Chapter 2 #2
“But you weren’t only relying on your legs,” I pointed out.
“I’ve heard that quarterbacks who were successful in college due to their athleticism instead of their arms usually wash out in the pros.
” That was what my cooperating teacher had told me the previous semester.
“I don’t mean that was why you washed out.
I would guess that your problems were due to your drunkenness at the workplace, when you were caught by your boss, Mr. Whitaker. ”
Everett picked up the glass of tonic water and drank some before he answered. “I wanted to talk about something different. You’re a teacher, right? You were at the stadium on some kind of class tour.”
“It was Mrs. Pauker’s first-grade field trip and I was her student teacher at Mitigomin Elementary School. I wasn’t a first-grade student in the class, but I’m not the real teacher yet,” I explained. “I’m training and going to school for that. A college, not an elementary school.”
He seemed to understand. “Ok. Never mind,” he said briefly, and I thought that he was going to leave.
“Wait!” I reached across the bar and grabbed his arm, but he looked down at my hand so I let go. “Do you have a problem with a school? Like, are there parents blocking your driveway at pickup, or are the bells annoying you? Because I know a lot of people in the district. I’d like to help.”
“Yeah. Ok, yeah,” he agreed. “I have some questions.”
He had very specific questions about the teachers’ advanced degrees, about standardized testing, about college acceptance rates for seniors, and a whole lot of other stuff, too.
He wasn’t looking for public information, the stuff that the district proclaimed on its website.
He was interested in details that only an insider would be able to tell him, and I was somewhat of an insider now.
When we discussed the elementary school where I was currently placed, for example, I could say that the principal, Suzanne, wasn’t great because she seemed to be afraid of making people angry so she avoided decisions and ignored problems. A lot of the teachers were unhappy and that made a difference to the students there and to their parents, too.
But he wanted to know even more, and luckily, I had a source for that. “I can talk to my school’s admin assistant,” I suggested. “She knows everything about everything.”
“Ok. You could you text and let me know what she says,”
It was a golden opportunity and I knew what my sister would have done. I tried to smile like Willow did, with my chin a little tucked so that I was looking up into his eyes. “Or we could meet again,” I suggested, my heart almost pounding out of my chest.
“I don’t go out to bars anymore,” Everett told me. “I quit drinking.”
“What a good idea,” I congratulated him. “After losing your job over it…”
“My demotion wasn’t due to what happened that day.
” He sounded angry, but I wasn’t sure if it was at me or about his lost football opportunity.
“I had a shitty preseason and I wasn’t getting any snaps in practice.
It was a matter of time before I got sent down and my agent was there to talk to them about it.
You can text and let me know what you find out—”
“But we wouldn’t have to go to a bar,” I interrupted. “We could have coffee, liquor-free. Do you still drink that?”
He looked at me and then got a funny smile. “Yeah. Sure, coffee’s still good.”
“Why do you want to know all this stuff about schools?” He’d asked how often they practiced drills for natural disasters at each location, for example, and if earthquake preparedness was a thing here in northern Michigan. Why was that important?
“I may be signing up a student,” he said, and now he sounded a little reluctant.
“Oh. Oh, this is so much worse!”
“What is?”
“When you said that your wife had left you after having affairs with a plethora of other men, I didn’t realize that you guys had kids together.” I shook my head. “I felt really sorry for you but this makes it even more terrible.”
“You felt sorry for me?”
“Well, you were lying half-naked on the floor and you had red marks from the carpet on your face.” I touched my own nose, remembering.
“And your agent said that you were ‘under the weather,’ but it was so obvious that you were drunk. You could hardly stand and he had to dress you like a baby, and then you threw up, and then your boss came in and saw everything. You had also talked about your wife’s adultery with multiple—”
“All right, I think I understand why,” he interrupted me. “It wasn’t my finest hour.”
At least he’d been spared a public airing of the video of the incident.
The chaperone on the field trip who had recorded it had been persuaded to erase the evidence, after a gift of Woodsmen tickets.
And we’d explained to the kids that Everett Ford had been feeling sick to his stomach, just like their friend Mya had been (her case was the first time I’d been puked on last semester).
“Are you really ok now?” I asked. “You do seem a lot better, but sometimes it’s hard to know about people.”
He looked at the glass of soda water. “I don’t have rug burn on my face anymore. I must be great.”
It didn’t sound like it to me—but then we both jumped. “It’s my phone again,” I told all the started patrons and Jannie. “I’ll turn down the volume.” My mom had finally responded to my many questions, and I read what she’d written.
“Is everything ok?” Everett asked.
Just like I’d said to him before, it was hard to know about people.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “I’ll have to do some checking.
And I’ll check on your stuff, too. I’m almost positive that my school’s admin will be able to tell me if our buses run on diesel, even if it isn’t reported anywhere.
Anita will probably have all the other answers, too.
She has files dating back years locked in a drawer in her desk. ”
“Thank you,” he told me. He glanced at the glass and pulled out his wallet, but I shook my head.
“That was on the house. It was really flat, anyway.”
He nodded and left, and Jannie called me over to help with her spreadsheet and to tell me that she was going bankrupt, which was where her bookkeeping sessions usually led.
“Who was that guy?” she also asked.
“He used to play for the Woodsmen. I mean, he used to be on the team. I don’t think he ever actually got on the field.”
“I thought he seemed familiar,” she said, nodding. She had to hold her fez so it didn’t tumble off her head. “Can you figure out where I went wrong here?” She continued to clutch the fez but used her other hand to point to her laptop. “There’s no way that we lost four hundred K last month.”
“No, there’s no way,” I agreed. I did help her, but my thoughts were elsewhere so it took me some time to figure out where she’d gone wrong.
It was a combination of too many zeros, decimal issues, and not keeping columns in her notebook, which was also pretty normal for her finances.
She noticed how distracted I was, and she assumed it was about the man who had just been in the bar.
“He’s not bad looking,” she said, but then sniffed. “I like them a little rounder and smaller.”
“Like a doughnut hole?”
“Exactly,” she said, laughing. “I eat them right up.”
I knew that was true, because Jannie had been married four times and had multiple boyfriends.
It was exactly why I never asked her for advice.
I just wanted one person and I wanted it to last, but that wasn’t her MO.
She was interested in many, many doughnut holes, which worked for her and for a lot of other people, too.
They preferred an assortment, different flavors in a variety pack.
I just wasn’t that way—well, I didn’t think I was, but I’d never gotten much of a chance to eat any.
I thought a little about Everett on the way home but mostly, I thought about what my mom had answered while I’d been at the bar.
When I’d gone to the water department, I had discovered that the problem wasn’t limited to the last bill.
She also hadn’t paid the one before that, or the one before that.
In fact, we were now several months in arrears and I’d set up a payment plan.
It had made me think about our other utilities, like electricity and trash, so I had called home again as I’d driven to the college.
Mom still hadn’t been there, my sister had reported, but I’d convinced Willow to do some snooping.
“Why? Why do you need to know her bank password?” she’d asked, and I had told her the truth. I was worried that we owed money, which didn’t bother my sister. “So? Just take care of it,” she had advised. I’d told her that I couldn’t and that she had to go to the basement, to my mother’s room.
I wouldn’t have asked her to do that except this was very important.
It took her a while to get down the stairs but when she had made it, she’d found the password on a note taped to the side of the old computer that only Mom used.
I had typed it into the bank’s website to look at her account and I’d seen the problem: her paychecks weren’t being deposited in it anymore and the money that I had been giving her out of mine wasn’t there either.
She had a total of sixteen dollars and thirty-two cents on tap, and in addition, there was no evidence that any of our bills had been paid for months.
As soon as I’d seen that, I had texted her again and again to ask why.