The Lateral

Chapter 6

I t had been heartbreaking—like, painful to witness and hard to talk about even now, all these hours later. “I just can’t believe it,” I sighed.

Calandra wiped away a tear. “None of us can,” she said in mournful agreement. “The Woodsmen should have won! They deserved to go to the Confederation championship and they should have won that, too.” She took a shuddering breath. “It was just so close.”

The football game had come down to a last-second field goal, which meant kicking the ball through the fork structure for points (three of them, in this case). The Woodsmen defense had jumped really high to block it, but…

“When it went through the uprights, I think I heard everyone in northern Michigan scream, ‘No!’” she continued. “My mom and I did. We woke up Dreyden, poor little thing, and then we were all crying together.”

In fact, she was crying again right now. A sense of depression had settled over the whole area and I definitely felt it tonight in the club. The men who had come to be entertained were quieter, sadder. They also weren’t tipping as well. We watched as a few small denomination bills got tossed on the stage as Lynn did her thing, and both of us sighed. I would not be adding much to the box up in the vent when I got home.

“Have you talked to Jake Koval?” She whispered the question, but not due to her welling emotions. I’d gotten a lot of attention here when I’d gone to the previous Woodsmen game, the one that had been sold out for weeks and with tickets being scalped for more money than I made in a year. It hadn’t been very pleasant attention, either, and was more of the kind that Meadow had experienced at her school with people angry-jealous and mean. Although, her situation was better since the meeting that had included the lawyer, and I had sent my thanks to Jake about that.

He hadn’t answered, so I shook my head no, and Calandra looked sympathetic. “He hasn’t texted you, not once?” she asked, and immediately answered herself. “That’s ok! He’s probably all broken up about what happened in New Mexico. It was so close!”

More tears brimmed in her eyes as she remembered the moment that the ball had sailed between those bars, the other team had run onto the field in celebration, and our announcers had said, “Jiminy Cricket, I can’t believe it. There will be no championship game for our Woodsmen, not this season. It’s over.”

“I didn’t expect Jake to text me,” I said, a little puzzled. I didn’t expect to hear from him ever again, unless it was about Meadow. “Why would he be in touch?”

She stuck out her bottom lip. “I guess…I don’t know,” she said. “Why did he come over to your house? Why did he help you with stuff?”

“I go over to your house,” I reminded her.

“And you brought me diapers when I couldn’t afford any last month,” she remembered. Dreyden’s dad was hiding (literally) from his responsibilities in regard to his son and I knew that things were tight. “I still owe you for those.”

“I think we’re even,” I corrected her. “You babysit—I should say, you watch Meadow for me when I need it. We’re friends.” It felt great to say that, because with all the moving I’d done in the last few years, I didn’t have many. Any.

“So you’re friends with Jake—” She broke off because she’d forgotten to whisper. “You’re friends with Jake Koval?” she continued, her voice low. “From what I’ve heard about him, he doesn’t seem the type.”

I wasn’t sure I would put a friend label on him, but I didn’t understand what she meant about his “type.” Anyway, we didn’t have time to talk here and now, because Travis was stomping over to do his managerial butt-kicking. “Stop fucking hiding behind the bar,” he snapped at us. “Calandra, get out there. Your regular is looking for you.”

She sighed. “That guy smells like death,” she said. But I knew that he also represented consistent money for her because he tipped well. Technically, we had a “no touching” rule but Travis turned a blind eye to what happened in the private rooms. There were two of them, and when the lights came up, you could see how dirty they were, with way too many unexplained stains on the chairs and sticky spots on the floor.

My boss turned to me. “Get out there and try to land someone yourself,” he told me. “With all the fucking experience you claim to have, you should be pretty goddamn popular but I don’t see you doing shit.”

“Ok, ok,” I told him, and when he yelled to get my ass in gear, I said, “Crudbucket! I’ll go.”

“What the hell did you just call me?” he hollered louder as I walked away. “Stop that damn coughing!”

A few guys were at tables drinking themselves silly to feel better, but no one was very into it tonight. I understood their feelings, as much as I could as a fairly recent fan. I had thought that Meadow would be crushed, too; after we’d watched the ball score the three points and the announcer had made the sad admission that the season was done, I’d turned to look at her, a little fearful.

But she had surprised me. “That’s how it goes sometimes,” she’d said. “They can’t win every game. They’ll be back next summer.”

“That’s true,” I’d concurred. “Wow, that’s a really mature way to look at this, too. I was upset but I feel a lot better after hearing it.”

She had nodded sagely. “I had to get used to the Woodsmen losing, because I would cry so much that my eyes would swell until it was hard to see. When I was little, the quarterback got hurt in one of the games. Davis Blake,” she’d explained. “I threw up and my mom got pissed.”

“Was Christal the one to tell you that it was ok, that they could try again?”

“No, it was my teacher,” she had explained. “I loved Mrs. Dobra.”

And speaking of school, it was…ok? She was going every day and I carefully questioned her when she got home, but as far as I could tell, things there really had improved. The meanest girl, Blair, had been moved to another homeroom and the bully cohort had deteriorated without her leadership. They’d had to write apology letters but I’d said no way to their “justice circle” idea, where Meadow would have had to listen to them lie some apologies and she was supposed to talk honestly about how much they had hurt her (giving them new ways to giggle at her misery).

Like Calandra, she had also wanted to know if Jake had been in contact. While I’d been trying to rush her out to the school bus that morning, she’d asked me about him. “Do you think he lives somewhere else during the offseason?” she’d mused.

“Put on your shoes while we talk, please.” I waited to answer until I saw her start tying. “Why would he have two houses?” I had remembered what he’d said about that before, how it wasn’t a vacation for him to move between his mom and dad (since neither of them had seemed to want him). But still, it must have been a relief to have not one but two places to go, just in case. Because you never knew, and it was certainly wonderful to have backups.

She’d paused, not putting on her nice coat and not picking up her old bag. “A lot of the players leave after the season is over,” she explained.

“Why? Do you have your lunch? Where’s your lunch?” I had asked her, looking around.

“It’s cold here, and there aren’t many places for them to train,” she said, slowly slipping on her coat. “Their practice facility gets taken over by the Junior Woodsmen, the development league team. You can go to their games, too,” she’d added. “I think the tickets are cheap because they’re all outside.”

“Yeah, maybe we could…there’s the bus. Run!” I’d stood at the window and monitored as she got on (I was optimistic that things were going better, but I hadn’t thrown out my common sense). While I had watched them pull away, I’d wondered about Jake. Would he go, like she’d said? He’d mentioned having animals, so maybe he wouldn’t be able to leave them and if that was the case, I might run into him in town sometimes. I might even get a job at that farm store where he seemed to shop. Maybe the owners there would pay great and make me a manager. “You’re so dedicated to rural life,” they’d tell me. “We would like you to have a pension.”

That was all possible—for tomorrow. For now, my shift at B-Dzld was over and it was very, very late. I had to get myself home safely over streets that were pretty icy, and I felt so tired. I swerved once because I’d gone off the road when I let my eyes stay closed for a moment too long instead of blinking them open. I was going to have to start bringing a thermos of coffee to work, and I’d keep it behind the bar. Barnacles! I pinched my leg and forced myself awake, but by the time I got home, I was a mess, so sleepy that I could barely make it in from the car. I had no memory of undressing or of getting into my bed.

That was why I woke up with my bag over my arm, fully clothed, face-down, one shoe on the blanket next to me. “What?” I asked out loud. And then my next thought was that it was Friday, and Meadow! I leaped up, tripped over the other shoe on the floor, fell, and crawled a few paces before I got up again and ran into her room. Her old backpack was gone from next to the desk I’d bought second-hand and painted. But she could have taken out the books and filled the bag with clothes and food, because that was what I had done…I looked around wildly. No, her books weren’t here, either, and neither was her coat when I raced into the living room to look for it.

I heard the truck in the driveway and leaped to open the door. “Jake! Meadow’s gone,” I called as I ran further, out onto the porch and toward him.

He stopped moving across the frozen lawn. “What? Where is she? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know, but she’s gone! I slept in by mistake and I can’t find her!” I had to calm down, to think rationally. “She’s on foot, unless she made older friends like I did.” I looked around. “Holy Moses, she stole my car!”

“No, your car is parked on the road a quarter mile down,” he said. “I thought something was wrong.”

“It is! Why would I have parked there?” I rubbed my eyes as I looked at it. I did vaguely remember having a longer walk to the front door than usual when I’d come home the night before.

“Let’s go inside,” he ordered, and I nodded. It would be easier to start forming search parties from there, and also, I was barefoot. “Why do you think she’s not at school? Is she still having problems?”

“Nothing was going to go away and get magically resolved because I stood up to Mrs. Dogpoop at the last meeting.”

“On the website, it says her name is ‘ Dragnall ,’” he pointed out. “Have you called there? Why aren’t you tracking her phone?”

“Oh!” I gasped, and started to search wildly for my own phone, before I realized that it was in the purse that was still hanging over my shoulder. My fingers shook as I opened the app…

And there she was. Her location? Madelon Stockwell Turner Middle School.

I sagged with relief. “Thank goodness, oh, thank goodness. I thought she had run away.”

“Has she been doing that?”

“She could,” I said. “I’m sure it’s on her mind.”

“Not if she thinks it through,” he told me. “Running off in the middle of winter as a twelve-year-old? That would be crazy.”

“Kids aren’t often celebrated for their logic,” I said, and went to start making coffee. Despite the extra hours of sleep I’d gotten, I still felt pretty—wait a minute.

I turned with the pot in my hand. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m back in town, thought I’d stop by,” he answered. He checked the couch and then sat.

“I’m really sorry about that game. I thought you should have won.”

“The score said otherwise. Fucking sucks,” he mentioned, and he wiped his hand over his face. He looked tired, too. “I thought we were going to do it this year.”

“There were some very unfair penalties,” I said, because Meadow had pointed them out to me and the Woodsmen announcers, Bernard and Earl, had also been angry. They seemed to be fans first, and reporters second.

“The refs called it pretty well,” Jake told me. “We had our chances.”

“Next season,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “You said before that you give yourself a week off and then you start training. Is this your cheat week?”

“It is.”

“What are you going to do? Are you going to travel? You could go to a beautiful beach, or see historical landmarks. You could go to another country if you have a passport. You probably do since you play in Canada sometimes, and in France, right? Meadow told me.” I yawned, then coughed.

“You should sit your ass down in a chair. Your hand is shaking and the next thing that happens is you drop that coffee pot. I’m too tired to try to catch it before it hits the ground.”

I did sit, and it felt good. “You’re right, I am a little shaky,” I acknowledged. “I didn’t mean to sleep in but I must have needed it more than I knew. Meadow did all the morning stuff by herself.” I felt a glow of pride in her actions, and also a lot of surprise. The last time I’d slept in had been the day that she’d carved the banana into his truck’s door.

“Sounds like she’s turning things around. What about the other little—” He paused. “I remember that you didn’t like it when I called Meadow a hellion, so I won’t say the word I have in mind for the girls who ruined her backpack.”

“I call them lots of things, but I keep it internal. The most I’ll say out loud is ‘monkey butts’ or ‘cornfed jerkoffs,’ stuff like that.”

He seemed to start to smile but he rubbed his mouth, and it was gone when he moved his hand away. “What’s happening with the monkey butts?” he asked me, and I filled him in on the latest. It still seemed to be nothing, which was such a relief.

“Right?” I prompted. “I feel like that’s the best possible outcome. My goal was for them to leave her alone.”

“That’s one thing I do right now, after the season is over,” he mentioned. “I set goals. What would be the best possible outcome for next season?”

“Winning the championship.”

“No,” he disagreed. “I mean for me, personally. I think about sacks, the red zone, block grades.”

I knew what a sack was and figured I could learn the rest, so I nodded.

“So she’s not a punching bag anymore, great. That’s it?” He shook his head. “The goal is for her to run that shit. The goal is for her to stand up and tell them to fuck off.”

“She can’t say the F-word at school.”

He shook his head more. “The goal is for her to dust them.”

I nodded again. “I wouldn’t mind any of that. For right now, she’s safe and that’s enough. We can think bigger later. One thing at a time.”

“What about you? What do you want for the future?”

“My goals are her goals,” I said. “She’s it. I have to get this right.”

He just looked at me, and it was impossible to read what he thought. It didn’t really matter much, anyway, since I was the one in charge and making the decisions, me alone. Although, I didn’t feel quite as on top of things when I did stuff like frantically running outside in my clothes from last night and with no shoes on my feet.

“So you wanted to stop by here to…” I hinted, and he got up. No, I hadn’t meant to make him leave! “You should stay and have coffee,” I said. “I could make breakfast, too.”

“Let’s go have lunch.”

“Lunch?” I squinted at my phone. “How did it get so late? Cheese and crackers!”

“You want to eat cheese and crackers?”

“No, I’m trying to find something that works as well for me as swearing used to,” I explained. “I take a phrase for a test run and if it isn’t satisfying, I try another.”

This time, he did smile. “Looks like you’re already dressed,” he remarked. “Let’s go.”

Actually, I needed to take a shower because I felt gunky, and I wanted to wear something that I hadn’t slept in. It took a little while longer, but I was pretty fast. While I was changing, Jake found my keys (I’d left them in the front door by mistake) and moved my car into my own patch of driveway. Then I climbed up into his truck and we went together.

“I got up late too,” he mentioned. “There was a pile of crap to get done at my ranch and I meant to jump right on it, but it didn’t happen this morning. I lay around my house, lazy.”

“What is your house like?”

“It’s nice,” he said succinctly, but I pressed on.

“So you really do have animals?” I asked.

“Did I tell you that? Right, you thought Meadow could pay me back by—”

“I owe you that money,” I interrupted.

“I told you that I don’t want it. But she could do some shit around the barn,” he said. “There’s always a lot of literal shit, if she wouldn’t mind shoveling.”

I wasn’t sure so I sidestepped, just as I would do on the ground around his barn if I ever visited there. “You know what I would really like? Remember how I told you that I want her to exercise more and learn sports? I’d like that for myself, too.”

“I have a gym,” he mentioned. “You two could come over and use it. Depending on what sports she’s interested in, I may have some experience.”

“Like in what? What have you done?”

Jake started to list things, and it appeared that football wasn’t the only thing he was good at. In high school, he’d also wrestled and played baseball in the spring. He liked to golf and bowl, and he loved basketball. He dabbled in tennis and had done the shot put his senior year when the track and field team really needed someone. He’d also picked up some kind of frisbee sport in college where tackling wasn’t allowed but, as he said, “We were both going up to grab it. Sometimes the other guys fell down.” I could only imagine the fear in the hearts of his frisbee opponents when he’d shown up to play.

“What don’t you do?” I asked.

He had to think. “I’ve never tried curling but I’d like to. How about you?”

“I never did any sport at all. None,” I promised, when he seemed skeptical. “I hardly even went on the playground very often.”

“Why was that?”

“I was busy, I guess. What do you do in your gym?”

For the rest of the way to the restaurant, he described his routine. Lifting weights was a big part of it—literally big, because when I asked him how many pounds he used, I couldn’t believe how high the numbers went. He ran on his treadmill, he biked, he spent time on the erg machine (which meant fake rowing, no water). “I run on my property, too, but I don’t go to gyms around here too much,” he told me.

“Why?”

“Because no one leaves me alone,” he explained. “I don’t want ten women to offer their numbers while I’m doing squats.” He shook his head. “I can’t talk to them. It’s terrible.”

I imagined that it would be hard to talk when you were lifting something that was the weight of the moon, as he did. It must have been frustrating and “terrible,” as he put it, to get bothered like that. But ten? Ten people asking for his number? I thought about the women who had tried to corner him outside the farm stuff store, and I decided it probably wasn’t an exaggeration. Besides the general level of interest in the Woodsmen among the people up here, Jake Koval was definitely good-looking. Due to all that working out and the hundreds of sports he played, he was so tough and strong. He also seemed like he would give the best hugs. He would wrap you up in his huge arms and you’d never want him to let go, and you could close your eyes and absolutely revel in it.

“There’s a lot to do on my land,” he continued. “I hire help, more during the season, but I do chores. I take down trees, clear brush, build walls, move rocks. That alone is a good workout.”

“How much property do you have?” I asked, but he was turning off the engine and getting out, because we had arrived at a place I’d never been before. That was not a surprise, since I’d never been out to a restaurant here, not one. And he did get a lot of looks from the other customers but rather than interest, I recognized sympathy. I saw a bearded guy wipe under his eyes with a paper napkin.

I was very excited to be looking at a menu, because it had been a while since I’d held one in my hands (and this one had nice, big print), but the sadness here was affecting me and it must have affected Jake, too. “The loss hit people pretty hard,” I said quietly.

“I hate this feeling.” He frowned, seemingly angry rather than crushed like the people seated around us.

“If you don’t like them staring at you—”

“No, I hate the feeling that I let everyone down. I know how much they love the team. I swear that I did my best.” His knee jiggled in a rapid, irregular rhythm.

Was he trying to convince me? I closed the menu and reached across the table to pat his hand. “I know that, and so does everyone in this restaurant. They’re not mad at you but I bet they want to hug you.”

“They want to hug me?” he asked doubtfully. “No, nobody wants to do that.”

But I remained convinced that he was good at it. “I bet they do,” I said. “I bet that if you got up and asked that lady over there for a hug, she’d squeeze you to pieces.”

Jake turned his head slightly and shot a quick glance at an older woman enjoying what looked like lasagna. He seemed a little flushed as he shook his head. “Maybe,” he said.“I’m not sure I want to hug a stranger.”

I studied the color in his face. “Does it actually bother you to be on display right now?”

“Actually, I’m pretty used to it,” he answered. “But I keep hoping that people here will get used to me.”

“You could move back to southern California, to Los Angeles,” I suggested. “There are plenty of famous people there and they’re not as into sports, not as far as I could tell.”

“No, I live here permanently,” he answered. “When were you in Los Angeles?”

The last time I’d told part of my travel history to a man, he’d been bored. Then he had tried to pull me upstairs to an apartment and had hit me in the face. I touched my lip with my fingertip but the scab was gone, leaving only a red mark behind that I covered up with plenty of makeup. “I left Michigan and drove across the country, working as I went,” I explained. “I ended up in Los Angeles after about a year and then after a while there, I drove off again.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see things,” I answered. “I had never been anywhere. Before I got that car, I hadn’t even laid eyes on one of the Great Lakes and we’re surrounded by them in this state.” The first thing I’d done was drive to the shore of Lake Michigan to stare at the water. I had been amazed and since I’d moved up here, I’d gone to look again every chance I could.

“Where’d you work?”

“Clubs, mostly, but I did whatever I had to. I needed food and gas, but I slept in the car a lot to cut down on expenses.” That had been hard in terms of bathing and other bathroom purposes, but I’d managed. “I left Michigan in April so it wasn’t too bad at night, and when it was cold, I dealt with it.”

“And you were how old?”

“Sixteen. I knew how to take care of myself,” I said. “According to my ID, I was twenty-one and from Nevada. The capital is Carson City and the state gemstone is a black fire opal.”

“Good to know.”

“Most people in the Midwest hadn’t seen a Nevada license and knowing a few facts helped to convince them that it was real,” I explained. It had gotten tricker the farther west I’d gone, and I’d had to ditch it for good in the actual state of Nevada where I’d moved to being from Connecticut. Hartford and the almandine garnet.

“I can’t imagine that you looked any older than sixteen no matter what your fake IDs said. You don’t look much older right now,” he told me. “You were that age and working in strip clubs?”

“I made pretty good money at some of those jobs,” I said nostalgically. Then a lot less nostalgically, I added, “It was an advantage to look young. There are some real perverted men out there.”

“Mother of all fucks.” He sighed. “Yeah, I know you’re right.”

But he didn’t know, not really. “Sometimes it was hard to leave places because they were nice…well, not exactly where I was living, but the towns themselves. I kept going because I really did want to see new things.”

“Well?” he asked. “Did you see enough?”

I wasn’t sure, and anyway, the server came back for our order. I figured I’d eat half of what I got and save the rest for Meadow’s dinner as a treat for her, too. But when I mentioned that, Jake signaled to the waiter again and asked for an extra of my plate to go.

“Eat as much as you want,” he told me. His eyes swept around the restaurant again, his cheeks flushed. “Do you really think that they want to hug me?”

“I think you should go ask them,” I said. “Or better yet, just stand in the middle of the room and open your arms. It will be like watching bugs fly into the zapper.”

Jake smiled, which I hadn’t seen too often. “I’ll be the deadly light?”

“They won’t be able to stay away,” I said, nodding. “I’m glad you came over today.”

“Yeah, because you would have run the fifteen miles to the sheriff’s office in the snow, barefoot.”

“I might have come to my senses after a while, hopefully before I got frostbite. I was just so worried,” I said. “It’s hard when you love someone so much.”

“You love her?” he asked, and I was shocked.

“Of course I do!”

“But you don’t know her,” he argued. “You just met her.”

“No—”

“Yeah,” he cut me off. “You took care of her when she was a baby, but you only recently met her as a real person.”

“I’ve loved her this whole time,” I protested. “Christal would send a few pictures and updates to our sister Davisa, and Davisa sent them to me because I bugged her a lot, even though she hates me due to our mom…that’s a complicated story. I followed all of Christal’s social media under fake accounts of my own so I could see things there, too.” She had never posted very much, though. “I wasn’t fully out of touch. I was somewhat,” I admitted, “but it wasn’t by choice.”

“So all these years, you never stopped feeling the love.”

I nodded. “And when I saw her again, even though I saw her again while she was screaming and fighting inside the social worker’s car, I knew that we were going to be a family, Meadow and me. I just knew. Sometimes that happens.”

He looked at me and nodded. “I got it,” he said, and I thought that maybe, he did.