Chapter 5 #2
“This is a nice car,” I said when he stopped next to a model I recognized.
Before, I had never cared about vehicles except that they needed to work ok but lately, I’d started to notice more about makes and models.
That was due to hanging out with someone who put a lot of thought into cars.
If we rode out to the practice facility together, he could name all the ones we saw and the years that they came out.
It was kind of a fun game, which I could have described to the girls over lunch.
This car was nice but looked slightly…well, disheveled.
It was dirty and had some dings, and it wasn’t what I would have pictured for my boss, who was always put together.
He looked at his vehicle and seemed surprised by my comment.
“It used to belong to a friend, but he doesn’t care for it,” he said. “Mine was returned.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer and wherever his other vehicle had gone, he’d already made himself at home in this one.
There was a pile of stuff in the passenger seat, including two ties and a briefcase (I’d seen him carry that into the office once, but I figured it was empty).
It didn’t seem as if anyone else was ever riding in there with him.
It made me realize that I didn’t know very much about him, except what I’d found when I’d briefly looked him up and saw who he was married to.
That had been enough to explain why he’d gotten the job that paid him for doing nothing so I’d halted my research, but now I wondered.
There were no car seats but he was in his late twenties, so it was possible that he had kids and they had grown out of them.
But the back was filled with other stuff, like various bags and what looked like several of his suits.
He cleared the front seat by dumping everything into the trunk, but I still wouldn’t be getting in. “If you pull to the side and wait for me next to the guard shack at the exit, I’ll follow you in my car,” I told him.
“You can come with me,” he said, but I shook my head.
“I’ll follow. That way, you won’t have to drive me back here,” I explained.
If he really wanted to go to his house, I doubted he would be leaving it again to return to “work.” “I won’t ask you to sign a fuel reimbursement form for this trip,” I added.
I didn’t want to talk about signing forms anymore.
That seemed to make sense to him and to my shock, he remembered to wait for me at the guard shack.
He hadn’t pulled to the side, though, so he was blocking the lane of traffic.
Luckily, no one was behind him and he did look up briefly from his phone to notice me.
He pulled away but I saw him typing on it again as we went, and he had to swerve back onto the road a few times.
Mr. Gowan didn’t live close to the stadium.
We drove for quite a while and ended up on a quiet street with giant, new homes on it, all behind high walls.
There wasn’t much crime in our area but maybe they were concerned about being bothered by trick-or-treaters or girls selling cookies.
His gate opened and I followed close behind so it didn’t shut on me.
Then he pulled into a garage, one that could have held several cars but was empty, and the door swung down behind him.
I stood in the driveway and waited for a few minutes, and then I called him on his phone.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Gowan, I’m outside,” I reminded him. He hung up but after a while, the front door opened. He acted surprised that I was there.
“Cate?” he questioned. “Come.” He walked away but left the door ajar, so I went in.
The house was just as large as the other ones we’d passed on this street, but it was different outside, with a lot of sticks and dead leaves left over from last fall.
Inside, it wasn’t like my apartment or like Ronan’s house, because it was so much bigger and fancier.
I obviously wasn’t great at décor but even I could see that the floor was marble and that you could have held a parade down the stairs because they were so wide.
“Maybe these would work,” I heard Mr. Gowan say from another room.
I followed the sound of his voice and found him standing next to a window where there were very impressive curtains.
Or drapes, or whatever you wanted to call them.
The thing that was strange, though, was that there wasn’t anything else in here.
I figured that it might have been a dining room, or maybe an office?
But there was no table to eat at or a desk to do work (not that he would have used it for that chore).
“Do you have a ladder?”
I turned around to look at him. “Like, on me?”
“There might be one in the garage,” he mused, and I wondered if he expected me to get it. I didn’t plan to, and neither of us moved. “These might be too long,” he went on.
That was certainly true, since the ceilings in here were soaring, much like the ones at the Woodsmen practice facility…I didn’t want to think about that right now, not after my trick to get his approval for the gym equipment.
“Besides curtains—drapes, what else do you want to bring to the office?” I asked him.
He hadn’t given that much thought. We walked through the rest of the downstairs, which meant passing through a lot of rooms. Basically empty rooms. There were random pieces of furniture, like a chair and a rug, but there was nothing that made me think someone could comfortably live here.
“How long have you been in this house?” I asked as he opened kitchen cabinets. I spotted a few cooking tools inside them and some food, but they were also mostly empty.
“Four years,” he answered. “Are there mugs at the office?”
“Yes.” But he never used them anyway, because he bought coffee on the way in rather than taking the free stuff that the Woodsmen provided. “What are you looking for?”
He didn’t seem to be sure. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested, but I shook my head.
“No, thanks. I’ll wait for you down here.” Mr. Gowan had never shown any perv tendencies but I didn’t plan to test that out. It was enough that I had come to his house with him—I was not going near any bedroom.
He wasn’t bothered by my refusal and after a few minutes, he returned with a few items: a toothbrush, several pillows, and a blanket, the kind that people put over the arm or back of a couch. I had been considering the purchase of one of those myself. “Is that all you need?” I asked, and he nodded.
“You’ll take them back for me,” he said, “along with the drapes.”
“We can’t get those down without something to stand on,” I reminded him. The chair I’d previously spotted wouldn’t get him high enough.
“What if you got on all fours and I stepped up on your back?”
I hesitated for a moment, not to consider my answer but to make sure he was serious.
When I saw that he was, I firmly shook my head.
“No,” I stated, and he accepted my answer without argument and I left without the drapes.
He mentioned something about golf and, as I’d foreseen, he didn’t return to the office that day. I did because I had forms to turn in.
It hadn’t been fun to trick him, but I was glad that I had when I went to the Junior Woodsmen workout room later that day and saw the crap that they had to use.
Ed was already there, wiping down the creaky old equipment.
He was aware that I didn’t want to touch anything without sanitization and he was always careful to let me know that it was all clean.
“Thank you,” I told him after we’d said hello. “I saw the guys out on the field.” Ronan had finished early at the dealership and a few of the other Junior Woodsmen had met him here an hour or so ago.
“They’re taking advantage of the weather,” he said. “We’ve had a few dry days and it’s a lot better out there.”
But he was an optimist. A moment later, the guys came in and they were splattered with mud.
“Cate,” Ronan said. He opened his arms as if he was asking me to embrace him.
“No, thank you,” I stated, and he laughed as they walked through to the locker room. He had been kidding about wanting a hug.
“They should have gone outside after working out in here,” I told Ed. That way, they could have headed home rather than having to deal with the cold showers.
“Ronan wanted to do it this way, so you could lift with them,” he explained. “He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I agreed. I put on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up one of his spray bottles of rat-germ killing cleaner.
“He’s steady,” Ed went on. “Good job, future prospects. He’s not depending on football like some of these other guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ronan has a trade,” he said, but I shook my head.
“Did you mean that the other Junior Woodsmen are counting on the idea that they’ll move up and play for a real team? Not that this isn’t a real team, too,” I quickly corrected myself.
“That’s ok, I understood,” he told me. “Yeah, that’s what I mean.
It’s hard to give up on a dream. Most of them have been playing football since they were little.
They set their sights on a future in the big stadiums, hearing the crowds, maybe winning a championship.
A lot of them still think that it’s right around the corner.
But then, you know.” He shrugged. “The seasons pass and it doesn’t happen.
Maybe they get hurt or they just lose a little with age, so they’re less explosive and slower getting down the field.
It’s just natural,” he said, “but they still don’t want to give up.
I think of it like trying to hold water in your hand.
It runs out between your fingers no matter how tight you hold them and then it’s gone before you realize. ”
That sounded miserable. “And none of them have a chance?” I asked. I looked around at the rusty machines that we’d been using. “This is all pointless?”