Chapter 2 #2
Then I did see someone I recognized. “Ed?” He was the building manager, the nice man who had walked me around, and he was just as nice now. He waved and came right over to talk.
“Cate!” he greeted me, loudly because music was pumping. “I didn’t know you were coming to this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A barn party,” he answered, which was obvious since we were in a barn. “It’s to celebrate the end of the season.”
“Oh, right.” I did remember someone remarking that the last Junior Woodsmen game was taking place today. “How did it go?”
“Not great, because the quarterback got hurt. But it’s over,” he told me. “There’s no post-season for the development league, so everyone just heads home.”
“Everyone?” I looked around. Where would that Ronan head off to?
“A lot of the boys stay pretty local,” he let me know. “They have jobs besides football that they’ll start up now. It’s fun to keep everyone together.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “Fun.”
“Want a beer?” When I nodded, he led me over to the liquor table, where there was a big assortment. It seemed like most or all of the people here, besides me, had shown up with an offering.
“I’ll bring something to the next one,” I announced. I didn’t like the idea of being in anyone’s debt.
“They don’t care,” he said, and grabbed me a can. “Cheers.”
I nodded and tapped it to his bottle as I continued to look around.
I hadn’t gone out at all in high school and not even very often in college because I’d been working hard at school and at various jobs and internships, and I’d also thought that the whole social scene was pretty dumb.
My roommate during freshman year had started drinking after her last class on Thursday and had remained mostly intoxicated until Monday morning, when she woke up for the next class. It was the same thing, every weekend.
I had told myself that it was stupid and actually dangerous for her to be so out of her mind like that with a bunch of strangers, in houses or apartments that she wouldn’t have set foot in when she’d been sober.
But the people at this party seemed to be having fun, a lot of it.
Even Ed, who must have been forty or more years older than the rest of the crowd, had a huge smile on his face and was bopping a little to the music as we talked.
Pretty soon someone called to him and he excused himself to go to the other side of the barn.
Then I stood there by the drink table, holding my can.
Until I was flying through the air.
“Cate McNaughton! You showed up,” Ronan said.
“Why did you lift me onto the bar?” I asked him. I almost fell off again but he grabbed my hands to steady me. “What did you do that for?”
“This is how we met. I thought you liked standing on tables,” he told me.
Even up here, I didn’t exactly tower over him and I was on the tall side of average.
I had looked him up after the tour and comprehensive survey, and there was a rudimentary website for the Junior Woodsmen—there was even a small, hard-to-find link to it on the actual Woodsmen website.
Ronan Wilder was twenty-five years old, born in Missouri, college in New Mexico.
He had played for another team in Canada for a season before coming here to northern Michigan and his position was defensive end.
There was an absolutely terrible picture of him, too, where he had really long hair that looked as if he’d backcombed it into a kind of halo around his head.
Also, his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, so maybe he’d been drunk or horribly hungover.
“Help me down from here,” I ordered, and he lifted me off the table. He didn’t seem to mind that I spilled my beer down his back as that happened or that I’d mistakenly kicked over a bottle of something that was now dripping onto the barn floor.
“I’m glad you came,” he told me. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Why?”
“Because you never responded to my texts,” he said, and I shrugged.
“I didn’t know this was an RSVP thing. What is this thing?” I asked.
He glanced around. “The barn belongs to another guy on the defense—no, it belongs to his grandparents, but they don’t care that we’re using it. It’s the end-of-the-season party,” he explained, just as Ed had. “You didn’t come to the game?”
I hadn’t even thought about going there. It was cold today and I wasn’t a football fan, anyway. “Sorry,” I said, but he laughed.
“No, you’re not. Nobody comes to our games.” He took my beer can, empty now since he was wearing its contents. “Want another?”
I took one, mostly to have something to do with my hands and because…
Judas Priest. I was the person that the health teacher had warned us not to become in ninth grade: everyone else was drinking, so I was too.
I stood there as person after person came up to talk to Ronan, smacking him on the back, hugging him, and in the case of one woman, kissing him on the lips.
She glanced at me and I nodded. I stayed where I was mostly because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Was that your girlfriend?” I asked as she walked off.
“No, no girlfriend.” He sounded relieved, but that was hard to judge because subtlety wasn’t a thing when you were screaming over music. “How did your survey end up? Are they going to tear down the building like I recommended?”
“I don’t actually think that they’re going to do anything at all,” I answered. “My boss is an idiot who doesn’t accomplish jack squat.”
“Sounds like a good job.”
I nodded, because it was. Now that other team departments weren’t asking for help, I could have sat in my cubicle and played on my phone all day while getting paid.
I had done that, too, but it got boring and frustrating.
“He’s gone most of the time,” I continued.
“Before it got so cold, he was golfing, and then he started skiing. He travels a lot to go to parties and see people.”
“That sounds like an even better job. How would a person manage to get into a position like that? I’m going to retire from football someday.”
“I think he has it because his wife’s family is part of the ownership group of the Woodsmen.
They also own a lot of other stuff around this area and she’s really connected.
” After looking up Mr. Gowan and seeing his wife’s identity, I had developed my theory of how he’d gotten his job as Director of Special Projects, even though he never did anything: I figured that they had given him the position and the nice desk to appease his in-laws.
“In other words, I have to marry up,” Ronan said, and I nodded. “Too bad. I don’t plan to get married in either direction.”
“Me neither.”
“I guess we’ll have to make it on our own merit. So, I’m screwed,” he said conversationally, and I realized that I was smiling at him. “Is that why you came up to Michigan? To work for the Woodsmen?”
I nodded again. “I graduated from college last spring and I applied to about thirty jobs. I had almost forgotten about this one until they contacted me.”
“Everyone says that it’s a great place to work.”
“I’m glad to be there.” Maybe someday, I could run the Office of Special Projects. I would sit at an even nicer desk and get nothing done there instead of doing nothing in my cubicle. “Ed told me that the Junior Woodsmen have other jobs, too. What do you do?”
“I’m a mechanic,” he told me. “Now that the season’s over, I’ll go back to working as a service tech at a dealership. The guy who owns it also owns part of the Woodsmen team and all those people try to help us out. My dad was a mechanic and he had his own shop, so I learned from him.”
“In Missouri,” I said.
His eyes widened. In the awful picture on the Junior Woodsmen website, you couldn’t identify the color, but I had remembered seeing them when the lights had come on as we’d stood on the table in the epicenter. They were green, a shade I’d never seen in anyone in real life.
Now they were slightly larger with surprise. “Why do you know that about me?”
“I looked you up,” I said. “I thought I was going to your house and I wanted to see who I was getting involved with.”
“Smart idea. I didn’t look you up, so is there anything wrong with you? Criminal history, traffic tickets, a love of figure skating?”
“I do like figure skating. Not to do it, but to watch it. Besides that, no,” I said, considering. I’d had issues with roommates in college who didn’t enjoy some of my habits, like waking up early and neatness. But those wouldn’t bother him since we wouldn’t be living together.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
That was a difficult question because there wasn’t one, single answer. I didn’t have to come up with anything, though, because another of his friends came over to hug him and say they’d had a great season, and then to ask for money.
I figured it was a good time for me to walk away, and I wandered into the crowd.
I got stopped by one person, but I wasn’t interested in his offer and I moved on.
Where were the bathrooms here? I didn’t need one immediately, but were we just supposed to stumble into the empty field?
Again, I hadn’t come prepared for a nature excursion.
I put down the mostly full beer, because I definitely wanted to avoid the need to pee.
Then I thought more about having to squat in some plants and also about walking back to my car as the night wore on and people got drunker.
I decided it was a good time to leave. I looked around for Ed so I could tell him goodbye, but I didn’t see him so I stepped out of the barn through a hole in the wall rather than the door at the front.