“No, I don’t do any sports.”
Not do any sports? I shook my head. What the hell else was there?
“My mom works on Saturdays so she needs somewhere I can go. She cleans rooms at The Lodge, you know, the big old hotel in Leland? The fancy one?” He didn’t wait for me to say no, I had never heard of it. “It’s not as busy now that it’s the end of fall and the pretty leaves are down. When there’s snow, people will come up again for that, like, for cross-country skiing and other stuff. Snowmobiles. You know. The big check-in day is Friday,” he informed me, as if that was something I’d been wanting to learn about.
“And you don’t do anything. You don’t play any sport at all,” I clarified, still having a hard time believing it. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t playing football, but my dad had made us pick up other stuff, too. Soccer, to improve our footwork. Tennis, to improve our hand-eye coordination. Lacrosse, to improve our toughness. There was always something that wasn’t good enough.
“I don’t play sports but I play the guitar,” he told me. “I used to take lessons but they’re really expensive. Do you play?” The kid sounded very hopeful.
“Play guitar? No,” I answered briefly, and his face fell. He shoved a load of reddish hair out of his face and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Yeah, I had been right about kids being gross. But maybe, if he got sick and didn’t show up or had to go home, they’d count my hours anyway.
“Do you play any instruments at all?” he asked me.
“Instruments? No.” I got out my phone again to read more about Davis Blake and his backup, but I avoided articles about the Rustlers, where I’d spent a few seasons as their starting QB. They’d been going on and on about how happy they were with my replacement, how he was going to bring stability and leadership to the position. Meaning that I hadn’t been stable or a good leader, that was what they were trying to say.
The kid kept talking to me and gradually the room cleared out except for one scrawny Helping Hand adult and a kid in the corner trying to build something. I looked at them for a moment and realized that it was a rocket. I’d had to build one of those, too, in…I thought back. Had to have been seventh grade, because my brother had moved out long before and wasn’t there to help me. I watched as the man struggled to get a bit out of the drill he was using and he and the kid laughed.
My kid kept talking to me, shooting the shit about various topics that I didn’t care about while I watched the lack of progress on the rocket, until it was finally time for me to leave. The second the clock on my phone turned to the magic number, I jumped out of my chair.
“Bye, uh…” I had to think. “Jamison,” I said, and since he didn’t tell me that it wasn’t his name, I’d gotten it right. “See you next Saturday.”
He’d been playing with some screws and piece of wood he’d picked up from the rocket project at one point. “Yeah,” he told me, staring at the scrap in his hands. “See you.”
I hesitated for just a second, thinking—a problem I’d always had on the field, too. I’d thought too much, and that had made me hesitate, and then I’d sucked ass. I remembered my dad yelling at me to act. “Make a decision!” his voice had boomed from the sidelines or stands. “Don’t be a pussy, Kayden!”
I walked out of the room and out of the building as fast as I could, ignoring the kid’s sad face. It was snowing now and a thin, white blanket was beginning to cover the ground. Shit. I hadn’t grown up driving in this stuff and even though I’d lived in cold places, I’d never gotten used to it. I stalked across the parking lot and turned up the heat as far as it would go when I got into the car, but before I left, I considered for a while about how I would spend the rest of my day. I figured I’d hole up in my apartment, maybe order in, maybe watch some sports. Nothing that sounded very interesting.
I sighed and pulled out of the lot. I hadn’t been able to figure out what to do with my time now that there was no football to regulate it. No meetings, no workouts, no teammates to meet at a bar or a club. No bars or clubs, either. I thought about going out and could almost taste the whiskey on my tongue. I swallowed hard, trying to force down how much I wanted it. I felt myself start to sweat, despite the fact that the car heaters hadn’t warmed up yet. I needed it. What would one drink hurt anyone? Why would it matter, since I was alone and no one would know anyway?
Wait, what the hell was that? I leaned over the steering wheel to look at what was happening on the shoulder of M-22. Jesus Christ, someone was on a scooter in this weather, and not a kid, either. What kind of idiot would—I looked back as I passed, and I recognized her. It was that woman, the one who was my victim. She was scootering down the highway in the snow.
The car skidded a little as I pulled onto the shoulder and I waited inside it until she caught up to me. Then I opened the door, got out into the icy wind, and said, “Kylie.”
She fell off the damn scooter, right into the road. Jesus! I picked her up and put her back on her feet, kicking her transportation aside as I did. “Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”
“No,” she gasped, and put the tip of her mitten between her teeth to pull it off. “A little,” she revised when we both saw her bleeding palm. “You startled me. I thought maybe you were a kidnapper, like in The Taking of Lady Evangeline. But she ended up falling in love with the highwayman kidnapper, and he ended up being a marquis anyway, so it was ok.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “You’re all right, though? You, yourself, not lady what’s-her-name?”
“Yes,” she told me, and smiled. “I’m so glad you stopped so we get to say hello again!” Snow was coming down harder, covering the lumpy hat she wore and slipping off the black garbage bag she had on as a poncho.
“Yeah, great that we get to say hello. Where are you scootering to, and why?”
“I’m going to work,” Kylie explained. “I don’t have a car and anyway, I don’t drive, so even if I did I couldn’t use it. It would be just for show. You know, orangeamental.”
I stared. “Ornamental. An ornamental car.”
“I don’t have one,” she assured me, and picked up the scooter. “I go to work on this.”
In the snow, on the highway. “Get in and I’ll take you,” I heard myself say. I grabbed the scooter from her and popped the trunk.
“Really?” her voice asked over my shoulder. “Oh, wow! Wow, this is great.” She ran around to the passenger side, garbage bag puffing around her body and making her look like she had another person stashed under there with her. Or maybe her dog. I could hear her talking as I walked around to my door and when I got in, she was going ahead full steam. “…at Roy’s Tavern. It was the first place I applied for a job, and it was really lucky that I got it. It wasn’t a lucky thing for Roy that he needed someone, though. The woman I replaced had robbed him. She took money out of the till one night and hopped onto her boyfriend’s bike and they left. But then I came and saw the little sign in the window, ‘Hot waitress wanted.’ And I don’t know about hot, but I do know my way around a bar.”
As did I. “Where is this place? Where am I taking you?”
She told me, adding, “It’s a local landmark. I’m surprised you don’t know about it but maybe it wasn’t your scene.”
No, but just about every other drinking establishment had been. “That’s miles from where we are. Were you seriously thinking that you’d scoot all that way?” I asked, and if it sounded like I was disgusted, it was because I was. Was she ten years old?
“Sometimes Roy gets me on his way but today he was coming from his girlfriend’s house and that’s in the opposite direction. Sometimes I can take a car, but that gets expensive,” Kylie explained. “He gets so furious about having to drive me—I guess he’s had other waitresses with transportation issues, too. I’ve scootered a few times but I admit that it’s harder in the snow.”
I bet that it was. “That’s a dumb way to travel. You should know how to drive.”
“I rea
lly should,” she agreed. The car skidded again and I swore. “You know how, right?” she asked me.
“Of course I do!”
She ran her hand over the dashboard. “And this is really, really nice, too. Does it have snow tires? Four-wheel drive?”
“Uh…”
“I only ask because once I was in a van that went off the road in Idaho because of having bald tires. Which means that tires are supposed to have a lot of bumps turning in, I mean, grooves, that help hold you on the road. But if they’re bald, they don’t have the groves.” She held up her bloody palm flat, like she was demonstrating.
“I know what that means. Do you have anything to put on those cuts?”
She pulled the ugly wool lump off her head and pressed it against her hand. “I made this hat to wear in winter,” she commented. “It looked better in my mind. Pulchri…what’s that word again?”
“I have no idea.” I glanced over at her without the hat. Her eyes were streaming and her nose was bright red beneath them, which gave me an idea of how cold it had been scootering down the road. But it was her hair that caught my attention. Without the wad of yarn holding it down, it fanned out around her shoulders in a shiny, dark wave. It reminded me of polished wood. “Walnut,” I said out loud.
“No, the word has nothing to do with nuts. It’s pulchris…pulchrist…something like that. It means ‘beautiful.’”
It was. Her hair was beautiful. The car skidded again and I looked back at the road.
“It would be better if you went slower,” she pointed out. “Are we in a rush? I’m not if you’re not. I budgeted a lot of time because I thought I’d be on the scooter.”
I took my foot off the gas and let us drift a little. “That hat’s not beautiful, no matter how you want to say it. You should throw it out of the window.”
Kylie laughed. “Don’t sugarcoat it. Give me your real opinion!” she told me. “No, it didn’t turn out like I wanted, but it’s very warm. My whole outfit today is designed for warmth but it’s not great for movement. What I have to wear for a uniform at Roy’s is already tight and uncomfortable, but I also have a lot of layers on top right now and I was having trouble bending my knees to push myself along and stay balanced. I came up here in the spring and I guess I knew that it would be cold in the winter, but it was definitely better in my mind.”
“Like the hat.”
“Exactly! Just like the hat. It would be nice if I could get to Roy’s in a car like this every day.” She ran her hand over the dashboard again, admiring.
No, I wouldn’t be driving her every day. Just this once, that was all. That was one thing about being famous, or formerly famous: people were always trying to get stuff from you, to take you for a ride of their own. I changed the subject before she could even suggest it. “What happened when you went off the road in Idaho because of the bald tires?” I asked her. “I thought you didn’t know how to drive.”
“Oh, I don’t! We were only passengers—Emma and I, I mean. We were scared after it happened, because the van turned over and we had to crawl through a window. Then it took a few hours for someone to spot us, because we were pretty far off the beaten path, and it took even longer for them to tow us out of the ditch. I was so worried about her paws getting frozen.” She looked out the window. “If it keeps snowing like this, the scooter’s not going to work. I’ll have to figure out something else.”
She was definitely going to ask me to drive her again, like I still owed her for what I’d done over the summer. Did I? Probably. “You can use that money I gave you to buy yourself some driving lessons,” I volunteered, and then could have kicked myself for bringing it up.
“I’m saving most of that,” she informed me. “I never had so much before.”
What I’d paid her wasn’t jack shit, but I didn’t say that. I’d spent more on drugs in a week. Sometimes, more in one single day.
“But maybe I will buy driving lessons,” Kylie continued. “Or maybe someone could give them to me, like a trade or something. This car drives really smoothly. Nothing like the van with the bald tires! I love it.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Did she mean that I’d be giving her driving lessons? No, because I wouldn’t be seeing her again.
It didn’t take long to arrive at Roy’s Tavern, despite how slowly I drove and despite the snow, which had picked up and was quickly covering the frozen mud of the ground. The place looked trashy and dark, deserted. There was a red “CLOSED” placard and one neon sign in the window that just said, “Roy.”
Kylie pointed at it. “Look! The ‘s’ went out again,” she told me. “That’s a shame.”
“Where is everybody?”
“It’s not open for a while,” she explained. “Like I said, I had budgeted a lot of time to get here but we went so fast in your dream car!”
Here it came. I waited for her to tell me that she’d need a ride home, a ride tomorrow, driving lessons. I waited to hear that I owed her.
“Ok, thanks!” She put her hand on the door handle and yanked on it.
“Wait a minute. Can you get inside the bar?” I asked her.
“No, only Roy has a key. He’s being especially careful now, since he got robbed by the last waitress. It’s like, he trusts me, but he still has some doubts.”
I could understand that. She looked insane in the garbage bag and that hat, and anyone with the bad judgement to think she could scooter to work in a snowstorm…
“You can’t stand out in the cold. You can wait in here,” I announced, and then kind of grunted at my own stupidity. Now I was stuck with her in my car until this Roy came with the keys.
“Really?” She turned to me with a huge grin. “You don’t mind? Seriously, this is the luckiest day of my life!”
Yeah, what a lucky person she was that she knew me, the guy who’d terrorized her by breaking into her house at night, and that she got to ride to work on a kid’s toy through the snow. “How did you end up here?”
She stared at me. “I got on the scooter and took a left out of Rosewood Trail—”
“No, I’m not asking how you ended up in this parking lot. Why are you here in northern Michigan? You came because your aunt died?” She had said something like that but I’d had trouble focusing on all the information she’d relayed when I’d first gone to her house. No, it was the second time I’d been there, but I didn’t have clear memories of the previous occasion, either. My mind wasn’t working well, high or sober.
Kylie was nodding at me. “My great-aunt died and I inherited from her, right. I came here to see the house and then I thought I could live in it for a while, even though its condition may not be the best.”
“Because she was a hoarder.”
“A pack rat,” she agreed. “But I’d never owned anything before. And it’s all mine, she didn’t have a mortgage or anything. There was a little debate about whether it should be condemned but I just had to clean it and now it’s fine.”
It was not fine, not from what I’d seen of it. I remembered it as an ugly, overstuffed, dirty hole.
“Why are you here?”
“Huh?” I turned to look at her across the car, at the water dripping off her garbage bag and onto my leather seat.
“I asked, why are you here?” she repeated more slowly. “You said you don’t play football anymore, right?”
“No,” I answered, and shook my head. No, football was done.
“Do you have another job in the area?” Kylie pressed.
“No, I don’t have a job. I have to do some volunteer stuff, though. I have to stay while I’m on probation.” And where else did I have to go?
“You only have a volunteer job?” she responded, amazed. “How do you pay your bills?”
I blinked. I hadn’t really given that much thought. As far as I knew, money automatically came out of my bank accounts, but I hadn’t ever looked much at those.
“You must have a lot saved from when you played football. I’m sure you made a ton of mon
ey.”
“Uh, yeah.” I probably had. I’d signed a big contract when I’d left the Woodsmen and I’d had a few endorsements. I vaguely remembered talking with my agent and some other guy about investments…
“Lucky,” she commented. “I never had much myself, not until you paid me all that money for breaking in. I’m really set now. I have my house and my job, and even a savings account. It’s pretty awesome,” she confided. “So, what’s your volunteer job like?”
“I only did it once. Today.” She seemed to be waiting, so I continued. “I’m a mentor to a kid, like nine or ten years old, something like that.”
At least she didn’t laugh at the idea of me being a mentor. In fact, her face softened. “That’s wonderful!”
“Sure.” No, not for the kid, Jackson or Jake or whatever it was, and not for me, either. It was boring and a waste of time, but both of us were stuck with each other.
“Besides volunteering, what are you going to do with yourself?” Kylie asked and I shrugged. I had no idea. “Do you have any hobbies?” she continued, and I could only shrug again. “Do you like to travel? Are you close with your family so you’ll spend a lot of time with them? Don’t you have family here?”
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, my brother and my niece. But I don’t have any plans except what the court ordered me to do. And I’m going to try to stay clean, I guess,” I said. That was pretty much all I’d been doing since I got released from jail, every moment of the day.
“You ‘guess’ that you’ll ‘try?’” she mimicked me. “You don’t really want to?”
“I’m going to do the best I can because I don’t have a choice. If I fuck up, I’ll get my probation revoked and they’ll send me to jail, or whatever else they do to offenders. So I’ll try, I guess.”
“Sobriety must be hard. There are some pretty sad regulars who come into Roy’s,” she told me, pointing a finger at the dark windows of the decaying building. “It’s really, really unfortunate how they live their lives, wasting away in a place like this. Sometimes I think about what they could have become if they hadn’t started drinking, or if they hadn’t kept at it.”
The Bust Page 4
