The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  I followed him again, back into the living room and carrying the plate. “Ok, well, I’m sorry,” I said. I’d been apologizing way too much today. “Maybe I haven’t been talking to other people enough and I’m out of practice with what to say. Roy doesn’t really count, since we mostly argue. Oh! Sorry, Em, I’m not saying that you don’t count, though.” There I went, apologizing again. “I just got curious about why you aren’t with your family on a holiday,” I explained to Kayden. “I’m curious about you in general.”

  “My parents are dead and my brother hates me. Can we leave it at that?”

  His brother hated him? That made me feel slightly sick, unrelated to the sandwich. “My parents are dead too, but I don’t have any siblings. So, even if you’re not glad that I came over, I’m happy to be here and with someone else today. I think Emma is, too. See how relaxed she is?”

  “She’s just full of my sandwich.” But he did look at her and smile slightly.

  I tapped the top of his screen. “We should watch the movie. The heroine is going to run into Baron d’Battenberg again at another ball and he pretends not to recognize her. It’s kind of funny.” I swiveled the laptop so I could see, too. “I know a bunch more we could play after this. We don’t have to watch football.”

  “Good. No football.”

  But as we switched our eyes to the movie, I watched Kayden as well. I saw him checking the score as Lady Saber and the baron fell in love, and then I saw him scrolling through statistics when we watched Kris Kringle unite a couple at Macy’s, and I saw him reading a sports website through two more made-for-TV specials that my mom had always liked, On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love! and Ho, Ho, Hopelessly Romantic.

  We didn’t talk much and he really didn’t pay attention to my movie selections. The pie was bad, as bad as the sandwiches, but I was having a good time in spite of all that—as I’d said, it was pretty nice to be with someone. No, I didn’t mind this Thanksgiving at all.

  Chapter 4

  Kayden

  “No, that’s not right.” I blinked. “Is that right?” I stared at the screen that the accountant had directed me in how to open, the summary of the allocation of my assets. A picture of my money situation, in other words, but something was wrong. Very wrong.

  “I’ve been…I’m sorry, can you hold for a moment?” She covered the phone but I could still hear her muffled voice, something about “sister” and “share.” “I’ve been trying to contact you for several weeks about this situation as it got more dire,” she told me when she came back on.

  “Dire,” I repeated.

  “I’ve been emailing and calling. I sent several certified letters, just in case, to you and to your agents.”

  I didn’t think I’d gotten any emails or any letters, either. “Those guys don’t represent me anymore.”

  “Well, since you know how I objected to the fees they were charging you, I understand and fully support that decision,” my accountant told me.

  I didn’t know about any problems with my former agents’ fees, no. I looked at the columns and graphs that she’d made and told myself that I couldn’t be drawing the correct conclusions about my financial future. I had always been an idiot in school and this was more of the same, me not getting the obvious. Right? “Can you explain this to me, just in basic terms?” I asked her. “What is it all pointing to?” Because it couldn’t mean—

  “It means that you’re in financial trouble, Mr. Matthews. That’s what I’ve been saying to you for months.”

  So for once in my life, I’d been correct in what I’d thought, even though now wasn’t the time that I wanted to be the smart one. “What happened?” I asked. I moved my index finger down the screen, staring at the numbers. How could these be accurate? What about my endorsements? I’d had a few, even though I’d never been one of the popular guys in the league. Not a lot of kids were running around wearing Kayden Matthews jerseys. “Do these charts and things include all my money? Everything?”

  “Yes, this is everything, unfortunately. Your expenses have always been very, very high,” she answered. “Your AmEx bill alone…and the other cards, too. I did suggest, many times, that you limit your purchases and travel expenditures, but you didn’t respond to me. Your agents didn’t, either. I’ve been concerned about this for a number of years and have expressed it to you—”

  I didn’t seem to remember any of those concerns. “So I put too much on my credit cards?” I interrupted. Ok, I could cut back on my spending. It wasn’t like I was going out anymore, having any fun at all. I didn’t need clothes or jewelry like I had before. And no drugs currently, but those purchases had been cash-based anyway.

  “It’s not just your credit cards. About a year ago, your restaurant venture failed and then the SEC and the New York Attorney General shut down the fund you’d invested in so heavily, the one I’d also warned about. Your cryptocurrency keys were stolen. The CEO of the online pet modeling agency, the one who was supposed to be your close friend? ”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “As far as I can tell, he liquidated all the remaining company assets before running off to Costa Rica. That money is gone,” she told me.

  “Gone.”

  She went on. “Your recent legal fees…they were a lot. You sold your property in Oklahoma at a steep loss because there just weren’t many buyers for a twelve-thousand square foot home in that area. I remember the cost of putting in the waterfall and the gas pumps for your cars.” She sighed. “Those cars, all those cars—their value only depreciates and you didn’t even get market value when you off-loaded them.” She ran through how I’d been fleeced when my agents had sold my car collection before they’d off-loaded me, too. I hadn’t noticed, but they’d gotten rid of the Ferrari, the Porsche, the Aston Martin, the Rolls, and the Bugatti at a fraction of what they were worth.

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the screen, remembering the big contract I’d signed when I’d left the Woodsmen to become the franchise QB for the Rustlers. This was all that was left? “How can this be all I have, though?”

  “You’re not bringing in any income. You spent and you lost even more. This is the result,” the accountant told me plainly. “Can you hold for another moment?” Her muted voice spoke to someone else. “Hailey, please don’t give your brother any more candy. He’s bouncing off the walls. Steve, can you please grab them? Thanks, honey.” I heard the sound of a kiss before she came back on with me. “I’m sorry. It’s difficult on a Saturday—”

  “Today is Saturday?” I interrupted her again. “I’ll call you back later. I have to go.” I hung up the phone with her still talking about budgeting and I bolted for the elevator, and then when I checked the time, I raced down the stairs instead of waiting for it to get to my floor. The days had all been flowing into each other as they got shorter and darker, and if possible, colder. I had missed that the weekend had started already, but I couldn’t be late to my Saturday gig with the Helping Hands kid. Things might have been shitty, but they’d only be worse if I was dealing with them from jail.

  So I ran into the gloomy charity building and past the receptionist who stood up and waved as I went past. For the last few weeks, she’d been trying to get me to stop to talk, but I wasn’t interested. Maybe I would have been into her before I got arrested—no, I definitely would have been, for sure. I wouldn’t have ignored a cute little blonde like that before, but now I didn’t seem to have any desire for any woman, no matter how much she was licking her lips and sucking on pens to try to get my attention. I didn’t have any urge to talk to her, I didn’t even want to screw her—her or anyone else, for that matter. It was like my sex drive had emptied out with my bank accounts.

  “Hey,” I told the kid when I sat down at the table, out of breath because I was now a loser who couldn’t even run twenty yards.

  “Hey,” he answered. We’d been at this same table every Saturday for a few weeks now with me mostly listening to him talk. Sometimes he broug
ht school stuff to work on but he didn’t need my help, lucky for him, and sometimes he brought books to read, too. I was reading one myself, but I couldn’t bring it in public, not with the purple cover and the naked guy on it.

  The Lady Desires a Pirate, that was the title. Kylie had loaned it to me on Thanksgiving, telling me that I was going to love it and actually, it wasn’t bad. Not as interesting as the other one she’d given me, but ok. I thought about the plot, about Lady Lorna sneaking onto the pirate ship, which was about the dumbest thing I could imagine for someone to do. But then I remembered some of the things I’d done, like investing a couple million in the pet modeling agency and a couple more in the chain of mud wrestling-themed dining establishments that another of my acquaintances had sworn was going to be huge. Those were the restaurants that the CPA had just informed me had gone under, but I hadn’t even noticed that happening. Maybe Lady Lorna wasn’t as dumb as I was.

  I realized that the kid wasn’t talking, something he usually did a lot of. “What’s up, uh, Jamison?”

  “You know my name?” He sounded shocked.

  “Yeah, I know your name,” I told him, annoyed. “Haven’t we been meeting for all this time?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. We don’t do very much.”

  I looked around the room. We were the only ones in here, because all the other pathetic mentors and their kids had headed out. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.” He kicked the table leg, making my phone rattle on the dirty top.

  “Don’t do that,” I said sharply.

  “Aren’t you bored?” he asked me. “We just sit here! We never go anywhere.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to take you in my car.” But yeah, I was bored out of my skull. “What can we do? What’s close by?”

  “The recycling center, but that’s boring too. The field, you know, the baseball field. But it’s all covered in snow.”

  “I thought you don’t play sports, anyway,” I said, and he started kicking the table again.

  “I don’t mind playing stuff. I like gym when we play basketball and whatever. I never got to be on a team, though. I have to come right home from school and on weekends…” He went back into his mom’s fascinating work schedule at the resort where she was a maid.

  “Sure, sure,” I broke in. “You have some kind of ball? We could go play.”

  “It’s snowy,” he said again, and I scoffed.

  “Are you made of sugar or something? My sophomore year, I was in the college playoffs and it snowed so bad we couldn’t see the lines on the field. They kept having to clean them off and the wind blew so hard it took the ball backwards when I threw it.”

  “Really? Did you guys win the game?”

  “Yeah, we did.” I remembered it perfectly. I’d thrown the winning touchdown and looked into the stands at where my dad had always sat, hoping to see him give the nod that meant I’d done ok. Then I’d remembered that he was gone, dead since the summer before, so he’d never watch me again. That throw had been useless. And I’d wanted to talk to my brother, but it had been too late for that, too. I’d already ruined—

  “Here! I found one, but it’s squishy!” A football bounced off my knee from Jamison’s terrible pass. “Oh, sorry. It never goes where I want it to,” he told me.

  “Because you’re not gripping it right.” I picked it up from the floor and stood for a second, holding it in my hand. It had been a few months since I’d even touched a football but it felt just the same, so familiar. Jesus, this was going to be it. I wouldn’t ever hold another football except for dumb shit like this, messing around with an underinflated toy in a field. I was never going to play again.

  “Kayden? Are we going?” The kid watched me, eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.” I followed him outside and it was like a witch’s tit out there. Maybe I was made of sugar myself, because I thought it sucked, but Jamison didn’t seem to mind—he was back to talking a mile a minute about the Woodsmen, about how he wanted to learn to throw just like Davis Blake.

  “You’re not going to do that. There aren’t a lot of guys who’ve ever been able to throw like Blake, not in the history of the league,” I told him.

  “Could you? When you used to play?”

  I shook my head. I sure wished I could have, though. “My brother Ben used to throw that well.”

  Jamison looked interested. “Is he in the United Football Confederation?”

  “No. He got injured in college and he couldn’t play anymore.”

  “Then I want to play like Teddy Hayes from the Cottonmouths.” The kid went on about them and how good they were this season, how maybe they’d win another championship but maybe the Woodsmen would get it back this year. I listened, sort of, but mostly I just kept turning the ball over in my hands.

  The field had been cleared a little so the snow didn’t come up to our knees and Jamison ran out towards where third base must have been in the spring and summer. “Here!” he called, and held his hands over his head.

  “That’s not where it goes.” I threw the ball to him and it bounced off his chest and put him on his ass. “Jesus! Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He got up and brushed off his pants. “You throw hard.”

  Too hard for him. “Sorry. Give it back here.” He did, tossing a wobbly, sad ball that didn’t cover half the distance between us. I jogged over to it and then to him. “Watch. Look at where I put my fingers.”

  He did. “You have big hands.”

  Yeah, the league scouts had been impressed by that before the college draft. They’d been less impressed by all the rumors about my drinking and partying. “Now bring it back like this.” I guided his arm and directed him. It was like this was totally new to him. “Have you ever thrown a ball before?”

  “Not like this.”

  “Didn’t your dad teach you?”

  “I don’t have one,” he said.

  Lucky.

  “My mom said he loved us but he had problems. Like, he drank a lot and stole stuff. So he left us and he used to call sometimes but he hasn’t for a while. He forgets about us when he’s drunk,” Jamison told me.

  “Yeah. That kind of shi—stuff happens.” I thought of all the things that had slipped my mind when I’d been drunk or high or both. Team meetings, practices. My niece’s entire life. But it had been fun, a lot of it, like all the parties, the friends, the women. Hadn’t it? I felt the familiar urge, that itch to use, and sweat broke out on my forehead despite the cold. “Let’s throw more.”

  This time, the ball made it into my hands when it left his. “I did it!” Jamison yelled, like it was a great accomplishment.

  “Good job, kid,” I told him, and he grinned even bigger. The itch eased a little.

  ∞

  Kylie

  One more. One more box.

  Emma sneezed and raised her doggy eyebrows. “Just one more,” I told her. “Then I swear I’ll take a break.” I’d been on a bit of a tear, moving faster through the house to clear it. Today I’d been working on the living room, emptying boxes of my great-aunt’s magazines. This particular bunch was all about gardening, which was funny. When I’d arrived here, the yard had been so overgrown that it’d been difficult to see that there was a building hidden behind it. But maybe, at one point, she’d liked to grow veggies and flowers in the weed patch in the front or the jungle in the back where the main crop was now frozen poison ivy and that weird sign that said, “Danger, nuclear!” I hoped that wasn’t real.

  I was trying to get to know my great-aunt by looking at her stuff. We’d never met, and I was curious—who was this lady? So far, I’d identified her interests in gardening from the magazines, wine due to a lot of empty boxes of “Red (blend)” I’d come across, yarn collecting (there had been bags, and bags, and bags of it), and Hollywood celebrities and sports stars of the 1970s and early 80s. She’d cut clippings from newspapers and gossip sheets and bundled them together or pasted them into a
n endless supply of spiral-bound notebooks, the ones that weighed a ton when I carted them down to be recycled.

  Maybe I’d discovered some of her pastimes, but I felt like I still hadn’t really cracked the nut of the real Great-aunt Maude. Who was this person who had left behind the mounds of…what had Kayden called it? Right, shit. I wanted to keep looking to keep learning about her—but I had another reason besides a thirst for knowledge for plowing through my relative’s shit. You just never knew if you’d find something useful or interesting or even valuable in a pile or a box! My mom had a little pack rat in herself, too, and when I’d cleared our apartment before I’d left California, there were all kinds of great things. They nestled among what someone might have taken down to the recycling center and lost, if she hadn’t looked carefully—and I would have missed so much.

  I’d found notes and reminders to herself in her books, which had been so cool, because I loved to see what she’d been thinking about and what had been important to her. Even coming across her old grocery lists in the corners of ancient purses had given me a bit of a lift. And in one of her wallets, I’d found a twenty-dollar bill, which I bet she’d stashed there so that one day the two of us could have had a little surprise treat together. She’d done fun stuff like that as much as she had been able.

  So far, I hadn’t found any money and not much else interesting in Great-aunt Maude’s stash, except for more of those unusual mushrooms that I had sworn to the Health Department had been totally removed from the house. I hadn’t been lying at the time—I really had thought I had gotten it all, but lordy, that fungus was pernicity.

  Anyway, I was taking my time, carefully moving through the boxes and piles. I felt like I owed it to my relative somehow. She had loved all this stuff, or needed it enough that she hadn’t been able to trot it over to the recycling center herself. Then she’d given me such a gift: this whole house! I wanted to be respectful of the things that had mattered to her. The mushrooms, however, I just wiped away with bleach, which was giving the house the strong odor of an indoor pool. That mixed with my dog’s tummy issues was noxiating.