Chapter 8 #2
But he noticed my concern. “I’m fine,” he told me. “This is mostly precautionary. They have a whole team of trainers and all the best equipment for them to use, and their rooms are amazing. No mice the size of…what’s that dog that Eddie’s always talking about?”
“It’s an Affenpinscher. They’re a lot cuter than mice.”
“Ed was there today, watching the practice,” Ronan mentioned. He rested his head against the wall behind the couch. “He’s so damn proud.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, he’s a good guy.” He drank from his bottle. “I could let him down tomorrow.”
“You mean, Ed will be sad if you don’t make the team? I think he would be sorry but not let down. He would be thrilled to have you back with the Junior Woodsmen. He’ll have mixed emotions either way it goes.”
“Me too. I mean, I’ll be…no, I can’t really imagine how I would feel if I make it.
I know how it will be if I don’t,” he told me.
“It will be the same as what happened in college when I didn’t hear my name during the draft.
Nobody around me said anything, that I should have made it or that they were sorry that no team picked me, or maybe that I had it coming because I wasn’t as good as I thought.
They just pretended like they hadn’t noticed and then I figured out a way to keep playing.
Nobody mentions it in the Juniors’ locker room when a guy comes back instead of moving up.
” He smiled. “Like it’s a curse or something. ”
“Do you look down on those guys? The ones who try out and don’t make it?”
“What?” He stopped smiling. “No. I always think, ‘Good for you. You tried it, you shot your shot.’” He pointed the bottle at me. “I see what you did there.”
“No one would be disappointed if you’re not on the roster.”
“I would be. Not you, though?”
I shook my head. “I would be sorry because you put in a lot of work, but that will also make you a better player for the Juniors. Things don’t always work out, sometimes because we mess up but sometimes because the situation just sucks.
When I was trying to get an internship for the summer after my junior year of college, I found out that one of the other candidates had an aunt who was the head of the human relations department at the company.
Obviously, he got the position and I was upset, but it didn’t have anything to do with my lack of qualifications. That could happen here.”
“If the nephew of some Woodsmen HR lady plays my position, I’m going to be pretty pissed off,” he said. “I get what you mean. We can control some things, but suckage is going to happen.”
“Suckage is going to happen, at times.” I really hoped that it wouldn’t happen this time.
“You know what the minimum salary is for rookies, right? I don’t earn that in five years with the Juniors. Can you imagine?”
No. I shook my head again. Maybe I’d earn that kind of money someday, if I ended up running my own department, but I couldn’t really imagine having it to spend.
Ronan sat up and sniffed. “Do you have something on the stove?”
We ended up going out, because what I’d had on the stove wasn’t fit for humans or animals, not even giant mice.
At some point, I’d unknowingly added a lot of cumin to the pot.
Pizza was looking good to both of us, and I drove the truck/SUV while he leaned the seat back and enjoyed the smooth ride of the vehicle he’d rebuilt.
We encountered a wrinkle once we got to the restaurant and walked in. He stopped and I ran into his back, then he turned and said, “You’re not going to like this.”
“What?” I peeked around him and saw what he meant. “Judas Priest. What is he doing?” Because there was Channing, Kiya’s Cado, and he was with a woman. But that woman wasn’t Kiya and when I asked Ronan, he knew that his friend didn’t have any sisters.
“Maybe it’s his cousin. Anyway, you said they broke up,” he reminded me.
“I said that I thought they broke up, but no one really knows because Kiya won’t discuss it. She won’t even tell Taylor and they’re best friends.” I stared at the back of the woman’s head and at that moment, Channing looked over and saw us. I watched him swallow.
“Come on,” Ronan told me. “Let’s order our food and then we’ll say hi to him. We don’t know that he’s doing anything wrong.”
No, he might not have been. If Channing and Kiya had split, then he was perfectly welcome to have dinner with as many women as he wanted. That was how life worked, and I had just been talking about how things could suck. It was also none of my business.
“Come on.” This time, Ronan took my hand to pull me along with him as we went to the counter, and I ordered absently enough that I wasn’t sure what I’d even gotten.
Was I supposed to let Kiya know what was going on here tonight in the pizza restaurant?
I’d never been in this position before, in the middle of a friend and her boyfriend.
I’d never really had friends like this and I didn’t want to make the wrong decision.
“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered, and Ronan heard me.
“Let’s talk to Chan and see what’s up,” he said. He took my hand again and we walked there together.
The woman at that table was very nice. She smiled and said hello to both of us, and asked how we knew her date.
She and Ronan talked for a minute but I had nothing to add and neither did Kiya’s former Cado.
Channing sat staring at his glass of red wine and I stared at him, and neither of us said a word.
When their conversation petered out, we found a table and Ronan took the side of the booth that faced them, so I had to stop watching.
“He didn’t admit to anything,” I noted.
“I didn’t really expect a full confession, did you? We don’t know that he has anything to confess.”
“He was acting plenty guilty.”
“Yeah, he was,” he agreed. “Are you going to tell Kiya?”
“Tell her what? Her ex was out with someone, or her boyfriend is cheating? She’ll be upset either way and probably blame me for it, because that’s what people do. They blame others for the failures in their lives.”
“That’s true. When our neighbor’s kids came to live with us, they were incredibly pissed,” he said. “The older boy took it out on my brother, but I made him stop. After that, he went back to focusing on the drug trade.”
“How did you make him stop?”
“I held him by his ankles over the side of a bridge. I wasn’t my full height and weight yet, but I’d been playing football and wrestling, so I was pretty strong and he was skinny like a worm. Lucky for him, he wasn’t slippery like a worm. That could have gone very wrong.”
“This situation with Kiya feels wrong and I won’t be able to hold any of these people by their ankles.”
“You could tell her that it’s my fault,” he suggested, but in the end I decided that a simple, informational text was best.
“I just saw Channing. He’s out with a woman,” I wrote, and a few minutes later, Kiya answered.
“So? He can eat me.”
“Ok, I guess they were finished,” I said, showing him my phone.
And actually, it wasn’t a bad thing that this had happened—not bad for Ronan, anyway.
It served as a distraction from worrying about the news he’d get tomorrow, the release of the Woodsmen roster.
We ate dinner and he didn’t look anxious and he didn’t frown at all.
It didn’t seem to distract me in the same way.
Now, I felt worried about both of those issues.
Channing and his date finished first and he hurried her out of the pizza place, barely waving at our table before skulking away.
We finished a little after that and walked out to the car/truck, and this time I sat in the reclined seat and watched the sky.
It never got dark in the summer, not until very late, and I saw a few birds fly past. I needed to be like them, like a duck and let everything slide away.
I couldn’t really understand why I was so upset about this Channing problem and I didn’t like it.
“Cate, we’re stopped in my driveway,” Ronan told me.
“Oh, right.” I sat up straight. “Ok, thanks for dinner and I’ll talk to you later,” I said.
“It’s early. Come in,” he invited, and I went ahead and did that. He got me another beer from his fridge and opened a few windows, since we’d cleaned up the dinner I’d made but the kitchen still had a certain odor. “Are you this upset about your friend?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m sorry that this happened to her and I’m sorry that I seem to be a part of it.”
“Because of me,” he said.
“But she’ll blame me because I’m closer to her.
My dad used to do this, too. Every time he had a problem at a job or with a woman, it ended up being my fault.
Like when he was late, it was because I hadn’t set the alarm right so he’d overslept,” I explained.
“That happened a lot and I used to set two or three alarms, but if he was drinking, I couldn’t wake him even if I poured water over his head. ”
“Why the hell were you in charge of getting him to work?”
“Somebody had to do it. We needed his salary,” I stated.
“But then that became my responsibility, along with everything else. If he argued with his supervisor, it was because he hadn’t wanted that job anyway but he’d taken it for my benefit.
If he fought with his latest girlfriend, it was because I had put him in a bad mood or because he had me in the first place. No woman wanted a guy with a kid.”
“I don’t think Kiya will act like that,” he said. “She seemed like a nice woman. A guy who accuses someone else of being the cause of his personal problems isn’t nice. He’s a massive dick who needs a swift kick in the ass and I would be glad to provide that.”
“My dad is dead,” I reminded him.
“When did that happen?”
“A while ago,” I answered. “I texted to tell him that I was graduating from college and that he could come if he wanted, and he said that he was sick and he wasn’t going to make it. The Woodsmen were great about letting me delay my start date.”