“We need a few things, first. We’re taking the car.”
“Oh, lordy. I don’t think I’m ready to drive with a minor concomporaneously,” Kylie said nervously, and I told her no, that I’d be behind the wheel for now, and we’d go to a parking lot to practice later. I didn’t want to drive concom…whatever she’d just said with Jamison, either, not on the roads. Miss Margulies seemed very sweet to her dog but I was pretty sure she’d flip a switch and have my balls if something happened to the kid.
“Where are we going?” he asked me as he bounced into the back, making the Bentley rock a little.
“It’s a surprise,” I answered, and both of them got so damn excited, I tried to temper it. “Not like we’re flying to Paris or something.”
“Paris? Who said anything about France? I’ve been to Paris, Texas, though,” Kylie said, and she went into a travel story that lasted for the rest of the way to our destination, with Jamison asking her about ten million questions about every single detail of that trip to keep her going. I sat quietly and listened, enjoying the sound of her voice, but hearing a few other things in her words. Like, how she had been trying to brace the door of the motel room with a table but it was screwed down, which Jamison thought was hilarious. But that meant she was scared in that room, right? It wasn’t funny. And he laughed again when she talked about sucking on free ketchup packets, but that was because she was hungry. The story sounded like a great adventure to him, and he kept saying that he wanted to take the bus to Texas, too, but I wasn’t so sure.
“Sporting goods?” Kylie read under the name of the store on the big sign at the road. “What are we…oh, I get it!” She beamed at me, so happy, but it took Jamison another minute to get that we were here to buy him cleats for baseball.
“Really?” he asked me. “We’re really getting them?”
“Sure, buddy,” I said. “You said that you need them, right? You should have good equipment to play.” He tilted up his glasses and I watched him wipe his eyes. “Don’t cry about it.”
“He’s so happy,” Kylie whispered, and her smile got even bigger. Only a few people recognized me in the store, also whispering some, but I didn’t really notice too much. I was learning for the first time that Jamison wore a size nine—men’s size nine—so that his feet looked like cross country skis at the bottoms of his skinny legs, and that Kylie had no idea that different sports required different footwear.
“Why couldn’t you wear these running shoes for baseball if you’re just playing on the same grass?” she asked. “There are different ones for football? Soccer, too?” Her eyes bugged at the prices. Of course Jamison had something to say about that, how you absolutely had to have good baseball cleats to be a good baseball player. I kept my opinion, that it didn’t actually make a hot damn’s worth of difference what he wore, to myself. It mattered to him.
I stood and watched as he tried on every pair they had in his size and walked up and down the aisle to test them out. “You made his day. What are you still frowning about?” Kylie asked me.
All the boxes had made reminded me of my father again. “I remember so many deliveries coming to our house with new equipment for me and my brother. My dad was always trying to get us an advantage with the latest stuff. Ben thought it was a joke, that a new pair of cleats was going to make a difference for him, but I bought into it, just like Jamison is. I just wanted to be better somehow.”
“I thought you said you were on the varsity team when you were a freshman. Isn’t that why those guys took you to a bar to get you drunk? Weren’t you a really good quarterback even then?”
She was remembering my virginity story. “Yeah, sure, I was fine.” I pointed to the kid. “Let’s make him choose a pair before the store closes.”
Kylie turned up the heat in the car and Jamison sat in the back, hugging his new shoes to his chest and grinning at them. “Where are we going now? Back to the Helping Hands building?” he asked. “I wonder if there’s anyone there who could see my cleats.”
“No, I thought we’d go to one more place,” I told him. It was like my paycheck was burning a hole in my pocket today, even though it had been shocking to see what my balance was after we left the sporting goods store. Kylie was making me check it all the time so I would pay attention to my finances, which I didn’t enjoy, but it was eye-opening how that number dropped after only one little purchase. I had known that the Junior Woodsmen pay was crap, but seeing it in my bank account really drove that point home. It was kind of scary, actually, because I had thought that playing again would be the solution to my money issues but it was clear that I wouldn’t be going to any Paris—France, Texas, or otherwise—for a long time, if ever again.
It took a while for us to drive back out towards our house, towards Roy’s Tavern. Kylie looked around as we pulled into the tiny town. “Are we going to the bar? I don’t have to be there yet,” she was telling me, but I stopped in front of the bookstore instead of pulling into the tavern’s washboard of a parking lot.
“You liked the book you got at this place a lot, right?” I asked her. “The one about the girl and her dumb sisters, the old-fashioned romance?”
She nodded vigorously. “It was great, and it took me so much longer to read it than normal! It’s another keeper. My bag is going to be so heavy.”
She said things like that every once in a while, making references to leaving which I didn’t like to hear. We were doing ok and it seemed dumb for her to go, even though I’d have the house to myself. No Emma to stink it up, although since I’d forced all the windows to open, it wasn’t such a big deal.
“Maybe there’s a sequel or that author wrote other books,” I suggested, and then told Jamison that no, he couldn’t wear his new cleats to go inside this store. “For the field only. I remember…” I remembered when I’d forgotten to take off my cleats and had gotten into my dad’s car, splattering chunks of mud all over the floormat. He’d lectured me the whole way home about how I didn’t use my head, I never thought, I was a dumbass. Why was he on my mind so much today? There was no reason to waste one thought on that dead bastard.
“Kayden, I’m always happy to look at books, but you don’t have to buy me anything,” Kylie told me, but I put my hand on her thin coat to guide her inside Holliday Booksellers.
Jamison went immediately to find the sports books, if they had any, and Kylie and I went to another section. I wasn’t so crazy about the alien romance she’d given me, although I hadn’t told her so. I scanned the shelves, seeing a lot of titles that I was supposed to have read in high school and in college. My time at school had been divided between football and parties, and reading hadn’t figured much into anything.
“Here!” Kylie held up a volume and waved it at me. “It’s not a sequel, but this one looks really good. I’m buying it, not you,” she told me. “I’m going to see if that woman is here.” She wandered off toward the front of the store and I looked around for Jamison.
“I found a book about football, about the Woodsmen!” he announced, and showed me a copy of The Wilde One.
I took it from his hand, because everyone in the league knew about Warren Wilde. His memoir detailing how the former quarterback of the Woodsmen team had screwed half the women in the United States wasn’t something that Miss Margulies wouldn’t approve of. “Let’s look for something else instead,” I told him.
“Hallie is coming to help me. I think she knows everything about books,” Kylie announced happily, and sort of slid next to my hip. I put my arm around her without thinking about it, but then I realized how well she fit right there. I looked down at her and she smiled up at me.
“Kayden Matthews?” a deep voice asked, and I let go of Kylie to turn towards it. A huge blonde guy dropped the carton of books he was carrying and folded his canon-sized arms across his chest. “What in the hell are you doing in here?”
I looked across the shelves at my former teammate scowling at me, and remembered how I hadn’t gotten along with thos
e guys, either.
Chapter 11
Kylie
“Who is that?” I whispered to Kayden. In my opinion, the other guy looked like Thor. Not the movie version, but the actual Norse god I’d read about in Golden Hammer of His Kisses: a man huge to the point that it was hard to believe he was real and with arm muscles that bulged as if he had beach balls under his shirt. Kayden was tall and strong, sure, but he was leaner. This other person was as wide as the front of the Bentley.
“That’s just someone I knew,” Kayden told me, and nodded to greet the giant. “Gunnar.”
“What are you doing in my store?” the blonde man demanded again, and he took a threatening step closer. “Get out.”
“We have to leave?” Jamison asked, but I had already put myself in front of both of them.
“Back off, lunk,” I told Thor. “Kayden, take Jamison! Go start the car and I’ll hold him here.”
The African elephant guy stared at me. “What? I’m not going to hurt anyone,” he said, like he was confuddled.
“Damn straight,” I shot back, and felt in my backpack for my bear spray without taking my eyes off him. “Jamison, drop those books and go!”
Kayden put his arm back around me. “Kylie, calm down. This is Gunnar Christensen. We played together in my rookie year when I was the quarterback for the Woodsmen. The real Woodsmen, the pro team.”
They had been teammates at the place where Kayden’s brother was now one of the coaches? Then why was Thor booting us? He’d gone back to glaring at Kayden like he also wanted to rip his head off.
“You two are welcome to stay,” he stated, and signaled at me and Jamison with a dill pickle-sized finger. “But Matthews, you’re out.” Now he pointed to the door.
“You don’t own this place!” I told him. “This is Holliday Booksellers, not Christensen. Just because you’re as big as three people combined, it doesn’t mean that you can tell us where to shop.”
“I’m married to Hallie Holliday,” he informed me, and I couldn’t believe that this huge, mean Norse god was with the nice red-haired woman who had made the bad coffee and later given me all the books. “We co-own the store.”
“We’re leaving,” Kayden said, and he put his other hand on Jamison’s shoulder. “We can shop somewhere else.”
“Happily,” I added, putting my book back on the shelf and not in the right place, so there. “I wouldn’t give you one thin dime, since this is how you treat customers.”
The heavyweight looked a little ashamed of himself. “I don’t usually treat customers poorly. But Kayden Matthews is—”
“I knew it! I knew I recognized you!” The red-haired woman who had been so nice, Hallie, stormed up to join the party, and she wasn’t smiling anymore. She scowled at Kayden, furious. “You look different now with that beard,” she said, “and the day you came in for coffee I didn’t have my glasses on. That was how I ended up using the week-old grounds from the compost to make your drinks.”
“Hallie, honey, that’s not food-safe,” the big guy said, but she ignored him.
“I was also distracted because I kept looking at your table and thinking that I knew you, and unfortunately, I do. You’re not welcome here, Kayden Matthews. Get out!” She pointed at the door as well. Then she peered at me through her coke bottle lenses. “It’s you! With him? Is this who you were talking about, the person who was going to teach you to drive? I’m sorry to do this to you, but he has to leave.”
I had been kicked out of places in very embarrassing ways before, including one time in Mississippi when Em and I had been run out of a motel with me only wearing my undies and flipflops. But I was pretty sure that Jamison hadn’t ever dealt with a situation like this and probably Kayden hadn’t either, not when he was sober. So I took charge again.
“We are leaving, and we won’t be coming back,” I told both of these jerks. “I really thought you were a nice person, Hallie Holliday, but I’m sorry that I patronited your store to begin with. I’ll be returning the books you gave to me.” By setting them on fire on their doorstep, that would be how she’d get them back. No one was going to mess with us, not while I was on watch. I let them know that, too: “No one messes with us. Got it? No one!”
But before I built up to anything more, Kayden was practically dragging me out through the front door. The bell above it nearly flew off into the snow when he crashed it open, and Jamison was right behind us. We piled into the car and Kayden took off down the road out of town, much faster than he usually went. But this time, I didn’t complain. I wanted to leave this place and never, ever come back.
“Wow!” Jamison said from the back seat. “Wow! What happened? Why were they so mad? Were you going to fight with them, Kylie?”
I opened my mouth but Kayden answered. “No. Nobody was going to fight. Gunnar remembers me from my rookie season when I came in after the Woodsmen quarterback got injured.”
“But why does that make him so mad at you?” I asked, and Jamison said, “You mean you played for the Woodsmen when Davis Blake got hurt, right?”
Kayden nodded, but that didn’t answer my question at all. “That doesn’t explain why a woman who had been very nice to me and helped me pick out books and gave me advice suddenly turned on me like a tiger salamander,” I said. “Those guys are cannibals, in case you didn’t know.” Jamison had a lot of questions about that, but I just looked at Kayden and waited.
“I think that Hallie Holliday is friends with my brother Ben’s girlfriend. I remember something like that, anyway. I don’t think I ever met her but I may have,” he finally said.
“She threw us out of her bookstore because you’re fighting with her friend’s boyfriend?” I asked.
“Huh? I don’t get it either,” Jamison said. “Who’s a girlfriend and who’s a friend? Why are you fighting with your brother, Kayden? You always say how much you love him.”
“Do I?” Kayden asked. He seemed startled by that idea, but of course, it was completely obvious to me, too. “I didn’t realize I talked about him that much.”
I was with Jamison, in that nothing about what had just happened made sense to me, either, but Kayden silently refused to answer our questions or to say anything more. We went for my driving lesson and I was so distracted that I nearly ran into a snowbank. Ok, two snowbanks, and Jamison screamed a little. A lot. Instead of continuing the turns around the parking lot, they dropped me at the tavern a little early and went back to the Helping Hands building to watch baseball videos and learn technique.
My location changed, but my mind stayed on Kayden. “I wonder why they don’t get along,” I mused, as I sat on the ground behind the bar and used an old mixing spoon to pick a giant hairball out of the drain. “How did this happen, anyway? Who shed so much?” I looked at Roy. “You? Is your hair dyed, by the way? I’ve always assumed that it couldn’t be such a coal black at your age. Or is it a wig?”
He ignored the hair questions. “Who doesn’t get along with who? Who are you nattering about now?”
“Kayden and his former teammate, Gunnar something. A huge guy who looks like Thor, the real one.”
“You mean Gunnar Christensen,” Roy informed me. He tried to rub a glass clean on his not-clean shirt. “He was the right tackle for the Woodsmen, a great player until he retired. He hates Matthews?” He hooted. “That’s a good one.”
“I looked up the Woodsmen team’s record from when Kayden filled in for Davis Blake. They were fine! Not like they were the best in the league, but for a rookie season, Kayden was good,” I told him, and he hooted again.
“You forget that everyone around here expected Davis Blake to take the Woodsmen to the championship game that year,” he told me. “And then we got stuck with Matthews, and that was a big disappointment.”
“But enough for that Christensen guy to still be pissed, all these years later? If that’s true, then he’s just a jerk. The largest-sized jerk I’ve ever seen outside of the animal kingdom, but still a jerk. I personally hate him
and his dumb wife, no matter if they have the coolest jobs in the world. They run their own bookstore,” I explained.
“It’s a good thing to have your own business, even if some people don’t appreciate it,” he answered, and that apparently made him think of his son and get angry about how Dexter had left and gone home without agreeing to take over the tavern. He stopped talking to me now and stayed pissy for the rest of the night, more than usual. I steered clear of him until a few hours later, when I heard one of the regulars loudly saying his name.
“Roy? What’s the matter with you? Roy?”
And I looked up to see that he was slumped over, hanging onto the side of the bar to keep himself on his feet.
“Roy!” I ran over, shoving chairs and people out of my path. “Roy! Are you all right?”
“Get everyone out of here,” he grunted at me. I saw his grip on the edge of the counter slip, and I held him under his arms to ease him down to the dirty linoleum.
“You heard him,” I yelled, even though no one could have heard much above the jukebox. “Get out!” I looked at my boss as the crowd slowly filtered toward the door. “I’ll call for an ambulance.”
“No! I don’t want that. I’m fine.” He tried to pick up his head and his pale face creased in pain.
“You need help, Roy!”
“I’ll drive myself,” he told me. “I won’t get in no ambulance.” Then he moaned, like something really, really hurt.
“We’ll drive together,” I decided, and luckily he was the size of a bandicoot, because I managed to get him to his feet and out to the parking lot to the Olds. But it became clear as he slumped onto the driver’s door that I was going to have to be behind the wheel. Oh, lordy.
“Give me the keys,” I demanded, and dragged him to the other side and got him in.
“Can you drive now?” he asked, but his eyes were already closed. Clearly, this was happening if I had a license or not, so I put myself into the seat and gripped the steering wheel. I could do it. No matter if I’d almost killed a snowbank or two earlier in the day, I could get Roy to the hospital now.
The Bust Page 19
