Chapter 5 #3
“I didn’t say that. Everett Ford, our QB from last season, is training to make it onto the Woodsmen roster right now.
” He opened his phone and showed me a social media account with lots of pictures of a shirtless guy lifting weights that looked both newer and cleaner than the ones we had here.
“He should make it.” But then he glanced over at the door to the locker room.
“For the ones who are here today, it’s hard to say.
Sometimes it’s talent and preparation. Sometimes it’s pure luck. ”
I’d never believed much in that, though.
When other people had commented on something I had been “lucky” about, like having my own car or getting into a good college, I knew the truth: I had achieved those things due to hard work and sacrifice, not some cosmic interference.
And when bad things happened, I didn’t take it as anything personal to me.
Bad things happened to everyone—like Ronan getting injured during his senior year and not playing as well.
That wasn’t personal or unlucky, but I sure hoped that nothing like that would happen to him again.
He and the other two Junior Woodsmen guys, Stevenson and Pham, came out to join us. “Damn,” Stevenson said. He was shivering a little. “I need to warm back up before I lift. Let me stretch.”
“Don’t go on the floor without a towel,” I said quickly. I knew that Ed hadn’t had time to wash the brittle, cracking rubber tiles and neither had I.
My workout was quite different from the one that the three football players did, and I couldn’t compare it to Ed’s, either.
As Ronan had told me before, he was like a brick shithouse in the best possible way.
It had been hard to see under his big parka but in this weight room, he wore a T-shirt and his strength was evident.
Despite how chilly I found it in the facility (even as the weather warmed), Ronan and the other players weren’t as worried about covering up.
They were often bare chested, like the guy in the social media post that Ed had just shown me.
And to be honest, it was good that I wasn’t lifting anything too heavy, because I could have had a bad accident as I got a little distracted by them.
Ronan’s arms, for example, were enough to make someone forget to breathe in and out.
They were cut with muscle and I could vividly remember grabbing them as we’d stood on the table in the rat epicenter room. They’d felt huge beneath my hands.
I wouldn’t touch him now, of course, and he didn’t touch me, not hugging as a joke or grabbing each other by the arms or anywhere else.
He was pretty serious as he worked out and I tried not to distract him, although at the moment, I was interested in telling him about my strange trip to Mr. Gowan’s empty house.
Did he really live there? I almost wished that I’d agreed to go upstairs, if only to have checked whether or not he had a bed.
I had missed the cardio portion of this workout and weight training didn’t last too long today.
Soon enough, we were all walking on the long path that led to the back lot, which was as soggy as the field despite what Ed had mentioned about things drying out.
“We’re fortunate that this stays frozen in the winter,” he said cheerfully as I maneuvered around a large mud puddle. “Bye, guys. See you tomorrow.”
“Really fortunate,” I muttered. “This parking lot is terrible.”
“Maybe your boss will want to do this next,” Ronan said. “He signed off on the new gym equipment, and he might say ok to this, too.”
I hadn’t explained that Mr. Gowan hadn’t directly approved that equipment. In terms of the Woodsmen budget, a few new exercise machines were like a drop of water in giant Lake Michigan, which had overwhelmed me with its size when I’d first gotten a glimpse of the dark blue waves.
“Maybe he would,” I said. “I’m not sure what he’s planning.
Are we having dinner at my house?” As we’d previously discussed, nutrition and diet were part of Ronan’s improvement strategy and I was a part of that.
We often ate together and we also meal-planned and went grocery shopping.
It was important for him and I was glad to participate.
“I thought I’d come over.” He looked down at his shirt, which didn’t have sleeves and was one of my favorites.
“Unless you think I’m too disgusting to sit on your furniture and mess with your pillows.
” He glanced back at the building. “I don’t want to take another shower in there.
The lights are out and I don’t have any confidence that I can get them back on. ”
“No, you don’t have to do that. I actually hate those pillows,” I confessed, but we didn’t continue the conversation until we were at my apartment and he picked one up.
“What’s wrong with these?” he asked me.
I put down the spoon with which I’d been stirring the mess in the pot on my stove.
I had to admit that I wasn’t totally comfortable cooking.
I persevered but didn’t always produce the results I was after, much like the situation with my couch.
“I wanted to make things homey yet elegant. Elevated yet comfortable,” I explained.
“Did you make that up or did you hear it somewhere?”
“I listened to another woman say it about her living room,” I answered. “It seems so nice in her video.”
“That’s all bullshit, though. If you looked at her house close-up, it would probably be just as bad as everyone else’s. Maybe she even has rodents the size of dogs like Ed talks about.”
“Please,” I requested, and he held up his hands to apologize.
“I was thinking about mini golfing,” he told me, tossing the pillow to the side. “It’s officially open for the season.”
I had liked it when the two of us had gone at night. “What were you thinking about it?”
His friend, a guy he’d met at the dealership, was looking for ideas to entertain the woman he was seeing. “I suggested miniature golf and I’m honestly surprised that he never thought of it himself,” Ronan told me. “Girls love it.”
“Do they?”
“They do when they go with me because I let them win,” he said.
“Talk about bullshit,” I answered, and he laughed. I wondered briefly how many women he’d taken to the little course. “Taste this and tell me what you think.”
He got a funny expression when he tried what I’d held out on the spoon. “Did you follow a recipe?”
“Something’s weird,” I admitted, and he stepped in to try to make repairs. “Something weird happened today, too.” I told him about Mr. Gowan’s empty house and how he wanted to make his office have gravitas.
“With drapes?”
“I didn’t really understand,” I said. “Why does he live like that?”
“Is he selling his possessions because he’s out of money?”
“I don’t think so. He takes trips and he wears different stuff all the time. But why does he care about how the office looks? I thought you might have understood that part, since your house is prettier than mine.”
“Maybe decorating can be my next career,” he said. “I’m going to add a little salt to this. Just a little.”
It needed it. “You’re going to give up football for interior design?” I asked. I expected him to smile, but he didn’t.
“I saw a preliminary list of the guys who are getting invited to the Woodsmen training camp. Besides the returning players, there are nine other defensive ends. Nine. I would be number ten.”
“Ok,” I said. I got another spoon and offered him a second taste.
“The salt helped. I’m saying, the odds just got a lot worse,” he told me.
“Why do you care about that? Other guys aren’t important,” I said.
“No?”
I shook my head in answer but decided he had been right to put in that salt. I added a tiny bit more. “I wouldn’t even look at anyone else. Who cares what they do? It wouldn’t matter if there were a hundred other defensive ends trying out.”
He stopped looking so worried and even smiled slightly. “Yeah, it would. If there are that many people, I might not get a good parking spot.”
“I think you’ll get it,” I said. I didn’t mean a place to leave the car/SUV, either. I had become convinced that he would soon wear the ugly orange jersey of the Woodsmen team.
“Maybe I should think about interior design. Or going on the miniature golf circuit or opening my own auto shop. I could try that instead.”
“Try football first. Then we’ll do the next thing,” I told him. “Can you grab two bowls?”
“Sure.” But Ronan didn’t move, and when I looked over at him, he was smiling for real.