changes I had started to implement but didn’t have the time or money to complete. The bookkeeping, ordering and inventory systems, marketing—everything needed an upgrade. “I have a very extensive business plan written out. If I can get my laptop running a little, I’ll give it to you,” I told him.

  He had been listening carefully as I went on and on, but now he was frowning.

  “Did I scare you with how much needs to be done? I could get most of it accomplished on a shoestring, I swear. Now that my wrists are healed, I could finish the painting—”

  “No, it’s not that.” He tilted up his chin and turned his head. “What’s that smell?”

  I sniffed, and I caught it too. “Is the pie burning?” I hurried to check.

  No, it wasn’t just the pie—it was the whole oven. Clearly, when I’d kicked it before, I hadn’t solved the problem of why it wasn’t working right, but maybe I’d caused some additional damage, and not just to my foot. “Fire!” I yelled uselessly, and wow, it really was.

  By the time the firefighters were through with my cottage later that night, there wasn’t going to be any more pie baking in the kitchen.

  ∞

  The Woodsmen won their next game, which was a good thing. After the way my week had gone, I needed something to be positive in my life.

  “Gunnar was great,” Gaby said. “The offensive line is so solid this season.” Even she didn’t sound as enthusiastic about the team as she usually did. The bright, happy orange she wore from head to toe contrasted with the somber look on her face that had stayed there for a lot of the game. She had ignored the offer to share my nachos and taken tiny sips of a beer which still sat, mostly full, by her feet.

  “Gunnar was amazing,” I agreed. He had been amazing in so many ways lately—first, by jumping to call 911 when I had stood frozen in shock and staring, horrified, at the flames, then by spraying the oven with a fire extinguisher that (surprisingly) still worked, next by grabbing me and my purse and pulling me outside, and finally, by having some of the crew working on the Feeney place take time out the next day to go put a major patch on my kitchen wall where there was a scary, charred hole. My cottage still smelled like smoke, no matter that I was leaving every window open and sleeping under every blanket I owned because the nights were growing even colder.

  Gaby and I slowly trudged up the steps to the main level and then to my car. “Do you want to go out?” I suggested. I sure didn’t, but Gaby just seemed so off, I felt like I had to try something.

  “No, I don’t really feel like it. Want to come hang out at my house instead?” she asked, but she sounded very doubtful, and then she sighed. “Gravy, I’m having such a hard time motivating! I keep thinking about Shep tonight.” She had whispered his name. “One of his daughters is having a kind of crisis about her boyfriend breaking up with her so they’re spending time together as a family. She only dated him for, like, a month or so, but Shep says she’s very fragile, and both parents had to be there for her.”

  “How many kids does he have?”

  “Four.” She looked embarrassed. “The youngest is twenty-seven.”

  I stopped dead. “What? His youngest child is older than you are?”

  “It’s not a big deal because I’m very emotionally mature!” she told me, but her lip trembled while she said it. Sure, mature.

  “I just…that’s really surprising. Shocking. And how old is the daughter in crisis about her month-long boyfriend?”

  “Um, she’s thirty-five.”

  I threw my hand over my mouth, pressing hard with my fingers to stop the words. Words like, “This is such bull, I wonder if they smell it in Kalkaska?” Or, “Gabriella Carter, I’d like to shake some sense into you and then run that Shep down with my car. Maybe Marley would know where to stash a body.” Instead, I just nodded, like it this was a perfectly reasonable situation.

  We got to my car and drove in near silence back to her apartment, with Gaby checking her phone constantly. “I know he’s not going to write, but I can’t help myself,” she explained. “He can’t text that much because of her. Also, he’s not that comfortable with new-fangled technology.”

  “Pardon me, did you just say ‘new-fangled?’ Are you Herb, or are you Buzz?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean!” she flared up, then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry, Hallie! This has just been on my mind so much and I’m stressing. I haven’t wanted to see any of my friends besides you because I’m keeping this secret, and I just feel so strange not talking about Shep when he’s such a big part of my life. I’ve been staying in my condo and decorating. I’ve spent a lot of money lately,” she said. “Too much.”

  “How often do you see him outside of the office?” I asked cautiously, to get the lay of the land.

  “Oh, at least once a week! Or maybe once every other week,” she conditioned. “He swears it will be more once she goes back to winter in Naples.”

  “Will his four children go, too?” Like, what would happen to the thirty-something daughter who needed both her parents after breaking off her short-term relationship?

  “No, the kids live here,” she answered, apparently not finding it ironic that she was calling four adults older than she was “the kids.” “Oh!” Gaby suddenly exclaimed, looking crestfallen. “I see what you’re getting at. He’ll still need to be there for them. But that’s fine, because he should support his children! I admire that about him.”

  “Yes, he sounds like a real prize,” I said snarkily, but she was nodding in total agreement.

  “He is, but this situation…it’s affecting my work terribly, too. I keep making mistakes, like yesterday, I left two clients at a showing and drove away. It was fifteen minutes before I realized that I was alone in the car. I had left them locked in the back yard, too, not able to get into the house through the sliding door.”

  I winced. It had rained pretty hard the day before.

  “At least there wasn’t a dog in there with them,” she reasoned. “The day before yesterday, I let a dog get loose out of another yard, even though there was a big sign on the gate not to open it, and I had to run in my heels to catch him. A guy came out of another house and filmed me and he said it was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. I was so embarrassed!”

  I briefly imagined myself running in heels after a dog and the damage I would have caused to myself, the bloody knees and possibly the chipped teeth. It wouldn’t have been sexy, that was for sure.

  “I’m checking through all my paperwork so carefully now,” she continued, “because I’m terrified that I’ll mess up something major and hurt a client.”

  “No, you won’t! You did such a great job with selling my building,” I comforted her. “You were a total real estate shark.”

  “Was I really mean and tough?” she asked, her hazel eyes wide and innocent, and I nodded in confirmation. Maybe she hadn’t really been mean, because that wasn’t her style, but she had indeed worked her butt off for me and gone toe to toe with Gunnar’s lawyer, too.

  Gaby shook her head. “No, I’m not any good anymore. I’ve lost all my concentration, ever since I thought…”

  “What? What did you think?” I asked when she trailed off.

  “I thought I was pregnant,” Gaby confessed, and started to cry. “And I wasn’t and Shep was so glad, but it made me think, a lot. I realized that some day, I might wan
t a baby, but he won’t, not ever.”

  No, not when he was as old as the hills and already had four grown kids and a wife, I wanted to say, but once again I crushed my knuckles to my mouth and drove one-handed. “I think that’s an important issue to consider,” I finally allowed myself to respond. “Very important. You should think long and hard about your future with him. Gaby, why didn’t you tell me about the pregnancy scare?”

  More tears streamed down her cheeks. “I’m so ashamed of myself,” she told me, and sobbed. “I can’t believe I’m doing this with a married man. Sort-of married,” she corrected, and my hand flew to re-cover my mouth. “But I love him so much,” she told me. “I really love him. And it’s not just the same old story about him and her, it really isn’t. He’s not like that!”

  “But, Gab—”

  “No.” She fought down the emotion. “It’s going to be ok once he gets divorced, and I know he will. I won’t need kids of my own, because I’ll be a part of his family. I’ll have stepchildren! That will be enough.”

  I was absolutely positive they’d take very kindly to a stepmom younger than they were. “Uh huh,” I said, sounding as unconvinced as I felt. “I want you to think about that more, Gaby. Like, a lot more.”

  “Sure, I will, but not tonight.” She wiped her hand over her cheeks to dry them. “It’s silly for me to let myself get so down about this. I shouldn’t ignore people, either. I’m so out of everything. My friends will hate me.”

  “No one will hate you.” Except her boyfriend’s wife and children.

  She sat up straight. “Know what I’m going to do right now? I’m going to ask people over. We’re going to have a party!”

  “We are?”

  “We are,” she confirmed. “We’re going to have so much fun, we’ll want to die. Just die.”

  Those last words had come out sounding very grim. “Great,” I answered, a little weakly. “We’ll want to die.”

  Gaby texted while I drove and she made a few calls, even, to say hi to people and invite them. I listened to her talk with her friends and winced at how forced she sounded, how false. Apparently, they didn’t notice, because she kept reporting that everyone she contacted said they would come. We stopped at a party store and she loaded up on booze and chips, and by the time we got to her condo, there were already a few cars outside.

  She put on a very bright smile, flipped her hair a little, and hopped out, waving. “Seaver, Omar! You guys, I haven’t seen you in so long!” she called, and they immediately ran over to help us carry the clinking bags of alcohol. “Come on in, everybody!”

  I followed them up into Gaby’s place as she chatted at a hundred miles per hour and smiled bigger. The two men were entranced and I was even more worried about her, because it was so fake, and felt so frenzied. This feeling got worse when I saw the interior of her house. She had said that she’d been decorating and buying a lot of stuff, and she really had. The living room was now exploding with pillows, so many and in so many colors and patterns that it was hard to see the furniture underneath. There was new artwork on the freshly-painted, lime-green walls: framed, inspirational messages and lots of images of rainbows. Vases, boxes, sculptures, and bowls in every color of those rainbows and in every possible material covered all the tabletops.

  “Oh, Jesus God,” I breathed. I stood near the door, overwhelmed by the cacophony of hues and designs and also by the general amount of stuff. More people walked in past me, including her friend Holland Mordarski, whom I had last seen laughing at me as I exited the Silver Dollar while dripping with the spilled drinks. I recoiled but then straightened up; never mind her, I was here for Gaby. I forced myself to go into the kitchen with the amethyst cabinets and the newly-teal walls to help set up what we had purchased.

  “Do you guys know my friend Hallie?” Gaby asked the group clustered around her island. “She’s my really, really good friend.” She smiled at me now, and I saw her lip wobble before she tightened her mouth. “Hal, you should invite Gunnar over! Just to say hi, if he’s not too tired after the game. Gunnar Christensen is her boyfriend,” she told the assembling crowd.

  “No, he’s not!” I said quickly, glaring at her. “He’s absolutely not. We’re neighbors, that’s all. And I don’t think he’d want to come here now.”

  “Ask him anyway,” she urged me, and I heard a little giggle.

  “The guy from the Woodsmen? The tackle, he’s Hallie’s boyfriend?” Holland said quietly to the woman next to her. “Right!”

  Witch. “I will text him. Since I have his number,” I said, staring straight at Holland. She appeared to be trying not to laugh. I grabbed at my phone, turning so that she couldn’t see the new tape on the screen, recently added after I had dropped it again on the sidewalk in front of the tutoring center due to a squirrel issue which had caused a slight fall. I did have his number, and we’d been texting a lot to talk about the fire and my homeowners’ insurance, a subject which I didn’t want to think about. My dad had reduced the coverage and the skimpy policy—

  “I’ll stop by. Will take me a while to get there.”

  I stared at the words that had suddenly appeared on my phone. Seriously? He was coming here, after his game when I knew he’d be exhausted and looking forward to the (relative) comfort of the Feeney place? He’d come to a party, with a crowd of people when he didn’t like crowds?

  “Well? What does Gunnar Christensen say, Hallie?” Holland asked.

  “Holland, don’t act like that,” Gaby spoke up, and Holland looked very innocent.

  “I’m just wondering if Hallie’s boyfriend, the Woodsmen player, is coming over to this party,” she announced in a voice that carried. Several people turned to stare.

  Oh, Gunnar, please come, I prayed internally. “He is coming. He said so,” I told Holland, and held up my screen and shook it angrily, forgetting about the tape holding it together. A small shard of glass fell down my sleeve.

  “I can’t wait to meet him,” Holland told me, her voice deceptively angelic, and Gaby nodded happily like the problem was solved. Just like she didn’t acknowledge the issues with her lying, cheating boyfriend, she also overlooked the character flaws in her nasty friends.

  I was glad she had me, and I hoped I could help her see the errors of her ways with Shep, the giant, unprincipled jerk. And as I shot Holland a look of hate and she smiled back at me, I also really, really hoped that Gunnar would come. In any case, I wasn’t going to run away with my tail between my legs and hide like I’d done when I was a teenager. I pushed my shoulders back. No, I was going to stand up and show everyone what Hallie Holliday was made of!

  Chapter 11

  An hour later, I was hiding in Gaby’s bedroom.

  “No, sorry, this is taken,” I said, as yet another person tried to open the door and rattled the locked handle.

  “Hallie? What are you talking about?” Gaby yelled from the hallway, and I ran over and opened it. After all, it was her room.

  “Sorry. I just needed a break,” I said. Holland had been walking around telling everyone about my “boyfriend,” how I had said I was inviting a Woodsmen player over, and then relating the fun story about the tray getting spilled on me at the Silver Dollar. I was getting way, way too much attention at this party.

  I looked carefully at Gaby. Her pretty, golden-brown hair was slightly mussed and her hazel eyes looked unfocused and bleary. “Gaby, how much have you had to drink?” I asked her.

  “A lot. Leo made the most delicious margaritas with the tequila we bought!” she told me loudly. “I’m going to have to work out for hours tomorrow.” She looked down at her hips frowningly, and when she brought her head back up, she swayed.

  Now that I could hear her words without the filter of the door, I picked up on the slurring. Well, it was her party; she could drink all the margaritas she wanted to. “Are you having fun?” I asked.

  “Totally. I’m totally having fun!” She almost yelled it, and I took a step back. “Are you?”


  “Sure. This is great.”

  Gaby looked very sympathetic. “Didn’t the text say he would be a while? I bet he’ll still come! Come on out and get another drink with me. I need one for sure.” I let her drag me out into the living room and toward the whirring blender. “So many people are here! I have so many people who care about me,” she told me, her volume still several decibels beyond what it should have been.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said doubtfully, glancing at the room. These people were in their twenties, weren’t they? But they were stumbling around, making out in the corners, ruining Gaby’s careful pillow placement and spilling liquid on her new mango-orange rugs. I spotted one guest in particular, tilting his head to finish what was in his beer bottle, then letting the empty drip onto the floor before picking up another and guzzling from that. “Oh, no,” I muttered aloud.

  “I meant to tell you that Carey’s here,” Gaby said, and his name came out of her mouth at such a pitch that he turned around and looked at us.

  “Shh!” I admonished, and gave him my back. “Don’t make him come over here.”

  “Too late,” she said, but she did try to modulate. “Why do you hate him so much? Is it because of that old rumor about you two in high school?” she asked, bending to say it loudly into my ear. “Nobody believes that! Of course, no one would think that of you! I don’t like him much, but I try to be cordial,” she went on. “It’s only polite, and plus, his dad owns more vacation rentals than anyone else in northern Michigan. He’s always buying and selling and he’s given me a ton of business!” She had forgotten to be quiet and was back to fully yelling.