Chapter 28 Procrastination
PROCRASTINATION
The only downside of being a soccer family was that since Ronnie coached Atherton, she had never been able to attend Rainbow’s soccer matches for Gordonvale.
Where life closed a door, it opened a window.
On Saturday morning, she tagged along with Reg to Rainbow’s match since she wasn’t supposed to drive herself yet.
In early May, sugarcane flowered in the fields along the road to Gordonvale.
She couldn’t wear anything with a waistband yet on account of the bloating, so she wore one of Mattie’s old Alien Weaponry hoodies and baggy gym shorts he had left behind in the dresser in his room.
She cheered when Rainbow scored a goal. Five minutes later the nine-year-old scored another, fist-pumped, then high-fived her teammates.
Ronnie cheered, hooting.
It happened again.
Unbelievable. Rainbow was a ringer.
No one in the stands acted surprised. Reg clapped, but he didn’t jump up and down or throw his hat on the ground the way she expected he would if he was as shocked as she was. Why had no one told her how fast Rainbow was? Or that she was the star player on her team?
“Dad! Rainbow’s a ringer!”
Rainbow’s footwork was clean—she controlled the ball whenever her boot made contact with it. “How’d she get that good? Her coach is terrible.”
Reg squeezed her shoulder, grinning. “All those lessons you gave her. It’s a Madonna thing. You were like that at her age.”
She didn’t know how to feel about this revelation.
Her daughter was a whole other person on the pitch: confident and bossy, ordering her teammates to get open, pointing them to where they needed to go in order for her to pass to them.
Rainbow looked like her tiny clone, except for the fact that Rainbow’s ponytail was high and had a bow in it.
Sun shining, freshly-cut Bermuda grass, happy crowd, happy daughter. This feeling, bloody hell... Better than anything she could have imagined when she was fifteen.
What a perfect day…
As that thought crossed her mind, she noticed Brad Collins in the stands on the other side, cheering for the Lionheart girls with his wife and twelve-year-old son. His nine-year-old daughter, Lacey, was on the field playing for Lionheart.
He flashed her a double thumbs up.
She ignored him.
Beside him in the stands, his aunt Debbie and grandmother Peggy clapped. They were cheering for Rainbow.
Ignore him…
Inside the pocket of her hoodie her phone vibrated—incoming call from Maude. She hesitated for a moment, looking down at the screen, before she answered. “How ya goin’?”
“Where are you?”
She squinted against the sun. “At Rainbow’s game. What’s up?”
“I heard from your lawyer.”
Ronnie swallowed. She shifted on the hard bench, suddenly uncomfortable.
“You’re doing that thing you do. You’re avoiding talking about this,” Maude accused in a light voice.
Next to her, her dad ate peanuts and dropped the shells.
She cupped her hand around the phone. “I’m listening.”
“We need to have a sit-down with her. Who’s paying her bill? It better not be me.”
“I am.”
“On your salary?”
Ronnie snorted. As if tattooing paid better… “Did you talk to her? What did she say?”
“I met with her at her office. She seems nice. She walked me through everything I have to do and what would change.”
When will the other shoe drop…
On the other end of the line Maude’s high voice sounded relaxed.
When she was in a good mood, her rural Queensland accent all but disappeared and she sounded urban, like a woman from Sydney.
“Can you handle this right now? Are you emotionally mature enough and financially stable enough to take care of a human being? You can’t even take care of yourself. You’re a mess.”
Ronnie swore inwardly.
Maude continued. “But Rainbow adores you, and she trusts you. She thinks you’re god. You’ve always been so good with her. I keep expecting you to stuff it up, but you haven’t. Not with her, anyway. Having two supportive, loving parents would be better for her in the long term.”
“Thank you? I think so.” Maybe this bullet was going wide. She got up and walked down the grandstands.
Maude plowed ahead with her lecture like she thought she might not get another chance. “She has self-confidence issues and anxiety about the fact that you gave her up. She thinks you didn’t want her.”
She could relate. “Right.”
“If I give you custody back, you have to be one hundred and ten percent reliable. Do you understand? You can’t be unpredictable or fun.
You can’t be the fun one. You have to be a responsible adult.
You’re dealing with a traumatized child.
This can’t be about you and your baggage, or about what’s best for you, it has to be for her, and what’s best for her. ”
“I am. I am good for her.”
“If you get your shit together and don’t stuff this up, I’m open to it.”
Ronnie laughed, tingling. Adrenaline rush, full-body chills. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
“I have conditions.”
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “Right.”
“Do you want to meet up to talk about it?”
“No, not really. Could you email the list to me? That would be easier. Maybe email it to the lawyer so she can forward it to me?”
“You want to pay a woman a hundred dollars to forward you an email?”
“I’m supposed to keep a paper trail of everything. Trying to do everything right.”
“Better late than never, I guess. It’s not a long list. I’ll email it to the lawyer. You’ll see. It’s all normal stuff.”
“Thanks.” She felt hot, like she might be sick, and tried to imagine what someone smart would say. “Did you want to schedule a time to meet with her together?”
“Maybe later. The hearing’s not until spring. My list will give you something to work on. At some point we should sit down with Rainbow and explain it to her.”
That sounded like a terrible idea, and also completely unnecessary. Having her and Maude in the same room unsupervised could go south fast. “I would need the lawyer to be there.”
Silence on the other end.
Next to her, Reg had started listening in. He had figured out who she was talking to.
“Still there?” Ronnie asked.
“I’m still here.”
“She’s our lawyer. She represents both of us.”
“Don’t be a bitch about this.”
“I’m not. This is important to me. I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
“Don’t blow it.”
“I won’t.” Ronnie had to keep her ex happy. If Maude walked away now, Ronnie might never get another chance, and Rainbow would end up in court petitioning for emancipation, becoming a bitter, disgruntled teenager. “Thanks for doing this. Thanks for helping me.”
“I’m doing this for Rainbow, not for you.”
“Right.”
“Kisses.”
“Bye.” She hung up and slid the phone back into the pocket of her hoodie.
Reg held out his hands expectantly. “What did she say? Is it still a yes?”
Ronnie nodded. “Yeah.”
Reg whooped and jumped to his feet, pumping his fist. He looked like Mattie.
In May she resumed coaching her primary school girls, the Wattles, belly-laughing at their dancing, ponytail flips, cheers, cartwheels, dribbling and passing, the routine of it, the smell of freshly mown grass, amazed and grateful that this ridiculousness was her life.
Her back ached. She had been ignoring the letter from the Lions.
By October she would be strong enough to play for her local amateur team, the Cutters, but would she be fast enough to survive try-out camp week in Brisbane?
Standards were higher at the pro level. If she wasn’t scoring tries by the spring, there would be no reason to fly to Brisbane.
Trying out for a professional team three days away wouldn’t demonstrate commitment to parenting. But weren’t self-care and self-improvement parts of being a good parent? Playing pro footy would be good for her.
What kind of role model would she be if she didn’t pursue her dreams? What kind of role model was she now? A high school dropout working a dead-end minimum wage job?
“Which way are you leaning?” Jackie Collins asked on the sidelines of the Atherton primary school athletic fields.
“Leaning toward taking the free vacation. Realistically, they won’t pick me anyway.”
After practice she high-fived her Wattles, girls pink and sweaty now in yellow school uniforms, then took the public bus back to her dad’s purple Queenslander in Lionheart, feeling old, watching FOR SALE signs for properties she couldn’t afford float by along the roadside, wanting two mutually-exclusive things.