Chapter 13 #2
But he was already interrupting, before I’d even finished the sentence. “I’m very happy with my current career as a football coach. That’s my dream.”
“I had asked you that,” I reminded him. “I wanted to know if you had always pictured yourself as a coach and you said maybe. It wasn’t really a goal, that was what you told me.”
“Well, I’ve changed my mind.”
“And you could change it again!” I answered. “There are so many things that you’d be good at. You’re amazing with people, for example. You totally diffused the fight between Roshni and Isaiah when we were at dinner and they wanted to throw down over him missing the toilet when he pees.”
But it had been a bad idea to bring up that night and specifically, that couple. “He still has the stitches in his arm,” Shane noted. “He’ll have a scar there.”
“I bet that he won’t care. His wife has been texting me and she says that he’s fine.
It was not a big deal,” I reminded him again.
“It’s not even sore anymore. And she said that the whole thing also made her stop to think about how quickly life can go wrong, so they both needed to ease up on the arguing and appreciate what they have. Isn’t that nice?”
He didn’t answer.
“What if I had hit that tray?” I asked. “Or what if I had done something else, just a mistake but it ended up with someone injured? Would you blame me and say that I was dumb and careless?”
“No, I sure wouldn’t. But if you had an issue which made you a danger to others and then someone got hurt because of it, then you would feel pretty bad about it. Saying ‘I didn’t mean to’ isn’t a good defense.”
“But…” Well, he hadn’t meant to. “It was so dark in that bar and with all the lights flashing, it could have happened to anyone. They should switch to plastic cups!”
“I don’t really understand your angle,” he told me. “You’re trying to excuse me from blame over hurting Isaiah but you’re also trying to get me to quit the job I just got because you don’t think I can handle it.”
“That’s not true,” I said quickly, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed after that. What exactly was my angle? Before, I had said that I was going to step back and let Shane be in charge of his own life. So what was I doing?
I was butting in and trying to control him, exactly what Max had been mad about when we’d had our last, failed family meeting. I had alienated my brother by acting that way and I was going to do the same thing now with my friend, if I wasn’t careful.
On the other hand, we were currently driving to Walter’s Café to help my brother because suddenly, he needed me and my controlling ways.
Was I supposed to be hands off, carefree and unconcerned?
Or should I have been hands on, gripping and directing?
It felt like I was going to lose either way but the most important thing was that Shane had to get better. I had to get him that way.
“I think you’ll be good at your job but I can tell that you’re worried about it. I also don’t want you to feel bad about the accident with Isaiah’s arm,” I said. “You’re refusing to leave the house and it’s scaring me.”
“Oh. I get it.” We drove for a few moments in silence. “You don’t need to worry that I’m going to be like Morgan. I promise that if I start to go down that road, I’ll get help for myself. I saw it with my sister, too, and I don’t want that to happen to me or to the people who care about me.”
I did not believe him, not in the least. He was actively refusing to ask for help with his vision issues, so why would his mental health be any different?
But I also couldn’t drag him into therapy or shove medication down his throat.
“Ok,” I said. Then we drove the rest of the way to Walter’s in silence.
My brother, on the other hand, was actively seeking help. When we pulled in, we found him sitting on one of the old utility poles that my grandpa had tipped over to mark the edges of the parking lot. His head had been in his hands but he jerked it up to frown at my car.
“Where’s the key? How do I turn the lights on?” he demanded when Shane and I got out.
“Hello. Let’s go see how bad it is,” I answered.
I had the key to let us in, and we were greeted by a terrible smell.
The power was definitely off (apparently, my mom had given up on paying the utility bills, which didn’t really surprise me).
It was very dark and I immediately turned to check on Shane, but he was busy trying to force open windows (there was no way, not with the water damage to the frames after we’d had the flooding).
Weeks before, I had been here to collect some of the inventory, things we’d been able to cook at home, but our residential fridge hadn’t had the space for much and someone else was supposed to have thrown away the rest…
“Max, you never cleaned out the coolers! It was the one thing that Mom asked you to do,” I said. I pulled my T-shirt (Shane’s T-shirt) over my nose but it did little to block the odor.
He pretended like he hadn’t heard me. “Do you know anything about construction?” he asked Shane.
“Some. Are you thinking about the roof?”
“Nobody should go up on the roof,” I said immediately. “Nobody!”
They examined the problem from the inside.
I propped open the front and back doors, threw open the coolers, and removed the most offensive items from them.
On my way back from the dumpster, I stopped to glance at where I’d hung up the dumb dixie cup hat from my uniform.
I had been away from here long enough that the sight made me feel nostalgic.
This wasn’t the time to romanticize the past, not when the present smelled so nasty.
I went and wiped off one of the tables and sat down to make a list. If Max was serious about getting this business going, he had to be quick.
In a few short weeks, the Woodsmen team would start summer practices at their nearby facility.
The food we served to them and their fans during that brief period carried us for the rest of the year.
But there was so much to do before he could reopen and I didn’t think he had any idea of what he was getting himself into.
Maybe seeing the multitude of words on my screen would somehow convince him that he was biting off more than he could possibly chew.
He had always complained that he had a sensitive jaw, so he couldn’t open up his mouth very far to eat.
I believed that he was similarly constricted in his work ethic.
If he did manage to fix the building, turn on the utilities, and convince our supplier to sell to him, then he would need employees.
He would also confront the biggest issue that I could see, one that his fiancée’s money couldn’t solve: Max would be the one running the kitchen and he didn’t know how to do it.
No, there was no way that he would be able to handle this.
I heard them talking in the back, but since they didn’t yell like my dad always had, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then they joined me in the dining room and Shane looked grim.
“The roof is sagging because the wall isn’t supporting it,” he stated. He continued with a litany of other physical issues with the building and I typed those into my phone, too, then turned the screen to show Max.
“How are you going to deal with all this?” I asked him.
Before, when confronted with any obstacle regarding his business concepts, he’d had only one response.
For example, when he hadn’t been able to immediately find a large enough building to rent for his moon landing experience, featuring genuine outer space rocks and an anti-gravity environment?
He’d stopped looking and given up on the idea.
When I had suggested that he would never be able to get enough qualified coaches to introduce sepak takraw to northern Michigan, he had written off all ball-based sports.
Basically, if he encountered any hardship at all? He quit.
“Do you have the items in order?” he asked as he glanced at my list.
“Like, in order of what’s the most important thing to do?” I wondered. “It’s hard to say which one I’d start with.”
“No, sequentially,” he corrected me. “That means—”
I remembered his fiancée defining words for me and I liked it even less coming from him.
“I know what it means,” I said. “The problems are presented in no particular order. Also, there are a lot more that I didn’t even write down, such as the fact that the parking lot is still a mess from the ice and plows last winter, so it’s going to need new gravel.
Dad lied for at least a year about cleaning the grease trap, too.
That has to be done. Will we need to be reinspected by the health department before opening?
” I paused. “That’s not all, Max. Should I keep going? ”
“Walk around and write down everything you notice,” he ordered.
“I think that would come better in the form of a polite request,” Shane told him. “She’s giving up part of her day off to come help you and you should be gracious.”
My brother did show a little grace, by blushing. “Thank you, Molly.”
“I’ll be really glad if you do this,” I surprised myself by saying. It must have surprised him, too, because he stared at me.
“Why?”
“Because you were right when you said that it’s our legacy. I think it’s pretty amazing that our family was able to hold onto this place and not even Dad could mess it up.”
“Mom didn’t do great, either,” he said.