Chapter 5 #3
I nodded. “You should drive. I had a skinny White Russian and no lunch before I drank it.” Apparently, I had already lost the tolerance for alcohol that I’d developed over the last few years because I was feeling that Kahlua right now.
“A skinny White Russian? Hell.” He waved to some of the other guys and we went to his car, which was at the back of the lot. It seemed like the nicer ones, which we’d seen the returning players drive, parked closer to the gate. “I was going to suggest that we go out, but if you’re not up for it—”
“No, I want to,” I said. For the past few days, he’d been feeling a lot of nerves. He mostly expressed them by frowning and looking scary, but I knew what was really going on. It was the roster. He would find out if he had made the team in less than twenty-four hours.
In fact, he was frowning right now. “It’s probably good news,” I reminded him. “If it wasn’t, they would have had you in the office to talk about getting a plane ticket.”
“They’re meeting with guys tonight and tomorrow before they send out the list of names. I could get a call at any time, and I won’t know the final decision until I see the roster in black and white. It will probably be orange and white.”
That made me nervous, which didn’t go well with the curdled milk in my stomach. We got into the hot car and he started it so we could roll down the windows, then he waited a minute for me to make my bun so that my hair didn’t blow into my face. “Can you hold this?” He handed me the birthday bag.
“What is it?”
Callum reached inside to show me. “It’s stone toad. It’s not a frog, it’s a toad.”
“Oh. Ok.”
“Jory Morin gave it to me. He’s the guy signing autographs,” he said, pointing toward the fence. “He wanted me to understand which animal it was, so he repeated it a few times.”
We both looked at it. “It’s too bad that we’re in the motel. We don’t have a place to put it outside,” I commented. “Why did he give it to you?”
“He doesn’t seem to believe that it will have live outside. He suggested that it would look good in a bathroom, and I think he gave it to me because he likes the color of this car. He also told me a few times that his wife’s favorite color is green.”
“Oh, ok,” I said again. We studied the toad for another moment. Maybe it would have looked ok in the bathroom, but I wasn’t sure there was enough space. “I’ll put him away for now.”
With the toad stowed, we got on the road. “What happened at the interview? Did you take the job?” he asked.
“No. I thought about it more and I decided not to,” I said.
“Were you thinking about the kidnapping? Because when you said that, I got worried. Very.”
“It was that, and some other things. I didn’t love the guy who interviewed me,” I told him. “Our meeting reminded me of when I went to Damian’s house for the first time.”
“Going over hours and expectations, money talk?”
That and more. “I didn’t like what he said. Where do you want to go for dinner?”
One of the other guys had gotten him excited about Greek food, so we went to the restaurant he’d suggested. But it was kind of a strange meal, because Callum was so distracted and jumpy that he had a hard time eating.
“Where would we go? If this doesn’t work, where would be a good place to live?” he asked suddenly.
“I really liked Indianapolis,” I said. It was where I had met him, after all, and he had a house there.
“We should go to a place with more fashion and clothes stuff.”
“Why?” I wondered.
“If you’re into that, then you should get a chance to try it,” he answered.
“New York? It’s expensive. So is Los Angeles, but maybe you have more insight into that market.
” He was playing with his knife, toying with it between both hands.
“I wouldn’t want to stay in Michigan if I couldn’t play for the Woodsmen. ”
“Victoria was talking about the development league team here, the Junior Woodsmen,” I said. “What about that? It’s a paycheck for football.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m not in the position to be picky.” He spun the knife. “What about you? What do you want to do, besides social media? Or we could keep doing that but make it about your life and not mine anymore,” he suggested.
“I’m not totally ready to give up on the Woodsmen. I think they may come through for you, even if they do make some strange choices about color and how they handle roster cuts. There are nice people working there, like Victoria.”
“What did she have to say today?”
I explained a little bit about our visit to Roy’s, finishing with, “I’m not sure why she wanted to go with me.”
“She probably thought you were fun and nice. She knew that you’re great to hang out with.”
“She didn’t know me at all,” I said.
“That was her chance to find out, then.”
“I liked her, and I also liked the kicker’s wife from the tour,” I mentioned. “I wonder how she’s doing.”
“She’s pregnant,” he said. “George told everyone today. He’s so happy about it.”
“Oh, no. Is he going to make the team?” Because if not, they’d have to move again, and then maybe again, and again. Kids needed to be in one place, secure.
“I don’t have an in with the special teams coaches, but from what I’ve seen of him in practice?” Callum nodded. “He has a great leg. If it doesn’t work out, I heard him saying that he might want to coach at the high school level. He’d be good at that, too.”
“I wish I had gotten that woman’s number,” I said. “But I’ll see her around at team stuff.”
“You sound pretty sure.” He started bending the knife and…
“Oh, hell.” We looked at what was now two separate pieces of metal in his hands.
“I’ll pay for it,” he said. “I have to start focusing more on money, because we won’t have this per diem stuff.
The Junior Woodsmen players work other places during their off-season but I don’t know if we can stay up here and hope for that, when you’ve had so much trouble getting a job that’s safe from kidnappers. ”
Then we started going around again with the same issues of him doubting himself.
We were both upset at the end of the dinner, so much that we didn’t even enjoy our first meal out together since we’d had Mexican food in Indianapolis, weeks before.
He picked at the baklava and I got worried about calories, so I skipped it.
And it continued when we went home.
“I didn’t know anything about that per diem.”
I was brushing my teeth in the motel bathroom when I heard him talking, and the water sputtering from the faucet echoed so much in the small room that I didn’t entirely catch his words. I spat and opened the door. “What? Did you say something in Latin?”
“Yeah.” Callum sat up partway on his bed, leaning on his elbow. “I said that I didn’t know anything about the per diem.”
“You hadn’t read the email, due to not having a normal phone.”
“I could have gotten a laptop. Or a tablet, something. But that’s not the only problem,” he said.
“I didn’t even know what the hell it was.
” He lay back, shaking his head on the pillow.
“I had never heard of that term and when you figured it out for me, I didn’t even have a bank account to put the money in. ”
I stowed my toothbrush and sat next to him, so he moved his massive thigh to make more room. “I don’t have a bank account,” I mentioned. “I don’t have a credit card, or work experience, or a car.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” His eyes moved to the bedside lamp, where a large moth was fluttering helplessly under the shade.
Callum picked up one of the plastic drink cups that the motel cleaners kept giving us and swung his legs around me so he could stand.
“I wasn’t trying to say anything about you.
” He neatly caught the moth in the cup, sealing it inside with his other palm.
I opened the motel room door so he could free it outside.
“Jory Morin talked to me about signing with the team,” he said as he shut the door again. “He said that unless I really know how to negotiate and then read a contract, I should have an agent and a lawyer. He gave me some names and said he’d tell them that I’d be calling. Then he gave me that toad.”
I absently patted it. We had put it next to the TV that would only get one station, local access that had a lot of shows about cherries and fishing. “It sounds like a good idea.”
“Maybe. Maybe I would be making a mistake because I don’t know enough.
” He started to go back to bed, looked at his hands, and angled into the little bathroom so that he could wash them.
He was drying them on his shirt when he came back out.
“If I get this chance, I can’t screw it up. It’s a big if.”
“If you get this chance, it’s because the good in you is coming back around. And you won’t mess it up, either.”
“If I get it,” Callum echoed. He held out one of his hands to me, and I took it. “If I get it.”
It was probably stress that led me to have nightmares, stress but also the good news that Heidi, the kicker’s wife, was pregnant.
In one dream, I was lost in Woodsmen Stadium, running through long hallways that flashed with purple and blue lights reflecting off their championship trophies and awards.
Later, I was in the hospital. I knew somehow that it was the same one where my grandma had died and my aunt had also gone, although everything in it was different.
I heard the sounds of babies crying and I went from room to room but I couldn’t move fast, hardly at all. I wasn’t making any progress.
I woke up out of breath, as if I really had been running.
I stepped carefully over the garbage bag with Callum’s shoes and went to sit on the concrete walkway outside our room, so my crying wouldn’t wake him.
He didn’t need any extra worry when he was about to find out if the biggest thing in the world was going to happen for him.
I hoped that it would. It had to, since he deserved it. It had to happen. Didn’t it?