Chapter 14
“I’m sending that now. Right now.” I clicked. “You should have it.” Good, that was my last task of the day.
There was a pause. “Got it, thanks,” Jenae’s voice told me on the other end.
Then she started talking to someone else and her words cut off midsentence, so the call was over.
She’d thanked me this time, but I was becoming less and less happy about working with her, one of my Woodsmen Wags.
She was what Anara called “peremptory, like a meerkat,” and I called “bossy, like a witch.”
She had been at my house for the Thanksgiving party with the other rookies and their families, but we rarely saw each other at games because she watched from a suite and she never waited for her boyfriend afterwards in the family lounge.
But one time, we had run into each other and she had announced, “Oh, that’s Rainey.
She works for me.” Which was true, yes, but we weren’t working at that moment! And—
Maverick strolled into the kitchen, my purse in his mouth. Again.
“No. No!” I told him, jumping up, and he thought it was the start of an exciting game.
He took off and the condo wasn’t big, but it felt like we went about half a mile before I caught him and made him leave it.
I had asked Beau if I could work from home for some of my hours, and one reason was to keep a better eye on the dog.
“If I’m around more, we’ll get more used to each other. He’ll accept me as an authority figure,” I had proclaimed.
“Uh huh.” Callum had looked extremely doubtful and later, I’d heard him having a discussion with Maverick about respecting me.
“You need to do better,” he had said very seriously. “I can’t have you acting up with Rainey. Pay attention to what she says and be a good boy.”
The dog had listened and wagged his tail. But since I’d set up a home office at our kitchen table, the two of us seemed to have regressed. He was acting worse, not better.
“You took him out of his routine with the daycare,” Anara had scolded. As she and I had talked, Maverick had lain quietly at her feet, totally peaceful and still. “He needs structure and stability. Consistency and firmness.”
I had remembered the woman from the animal shelter, the one who’d come to do our home visit, saying close to the same thing. “I know that. I’m trying to be consistent and everything,” I’d answered.
“But as long as he can sense—never mind,” my friend had said. “I’m going to work on with him on heeling.” He did great with that, as long as she gave the command.
She was also alone tonight because Demitrious was gone, and so was Callum.
The offensive line coach had, for some unknown reason, gotten upset about a lack of effort that he thought he had spotted in the last game, the final one before the postseason started this weekend in California.
The Woodsmen had lost that game but I wasn’t putting it on the backs of the offensive line.
“No way,” Anara had agreed. “It wasn’t their fault and they shouldn’t be punished for it.” We were both very convinced.
Unfortunately, the OL coach hadn’t asked for our opinions.
He had brought the guys back to the same hotel where they usually spent the night before home games, in order to shake them up and force them to focus.
They’d had intensive meetings and practices today, they would meet again tonight, and then they would finally come home after a regular day of workouts and practice tomorrow.
“This sucks,” Anara had said when we’d all heard this plan and she and I had been in agreement again. It did suck. Wasn’t Callum gone enough? Without him here, it would have been just me and Maverick, the purse eater, but I had other ideas.
“Want to go out?” I texted. Both Victoria and Anara answered that they did, and the dog fell for the cheese trick again. I got him into his kennel and left.
“Damn, it’s freezing!” Victoria said when I went to her house to pick her up. She seemed to have forgotten the issues with that old post of me, how awful and scary I looked in that picture. “Is this a new car? It’s nice.”
“Thank you,” I answered. I was no longer behind the wheel of the rental because Callum and I had come to a compromise.
He’d said I had to drive something that did better in the snow and I said ok, but I was going to make the payments.
We had gone to Whitaker Automotive, one of the Woodsmen preferred providers where players got a discount, and he had handed over a down payment.
It had been more than I’d saved so far and it made my monthly payment manageable, and that was that.
Except I believed that he was going to pay off the whole loan soon, because he’d also said so.
“I don’t like having debt,” he’d explained when I’d argued against that. I had remembered what Heidi had said about the guy who had signed a contract with some team, gotten money, bought a bunch of stuff, and then been cut. It was always in the back of my mind that the football life was evanescent.
“I’m so glad you texted,” Victoria continued to tell me now. “The house is empty without Finley. I need to find a hobby that I’ll only do when he’s with his dad. Maybe drinking.”
I quickly looked over, but she was laughing like it was a joke. Good. “We’re going to pick up my friend Anara,” I said. “She’s a little direct, so…just know that she’s saying things from a good place and not to be mean.”
“Sure, I’m not thin-skinned.”
But it was lucky that I warned her because the first thing Anara said when they met was, “You’re so similar to a red panda!”
Victoria’s mouth fell open. “A fat bear?”
“No, red pandas aren’t real bears,” Anara answered. “Biologically, they’re distantly related to skunks.”
“Oh, great.”
I glanced between them. “Should we get going?” I suggested.
On the way to Roy’s, Anara explained that red pandas were a totally different species from the fat black and white ones, and also that they were really cute.
“I meant that you have that beautiful coloring and such a pretty face,” she explained and after Victoria looked at the pictures, she was more inclined to agree.
“They actually look a lot like my son,” she said. She got out her phone and soon she and Anara were discussing how cute Finley was, too.
“I’m glad that we met,” Anara told her. “If Demitrious and I stay here in Michigan—”
“Wait a minute, are you leaving?” I demanded. “Did he get traded?”
“Rainey, we’re past the trade deadline,” she reminded me. “But you never know about next season. If we’re here, it will be great to know another mom,” she continued to Victoria.
“What?” I asked. “What do you mean by ‘another?’”
“Oh, I’m pregnant,” she said. “I wonder if I’ll get sick like Heidi.”
I almost ran off the road. “You—you and—what?”
“I am preg-nant,” she said slowly. “Ex-pec-ting. With chi-ld.”
“I think she understands the concept,” Victoria told her. “She’s surprised.”
“I am!” I chimed in. “Very! It feels like you were just talking about birth control methods and how serious you were about using them.”
“That was a few months ago,” Anara answered. “We were thinking about switching that up but then we decided that we wanted a family of our own instead. And here it is, in my uterus.”
“But Demitrious might have to go to a new team,” I said.
“There’s no perfect time to have a baby.”
“But we just ordered your wedding dress!”
“Will that be a problem? I guess it might be,” Anara mused.
I was in shock. “Both you and Heidi are pregnant,” I said, which led to Victoria asking about our other friend.
The two of them discussed gestation, giving birth, and child-rearing, and I kept driving for quite a while before I even remembered to say congratulations.
Then I asked, “Are you sure that you want to go to a bar tonight?”
“I won’t drink,” Anara answered. She asked Victoria about prenatal vitamins and I fell silent again.
Despite their awkward introduction, the two of them got along great in the car.
They talked so much that they didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t really participating and was only answering direct questions.
I seemed to be in a little bit of a haze because I had never thought of Anara being a parent.
Not that I believed that she would do a bad job, or that I had any specific reservations.
I didn’t! But the haze continued after we’d sat at a booth at Roy’s Tavern and placed our orders.
“A button-up shirt,” Victoria was saying as I refocused on them. “You want to have your boobs accessible at night if you’re going to breastfeed. I liked to be able to open it rather than pulling something up. I got really cozy PJs at my baby shower and I loved wearing them.”
“That’s good advice,” Anara said, nodding. She was writing it all down on her phone. “I’m going to tell Heidi, too. She also has an older sister with three kids, so she may already know.”
“I was the first one out of my friends to have a baby. It was kind of isolating,” Victoria mentioned. “They weren’t trying to keep me apart or anything, but they didn’t really understand and obviously I couldn’t do the same stuff with them anymore. I missed them a lot.”
“I don’t think that Rainey will behave that way. She’s a considerate person and she’s interested in others.”
I stared, surprised. “Do you really think that about me?” I asked Anara.
“Yes. Clearly I do, because I said it,” she answered.
“There are so many examples. You always took Heidi’s arm when we walked down the stairs in the stadium.
When I go to your house, you make sure I have things to eat and drink.
You made everyone at your Thanksgiving party feel welcome.
You play with kids in the family lounge after games and talk to their moms.”
“Thank you. Thank you for noticing and for saying that about me.”
“You seem to really like those kids and babies,” she continued. “I don’t have sisters like Heidi does, so you can be Aunt Rainey to my child.”
Now they stared at me. “Why are you crying?” Anara asked.