Chapter 12 #3
“I was angry because I felt like I had to come home to try to help her, although, when I look back at the situation, I don’t think I was doing much for anyone.
I was busy with school and with football and I was upset that my attention got pulled away by her problems. I felt like she should have been doing something to help herself.
Now I get that she couldn’t, that she was too overwhelmed to act, but at the time, I wanted her to take responsibility and fix things. ”
“I can understand that,” I said.
“It wasn’t fair, though,” he told me. “It wasn’t something that was under her control. I wonder if she ever noticed that I felt that way. I hope that I didn’t show it.”
“When Morgan was in her bed, I don’t think she noticed anything but her own problems. I used to ask if she cared about us. If she cared about me,” I specified. “She sure didn’t seem to.”
“She wasn’t herself.”
“It’s going to be hard to forget all that,” I said.
“I’m going to try because I don’t want to fight with her.
I’m sorry now that I moved out of the house without saying anything to them.
I could have explained how upset I was that they were forgetting about the restaurant, after all the work we’d put in.
I could have been more explicit about wanting them to come to my graduation, since it had been so hard to get myself to that point. ”
“I’m glad I was there,” Shane told me.
I was very glad about that, too. I smiled every time I remembered hearing him whistle and yell my name.
I smiled now but I also started to feel like I might need one of his T-shirts for my eyes, so I changed the subject since I had worked pretty hard on my makeup.
“Tell me who we’re going to meet tonight,” I requested.
There were several people, all assistant coaches: Malcolm, Derrick, Isaiah, and Jameson. They also had wives or girlfriends: Bella, Ariana, Roshni, and Brooklyn.
“I’m never going to remember all their names,” I told him. “Do you think they’re the types who would get mad about that?”
“Like if you call them Joe and Sue instead? They probably won’t like it,” he said. “You’ll get them right.”
I had always held on well to grudges and I rarely forgot a slight, but I’d never been great in social settings with name recollection.
I practiced in my head as we continued on our way to the restaurant.
Because Shane’s flight had been on time and also because I drove slightly over the limit (or far over it, because I was a little nervous), we got there before anyone else.
That made it easier to classify them all in my mind as they gradually joined us.
“Malcolm,” I muttered, repeating it after we’d been introduced. He was the big one with a unibrow. Bella was his wife and she had no unibrow, but I could remember that B for brow went with B for Bella.
Anyway, they were nice, especially to Shane (and that was all I really cared about).
They talked a lot about working for the Woodsmen and their employment histories as they tried to ascend the ranks of various coaching staffs.
All of them were from other places around the country and most had worked for at least a few different teams.
“Get ready to move,” Roshni told me. She was smiling ruefully. “This is our fourth city in five years.”
“When we got serious, I told you it would be like this. You knew what you signed up for,” her husband Isaiah told her. Her name ended with an I and his started with one, making it easy to remember. He had sounded slightly annoyed when he’d spoken.
“Yeah, I knew what I signed up for, it’s my fault,” she snapped back.
“It’s my fault you’re at Woodsmen Stadium fourteen hours a day and we never see each other, it’s my fault that you’re on the road so much that I’m in charge of every detail of our lives.
” She definitely wasn’t smiling anymore and the other three women glanced at each other.
I could have corrected their assumption that if Shane went to another team, I would automatically go with him. I did not correct anything, though, and he didn’t seem to be in a rush to do it, either.
Despite that minor skirmish, the dinner went well. He found something on the menu that satisfied his dietary requirements without too much discussion, and it turned out that Jameson was even more exacting about his own food.
“It’s impossible to cook for him,” his girlfriend…oh, no. Was it Boston? Berlin?
“I know, I know,” he said, but unlike the other coach, he didn’t get mad. “That’s why I mostly cook for myself. What about you?” he asked Shane.
“I’m not home enough to do very much in the kitchen.”
“You’re great,” I told him. “And you’re meticulous about cleaning up, too.”
“Ah, the honeymoon stage,” Roshni said. After the spat with her husband Isaiah, she had immediately knocked back a glass of wine and then finished three others.
I was aware of that because I was already keeping track of what the bill would add up to and thinking about how we would split it.
She frowned. “After a while, he’ll stop doing dishes and start pissing all over the floor of the bathroom,” she told me.
“That is, if he makes the time to come home to piss.”