17. Greer
Greer
By the morning, the league names Kieran the East coach for the All-Star Game, I am sixteen weeks pregnant, four pounds heavier than I have ever been in any year of my adult life, and standing in front of the bathroom mirror in my apartment with my hand under the band of the work pants that were, in October, the loosest pair I owned.
The pants do not, anymore, button.
I have been bracing for this. The week we got back from the Christmas break, I bought two pairs of soft-banded maternity work pants in the same charcoal as my regular ones, and I have been wearing them, under a long charcoal cardigan that hides where the bands meet, on the theory that the only person looking at me closely enough to notice the change of fabric is the person who is, in any practical sense, allowed to.
I put the maternity pants on. The cardigan goes over the polo. The boots are the boots that go with everything.
In the mirror, the woman looking back at me has been the same woman since New Year's, and I am, this week, finally used to her. Her face has gone round. Her chest, in twenty-six years, is unfamiliar territory. Under the cardigan, her belly is, this week, going to start being very hard to miss.
I leave for the practice facility at seven-thirty.
The traveling party for the All-Star Game is leaving Boston this afternoon.
The travelers, by the league's protocol, are the head coach of the East team, his two assistants, the league's medical liaison, and the head trainer the league has assigned to cover everybody for the weekend.
The Barons' head PT is, by the same protocol, supposed to stay home.
Kieran calls me from his office on the sixth floor mid-morning.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"I have nine minutes."
"Okay."
"I need to tell you something in person, but the next time I am going to be in person with you is Sunday night, and I do not want this on a phone for four days."
"Ok…what’s up?"
"Can you come up? Three minutes."
I take the elevator with a clean professional face on. I knock on his office door. He says come in. The blinds on the interior glass are down, the way they always are when I am in this office.
He has a folder on his desk. He sets it aside.
"Sit."
I sit. He sits across the desk.
"Magnus Whitcombe."
I look at him.
"From Chicago."
Magnus Whitcombe owns the Chicago Crowns.
He is the richest team owner in the Western Conference, a man my parents' age, the kind of name that shows up in the back half of the Forbes list for the third generation in a row.
I have, in the four months I have been on the Barons payroll, heard his name in three contract-talk hallway conversations and one mention in a Globe trade-deadline piece.
"He called this morning," Kieran says. "The league office gave him my number for All-Star logistics. He used it for something else."
"And what was that?"
"He told me he would like to talk to me when my contract is up. He told me he is not making me an offer today, but he wanted me to know there is a job in Chicago for me whenever I am ready."
"Okay."
"I told him I am under contract through the spring."
"Okay."
"And I told him I would not, until I am out of contract, take a meeting with him."
"Okay."
"I am telling you, Greer, because I want you to know what is in the room. I will finish out this season, and then we will talk about it."
He sits across the desk from me with his sleeves rolled and the folder set aside, and I understand, suddenly and completely, that whatever Magnus Whitcombe does, the man in front of me is staying.
"Thank you," I say.
"For what?"
"For telling me."
"I haven't decided anything alone since November, Greer."
"I know."
He nods. He picks the folder back up.
I get up.
At the door, with my hand on the handle, I look back at him.
"Call me when you get to the hotel."
"I will."
The sixth-floor hallway on the Thursday before an All-Star Break is quiet, like the building empties out before a long weekend.
I take the elevator to three and go back to the medical wing.
I do the rest of the morning the way I have done the rest of every morning since the road trip, which is competently and slowly and at three-quarters of the speed I was working at in October.
The building becomes increasingly quiet. The traveling party is in the air. The non-travelers are on the way home for the weekend. The medical wing has, by the time I leave, exactly two people in it, which is me and Will.
I leave at four and when I get home, I sit on the edge of my bed in the soft maternity pants and the cardigan, and I do not get up for forty minutes.
Indie texts me a little after six.
All-Star weekend, no dad in town. dinner Saturday? my place? I'll cook.
I read it twice.
I type back: yes. saturday. what should I bring?
She sends back: bread + your sense of humor.
I send three hearts.
I put the phone down.
* * *
Kieran calls from the hotel that night.
"You made it."
"We did. The room is fine. The view is the back of a Marriott parking lot."
"Sounds professional."
"The league does not allocate for views in its event-planning budget."
"Mm."
"How are you?"
"I am four pounds heavier than I have ever been and I had to switch over to maternity pants for good this morning."
"I want a picture."
"You do not get a picture."
"Greer."
"You do not get a picture, Kieran. I look like a tired person in soft pants and the cardigan you gave me at Christmas."
"That is the picture I want."
I do not, for a second, answer.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"How are you doing today?"
"I am getting through it. Indie texted. We are having dinner on Saturday at her place. She is cooking."
"At her place."
"At her place."
"That sounds — "
"It sounds like having dinner with my best friend on a Saturday night."
"Yes."
"I miss you."
"I miss you too."
"Goodnight, Greer."
"Goodnight, Kieran."
He hangs up.
* * *
He calls again Friday night from a hotel hallway between two media commitments.
The call is fifty-eight seconds long. He spends it telling me that the East assistant coach who used to play for him in Hartford has a daughter who is eleven and a half and who knew the names of all four of the Barons' line combinations off the top of her head when she met him in the lobby, and that the daughter has just told him she is going to be a head coach when she grows up.
He sounds, for the entire fifty-eight seconds, like himself.
I drive to Indie's at six-thirty on Saturday with a bag from the bakery in my passenger seat and the soft maternity pants under the long charcoal cardigan that hides what they need to hide.
Indie opens the door.
She has her hair in a bun and is wearing an apron. She kisses me on the cheek, takes the bread from me, and walks me to the kitchen.
She doesn't look at the front of me for the first few minutes. Then she does — once, fast — and her face changes.
She doesn't say a word about what she sees. Not yet.
We sit down. She pours herself a glass of wine. She holds the bottle over my glass.
"None for me," I say.
She sets the bottle down on the table between us.
She says, very quietly: "Greer."
"Indie."
"It’s been five months."
"I know."
"Five months of you tired and not eating and skipping the wine and looking the way you have been looking. Five months of me telling myself it is the new job and the road trips and the schedule. Five months of me asking you if you are okay and you not looking at me when you answer."
"I know."
"Are you sick?"
"No."
"Are you pregnant?"
I look at her.
I do not, for several seconds, answer.
She looks back at me from across the small table in her front room with the open bottle of wine between us and the pot of pasta cooling on the stove, and I look at the best friend I have had for three years, and the question she is asking has been behind her teeth at every dinner and every Saturday wine night and every team event since the day after Thanksgiving.
"Yes," I say.
She is, for several seconds, very still.
Then she gets up out of her chair, walks around the table, and pulls me up out of mine. She wraps both her arms around me from the side, very gently, and presses her cheek against the side of my head.
She says, into my hair: "Oh, Greer."
I close my eyes.
"How far along?"
"Twenty weeks tomorrow."
"Halloween."
"Right after."
"You found out at Halloween?"
"I did."
"And you have been carrying this by yourself for five months?"
"Not by myself. Lena knows. I told her in November."
"Lena."
"Yes."
"Okay."
She does not, for a long second, let go of me.
When she does, she sits me back down at the table and sits down across from me. She picks up the bottle, corks it, and walks it to the kitchen counter, then comes back with a bottle of sparkling water and pours us both a glass with a slice of lime.
She sits down again.
She says: "Are you healthy?"
"Yes, I am healthy."
"Is the baby healthy?"
"Yes, The baby is healthy."
"Are you safe?"
"I am safe."
"Are you loved?"
I close my eyes.
"Yes," I say.
She does not, for a long second, say anything.
Then she says, very quietly: "Who is he, Greer?"
I open my eyes.
"Indie."
"You don't have to give me the whole story tonight. You don't have to give me anything you are not ready to give me. I am asking you a single question. Who is he?"
"I can't tell you tonight."
She does not move.
"I will," I say. "Just give me a few days. Until the team is back from the West Coast trip. I will come here. I will sit at this table. I will tell you every part of it. I am asking you, tonight, only to give me until then."
She looks at me for what is probably ten full seconds.
She says: "Why not tonight?"
"Because it’s complicated. Which is why I have not told you in five months."
She closes her eyes.
She opens them.
"Okay," she says.
"And Greer?"
"Yes."