“Why?” I asked curiously.
“Because that’s how I want my house to feel,” he told me. “Like yours, munch.”
“Why are you calling me that? Are you trying to say that I eat too much? That I’m fat?”
He ran off the road and swerved back onto it, but thankfully, we were almost exactly in the middle of nowhere, so no other car got involved. “Why would you think that?” Gunnar demanded when he’d straightened the wheels.
“I practically licked my plate clean at Jory and Meredith’s house,” I pointed out.
“That’s because she’s a really good cook. Do you think she could teach us?” he mused, before shaking his head. “I’m calling you that, just like I used to call my sister Ingrid ‘giraffe’ because she’s almost as tall as I am.”
“That’s mean!”
“No, it’s great for her!” he protested. “She played Division One volleyball and killed it. Coaches are already trying to recruit her kids for every sport there is. It was a compliment, because Grete and Tove and Marit wished they were that tall, too.”
“What were you calling me, then?” I asked suspiciously.
“A munchkin, because you’re small.”
“I am not!” I said, affronted. “I’m normal-sized but your sense of scale is off. A gorilla would seem small compared to you.”
He laughed. “I don’t know about a gorilla. But if it bothers you, I’ll stop calling you that.”
“Well.” I thought. “I guess you can. Ok, yes, it’s fine.” And secretly, my heart was now soaring over the fact that he had a nickname for me. It felt like that meant something.
“Good,” Gunnar said. “That’s settled. But why would you think I would call you an insulting name? And that’s not the first time you’ve made some remark about me criticizing your weight.”
“Well, you know, I’m not what you’d call slender. I’m more what you’d call sturdy.”
“I wouldn’t call you that at all,” he disagreed.
“I almost got a job handling a deep fryer because I was sturdy enough to tackle it,” I told him. “That exact word was used.”
“First, I don’t think you should be working with boiling-hot oil. I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m just concerned about, uh, accidents.” He glanced over at me, and I nodded. Yes, it was probably for the best that I hadn’t gotten the job at the restaurant. “Second,” Gunnar continued, “anyone who calls you ‘sturdy’ must have been breathing too many french fry fumes. Or, maybe that was meant as a compliment, because you look great to me. Ok?”
I swallowed and nodded. “Ok. Thanks.”
His palm slid over across the seat. His eyes on the road, he picked up my hand in his. “Ok with this, too?”
I nodded. It was really, really ok with me.
∞
“Stupid football.”
Marley lifted her head out of her world history textbook. “What?”
“Football is annoying. Away games, they’re annoying,” I explained heatedly. “I hate away games.” The Woodsmen’s schedule seemed to be full of them, too, dragging the players back and forth, taking them from Michigan when people around here really wanted to hang out with them. And it made those players really tired, also, so that even when they were home, they were trying to rest and recover from injuries and they weren’t able to see the selfish people who wanted all their time. I sighed.
“Maybe you could email the coach,” Marley suggested. “You could tell him, ‘Stop going away so that I can keep dripping my drool puddle around Gunnar Christensen, who’s also my boss.’”
What was even more annoying than away games was that this girl missed nothing. “I’m not making drool puddles,” I informed her.
“You do whenever he comes in here,” she informed me right back, gesturing around the bookstore. “You turn, like, totally red when you see him and if he smiles you do this.” She let her mouth hang open and her tongue droop out.
“That’s repulsive and I do not!” I frowned. “Do you really see my tongue like that?” She shrugged an answer and I tapped her textbook with my pen. “Don’t you have a test next week? Keep reading and don’t worry about the Woodsmen.”
“You brought them up,” she told me, and then said softly, “You always do.”
I did not. Did I? “Oh, Rob?” I called to one of the workmen as he walked past our desk. “The plumber wanted to talk to you about what’s happening in the back room. I guess there’s a waste pipe that needs to go right in a spot where you put some framing.”
Rob swore, looked at Marley, and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“I’ve never heard that word before,” she told him with her deadpan face, and he looked worried as he went to check on his boards.
The bookstore, as it underwent renovations, really wasn’t the best environment for tutoring, or for talking, or for doing anything without a dust mask, but Marley had nothing going on most Saturdays and I wanted to keep an eye on her. Since I wanted to keep an eye on the construction, too, that meant we were hanging out with the crew as they worked overtime. With Linda’s unspoken approval, I had totally thrown in the towel on only seeing Marley at the learning center, and we were hanging out together a lot more, not just when I was trying to cram world history down her throat.
And speaking of hanging out, I had been trying to convince her to come with me tonight to the Woodsmen game, since they were finally playing at home again. If she didn’t come with me, I was pretty sure that she would be going to a senior party she’d heard about that I really didn’t want her to attend.
“Are you positive that you don’t want to come? It’s really fun at Woodsmen Stadium, with lots of delicious snacks,” I tempted. “And we get to go back and sit in the family lounge tonight to see the players come out after the game.” Gunnar had invited me to wait for him and I was trying not to let on to Marley how exited I was about this.
“Oooh, a lounge? Who doesn’t want to sit in a lounge?” She gave me major eye roll.
“Aren’t you at all interested in meeting the Woodsmen?” I tempted further.
“I already met the one. That’s enough.” She had been completely unimpressed by Gunnar when I’d introduced them and every subsequent time he’d come here to check on the construction, which was great for him. Her utter nonchalance had made him totally comfortable around her. She was the only person left in northern Michigan who didn’t care about our football team, now that I had jumped on the bandwagon.
“If I went to the game with you, would you buy me a beer?” Marley asked me.
“No, of course not!” I shot back, horrified.
“Do we get to go into the locker room? Or the showers? If I could sell some pictures—”
“Marley!”
She cracked up, shaking so that she had to put her head down on the table. “You’re so easy. Sorry,” she told me, when the hilarity waned.
Those were two things I had never thought to hear from her: laughter, and an apology. I smiled, thrilled, then started to laugh, too. “Fine, I’ll go with Gaby. She’s legal to drink beer,” I said, and got only a minor eye roll back. Going with Gaby was contingent on if I could drag her out of the fun house that was her condo. She was leaving there even less than before, and had continued to online shop with a vengeance. It was getting hard to move through the rooms with the number of accessories she’d collected.
“Color makes me feel good,” she’d explained when I commented on the many, many different shades decorating the walls, floors, furniture, and even ceiling. I had nodded, tripped over a new pouf, and left my sunglasses on until we went outside again and my eyes didn’t need the protection from the glare.
Marley left the bookstore, promising to go home and study, which she assured me was what the cool kids did on Saturday nights, anyway. That was what I had done in high school and no one had ever ventured to call me that, but Marley said that times had changed. “You’d be the coolest person in our whole school,” she told me, “except for your clot
hes.” She was still angling for a lot more skin, but now that it was fall and really felt like it, even she was loosening up on that. She let me hug her goodbye and I watched carefully until I saw her get picked up, and waved to her foster dad.
I called Gaby from the phone at the bookstore that always worked, now that Gunnar’s crew had straightened out the issues with the wiring that had previously messed with the phone lines. My grandpa’s friend Lew had “fixed” the electrical system at the store, too.
Despite what she had said about needing to have some fun and getting out of the house, Gaby didn’t answer and she didn’t call me back about having dinner and then driving to the game together. And when I got to the stadium later that evening, the seat next to me stayed empty even as the Woodsmen lined up for the kickoff.
“Where are you?” I texted her for the third time since sitting down, and I hit my phone against my palm to try to force the message to go through. It emitted a funny sound that I took as a positive.
“Work emergency,” the screen suddenly read. I narrowed my eyes at the words. Who had a real estate emergency on a Saturday night? Especially since every single person in the area, besides Marley, was either at this game, watching it, or listening to Herb and Buzz on the radio?
“Are you with S?” I wrote back, and when she didn’t answer, I wrote, “Gaby? Are you with him?”
I waited impatiently for her response because I knew that if my phone was actually working, she would have seen what I had sent. Gaby’s eyes never strayed too far from her screen, for work but especially in case she heard from Shep. Her terrible married boyfriend/jackass was an infrequent texter, but she hung on her phone anyway, waiting. He had been busy this week, feeding her some story about the two of them going away for the night together, even though his wife hadn’t yet left for Florida. In fact, Gaby had told me tearfully that she might just change her plans and stay in Michigan for the winter, because she was acting strangely and making Shep nervous.
“Gaby?” I wrote again, but she didn’t respond. Darn it.
Well, I could enjoy the game on my own, even though it was a lot more fun to chat with Gaby in between the action. But sitting by myself made me focus more on what was happening on the field at all times—I meant, besides just watching Gunnar, I actually looked at other people.
I watched the Woodsmen cheerleaders, formerly called the Dames, strut in their tiny outfits and shake what nature had given them, and I watched Jory smash into people on the other side of the quarterback from Gunnar. I watched his fiancée Meredith’s dad, the Woodsmen head coach, and all the action on the sidelines, where the coaches, trainers, and other personnel were always running around and working. I missed Gaby, but I was enjoying being on my own, and also eating a giant tub of popcorn without feeling like I needed to match her lack of caloric intake. There was a reason that she was thin and I was sturdy, no matter what Gunnar said about it.
But when I remembered what he’d said about it, I got a big smile while sitting alone in the stands. Sturdy wasn’t so bad, not when you were next to a guy who could looked like he could crush a car with the same hand that was gently holding yours. Yes, we hadn’t seen each other much because he was so busy, but we’d been doing some hand-holding. I smiled bigger, and the man sitting one seat over looked at me uncomfortably.
“I’m not smiling at you,” I told him, and turned my happiness in the other direction.
Gunnar played great—all the Woodsmen did. I was mentally calculating how many points they would score if they continued at roughly the same rate across the next quarter and a half, and that was why I didn’t immediately notice that he was hurt. It felt like someone had slapped me when I suddenly saw he was down on the field and not getting up, and Jory and the quarterback were waving people over from the sidelines.
They took him off on a cart somewhere and I certainly wasn’t interested in the rest of the game. I barreled my way up through the stands and to the family lounge, remembering the directions he’d given me and the stadium diagram I’d looked up on the working computer in the bookstore. There was a security guard standing at the door, and he looked very surprised to see me. My name was on the list of admitted guests that he had, but it was only the third quarter.
“Don’t you want to see the rest of the game?” he asked me. “There are TVs in there, but it’s much better live.”
“I came to watch Gunnar, but…”
“Oh, right.” The security guard winced. “I saw what happened. Ok, well, you can wait in here,” he told me, and let me into the lounge. “I’ll see if I can find out anything for you.”
It might have been a nice room, or he might have been locking me in a dungeon or a pit of snakes for all the attention I paid to it. I was pounding away on my phone and writing to Gunnar, so many messages and so often that suddenly my screen seemed to smear, and I realized that I had bled a little bit from my fingertip from where the tape had failed. I was also crying a little, because he wasn’t answering, but I had tuned to Herb and Buzz’s radio broadcast and what they were saying about his back being injured very badly was scaring me to death.
I was wishing, very, very hard, that Gaby was here with me, because I was sure she would have had something comforting to say. Or Marley, who wouldn’t have said anything comforting but would have told me if I was the appropriate level of freaked out, because I had lost perspective.
The security guard came back into the lounge to tell me that they were treating Gunnar and he wasn’t going to have to go to the hospital, and he would pass along any more news, and then the game ended. Meredith came in to wait for Jory along with a throng of other people dressed in Woodsmen fan gear. “Hallie, hi,” she said, and she looked concerned. “Jory will come out and tell us what happened. I’m sure he’s fine.” Of course, she didn’t know how badly Gunnar’s back was already injured, so I just nodded.
Meredith started to tell me a story about how Jory had been hurt, too, the season before, and how it had all worked out, but I was having trouble paying attention. “Do you think you could tell me this later?” I asked her. “I’m not really listening to you right now.”
She opened and closed her mouth and I realized that I had been rude again.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “I just mean that I’m very distracted because I’m worried.”
“I get it,” she said, and smiled. “It’s ok.”
Jory was the first one out into the lounge, practically running from the back and still pulling on his shirt. First he grabbed his fiancée and kissed her like they’d been apart for years rather than hours, and then he turned to me, his stern face very serious.
“He’s in with the doctors and he said it was going to take a while. You should go, if you want,” he told me.
“No, I don’t want to,” I answered firmly. “Not at all.”
Jory nodded as if he approved. “Lyle,” he called, and the security guard who had let me into the lounge came over. “Can you take her out to get her car and pull it into the players’ lot?” Meredith talked more about calling her or something but I just waved and went to move the car, not wanting to leave the lounge at all in case something happened while I was gone.
And my car didn’t start, anyway. “Oh, well, that’s all right,” the security guard told me. “Happens a lot when it starts to get cold. I can jump it for you—”
“I can’t wait for that!” I said impatiently. “No, I mean, thank you, but can you drive me back? I can’t wait here. I need to be inside, there,” I told him, and pointed through the darkness at the stadium.
“Sure, sure,” Lyle the security guard answered calmly, and he turned the golf cart around and shot back through the empty parking lots to let me back into the lounge.
It was empty now, and a little eerie, and I got more and more nervous as I sat there for longer and longer. Then my phone suddenly pinged with a message that Gunnar was on his way out. I stood, ready, and hopped a little as I waited. And waited.
H
e came through the door that Jory had run through, but he walked very, very slowly, and he wasn’t smiling like he usually did. “Hi, munch,” he told me, and I ran across the room, barely stopping myself before I threw my arms around him.
I skidded almost, and he put his hands out, too. “What—”
“I’m ok,” he interrupted. “Same old problem. I just want to go home.”
“Need a ride to the parking lot, Gunnar?” the security guard called, appearing from what felt like thin air. I hoped he hadn’t seen me trying to pick the lock to get into the players’ area.
“No thanks, Lyle. I need to move.” But he still moved so slowly, it took a long time before we made it out to the parking lot. “Can you leave your car here and drive me?” he asked.
“That’s already taken care of,” I answered. I hovered as he lowered himself into the passenger seat, then ran, skidded and hit the hood with a thump, and finally made it to the driver’s side. My hands shook as I moved the seat forward to try to reach the steering wheel and pedals. It squeaked its way, bit by bit, gear by gear, inch by inch…
“Darn it!” I yelled. “Move, you stupid chair!”
“Hallie.” I looked over at Gunnar. He reached and put one of his hands where mine was clenched around the wheel. “Relax, ok? You don’t need to worry.”
Sure, relax, with him closing his eyes and obviously trying not to groan in pain every time we hit a bump. And the roads had never seemed so much like driving over a washboard. Did no one ever repair them? I leaned forward and clutched the wheel harder, trying to drive faster and yet more smoothly, and cursing the fact that Gunnar had chosen to live next to me on a dirt road. I meant, I was happy he lived next to me, but why on Earth would we have left the road in this terribly rutted condition? It sucked! I fumed and planned to start working on it soon, tomorrow if possible. Someone needed to do something!
I was so caught up in my plans to somehow rent a grading apparatus that I almost jumped out of the car when Gunnar spoke. “Come in with me, ok?”
The Last Whistle Page 21