by Andrea Cale
She reached for her apartment key and made her way into the lonely space. She immediately spotted the mug of tea on the counter and dumped it in the sink without a hint of frustration for the evening had been a success for the International Presswire. JP had called Maxine back, just as his mother promised he would.
“Hello, this is Maxine,” she had answered.
“Hi, Maxine. My mother said you called. She also passed along your congratulations—thank you.”
“JP, this is a big day for you, and undoubtedly an emotional one at that. I can only imagine. I would like to take your picture—no football, no runs, just you in your parents’ home, if that’s convenient, with perhaps a couple shots with them too.”
“My mom said you’re with the wire, so you’ll be able to get this to other publications, making it easier for me to decline their requests? I have a lot of other things I need to be concentrating on right now.”
“That’s right,” Maxine had said, sensing a scared tone in his young voice. “You know, my bosses would absolutely kill me for even asking this, but have you spoken with your coach about the press? I know he’s protective of you guys.”
“I have, actually,” JP said. “He’s quick to take my calls these days.”
The pair shared a laugh.
“I’m surprised you asked,” he had continued. “I appreciate it. Coach Flash said it would make sense to do one thing with the wire if it meant less distraction for me later.”
“That’s wonderful,” Maxine had said. “I have one more request. Can I bring one of our reporters with me? I can tell him we need to limit it to five minutes.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready for all that. I’m going to have to pass on a reporter.”
“I understand. You know, sometimes people give a brief statement in times like this. If you gave one to us exclusively, I’m sure we’d be making my newsroom very happy, but it’s up to you.”
“You mean, I could just prepare a couple of sentences on your way over and that’s that?” he had asked.
“That’s right. People here would only be able to quote you on those words you prepare.”
“I’d like to do that, actually,” JP had said. “Huh. You’ve been very honest and helpful. I appreciate it. I trust you.”
Maxine had hailed a cab to the professors’ Jamesville home and phoned in her update. She let her boss share the good news with the sports writers, who would be happy on such a short deadline to get an exclusive comment. Maxine had also suggested that the woman pass along the progress to the bellowing New York City sports editor with a note that she’d get a good still shot.
“Can you wait here, mister?” Maxine had asked the cabbie in front of the Hemmings’ home. “It’ll be about twenty minutes, but I’m on deadline and need to head back to Syracuse shortly. Please keep your ticker running. I’ll pay for you to stay.”
Upon knocking on the Hemmings’ homey evergreen door, Maxine was greeted by the professor whom she hadn’t yet had the opportunity of meeting. He had opened his arms for a big hug regardless. Maxine had squeezed him back.
“You must be the proud father,” Maxine said even though the man seemed to share no resemblance with JP.
“Why, yes,” he answered. “Please come in.”
Maxine saw in that moment that the Hemmings’ three faces shared the same look. They were excited and scared at the same time.
“JP,” Maxine said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with you in person.” She held out her hand, and the boy gave it a surprisingly hard shake. “Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I really think you’ll be happy with your decision.”
In reply, JP had handed her a single, folded piece of paper.
“Ah, your statement,” Maxine had said. “May I?”
“Please.”
I’m excited to play, and I’m looking forward to a win on Saturday with my teammates.
Maxine had smiled. The brief statement said nothing and everything all at once. Its tone might have come across as overly confident if it had come from any other player. But from a little guy burdened with the doubt of thousands of people, the statement was perfect. It would fit well into any of her colleagues’ articles on why picking him was a risky choice.
Maxine had peered into his eyes and had seen the hungry look of a very successful, special person.
“I believe you will win that game, JP,” she had said truthfully. She had hoped she could capture the eyes in her shot. She glanced around the snug home to find the right place to take it.
“I have the perfect place,” JP had said, reading her thoughts. “Come on up to my shrine. My parents haven’t changed a thing in my room since I left.”
“Let’s check it out. Parents, I’m going to need you too.”
The four of them made their way upstairs into JP’s room, a space that was filled with trophies and recognitions—from “Most Improved Player” certificates to “Most Valuable Player” awards. There was also JP’s favorite, The First Annual JP Hemmings Award for Best Attitude. To: JP Hemmings.
“That one was from Coach Flash’s twin, who happens to be named Coach Crash,” JP had explained with a laugh. “He gave it to me last year at Jamesville-DeWitt High. It’ll be interesting to see who gets the recognition this year.”
Maxine had looked around in awe. She realized she was in the presence of a young man who enjoyed much support and even more success. She wasn’t expecting it. Her readers wouldn’t either, she thought.
“This is indeed the perfect spot,” she had said.
To her delight, his eyes still radiated a powerful, hungry desire to succeed. She had snapped shot after shot. She glanced at her watch and spotted her cab driver waiting obediently through the very window JP had used as a boy to gaze up at the stars whenever he questioned his little place on earth.
“OK, if I could,” Maxine said, “I would like to take a few of all three of you.”
She was touched to see the parents’ eyes sharing the same spark.
“I’m going to ask a question on the record that you don’t have to answer,” Maxine said. “I assume you both adopted JP into your family?”
“He is adopted. He’s been with us since his birth. He’s also our son.”
“Of course, Mrs. Hemmings,” Maxine said softly. “I’d like to thank you all for your time. I wish you the best of luck on Saturday, JP. So, as a member of the media, I’m not supposed to be partial, but between you and me, you’ll have at least one photographer on the sidelines rooting for you.”
“I have a feeling I could use the support.”
Maxine made her way toward her cab and placed a hand on the frigid, snowy handle.
“Maxine, hold up!” one of the professors yelled. “So, like any good mother, I did a little research on you too.”
She had offered Maxine a second folded piece of paper.
“This one’s just for you, not the sports writers whose butts you’re covering by letting JP’s statement fall right into their laps,” she said. “This one’s for your caption, in case you need it.”
Maxine unfolded the note and smiled appreciatively as she read it.
“This will come in very handy,” Maxine said. “Thank you, Professor Hemmings.”
“Very well, then. You see, I learned from my research that even though your captions are terribly long, papers usually pick them up word for word,” the professor said with a wink.
Back at her lonely apartment that evening, Maxine brewed herself a fresh cup of tea.
“Let’s try this again,” she said aloud to herself.
In the last few frenzied hours, family members had deposited a couple new personal messages on her cell phone and asked whether she was working too much.
“Have you been on any dates lately?” asked one.
Maxine obediently opened her laptop and checked her online dating profile. She saw a request for a date. The man in the picture looked a bit like George Clooney. He was youthful and ha
ndsome. He reported enjoying hikes, movies, and football. Maxine decided she’d give him a shot.
“This can wait though,” she said.
She was relaxed now and was terribly hungry. In the chaos, she had forgotten to eat. Stress often covered up her hunger until deadlines passed. She set her oven to 425 degrees and removed a frozen pizza for one from the freezer. She clicked open the electronic photo of JP with his parents so she could review the evening’s work. Even when time was too late to change as much as a comma, Maxine always looked over her photos and captions to see if there was something she could improve upon next time.
On this night, however, she would enjoy her dinner looking into the eyes of the Hemmings family and the familiar black-and-white type of her caption, which read:
JP Hemmings (center) is the smallest member of Syracuse College’s football team and until Wednesday, one of the least publicized, yet he sits in the Jamesville room in which he grew up with walls covered in trophies, plaques and MVP awards. His adoptive parents, SC Professors Harvey (left) and Regina Hemmings (right), raised him from birth. On the day she discovered her son was expected to fill the shoes of the leading offensive player on the team, Regina Hemmings said, “I have never been prouder of my son. Fans can rest assured that he is the hardest-working person I know. He never gives up until he succeeds.”
CHAPTER 19
CAROLINE
The Troubled One
Caroline forced her head out from the warmth of her comforter and was surprised to find that her clock showed 11:13 a.m. For the first time in her college career, she was going to miss a class without a coach’s slip relaying her need to travel for a game.
As guilt hit and tightened her chest, she needed to look no further than the other side of the room to spot another skipper. Her roommate lay still asleep with a black mask strapped across her eyes. The bright light in the room instantly brought aches to Caroline’s own.
“I can thank Devin for this,” Caroline whispered, but not softly enough.
“Debin,” her roommate mumbled in her sleep.
“Apparently, a man of many girls’ dreams,” Caroline quipped back, even though there was no one conscious to groan at her pun.
As Caroline sat up, the dehydration from the previous night’s beer consumption delivered a sharp bolt of pain. Despite that, she grinned and thought of Devin’s smile.
With two feet on the floor and her sleepy brain beginning to recall the night’s events, Caroline gratefully remembered that she had the good sense to hit her dorm’s laundry room after the football party. Despite buzzing from the booze and the encounter with Devin, Caroline had succeeded in washing, drying, and folding the outfit she had borrowed. The items were now back in the closet of her roommate, who was still dreaming of Caroline’s new man.
“Debin,” the girl said again.
Caroline shook her red bedhead and made her way to the girls’ bathroom. She hoped the guilt from missing her psychology lecture would wash away as easily as removing her messy mascara.
Missing a class wasn’t the only proof that Devin was already meddling with Caroline’s typically wise head. When she had reached in her bag for coins during her midnight laundry session, she had come across the ad for the amateur night at the Gentlemen’s Club downtown. The alcohol in her blood that evening had seemed to make everything seem so clear. If she landed some cash she wouldn’t need to borrow her roommate’s clothes, she had thought. She wouldn’t have to take a pleather purse with her on a date with the most prestigious player in Bowl Championship Series football, if she ever had the chance. She might even be able to insist on paying her way.
She had sat atop a laundry folding table fingering the ad like she used to do with her pink childhood blanket made by her late mother and watched the clothes swirl around and around in the washing machine. The smell of dryer sheets brought her back to Rhode Island’s Soap Opera Coin Laundry, the place where her mother had once worked in Cranston.
“Sometimes, when I’m really bored working in this place, I stare at the clothes flip-flopping about in the machines and dream about gettin’ our family to a better spot,” Caroline’s mother had whispered to her girl a week before the woman’s fatal car crash. “I think about winning the lottery and moving us all to California, where you and I could go to the beach every day—even the rainy ones—and Daddy could go to college. What I wouldn’t do for a little more cash. I could get some help,” Lindsay had continued, not realizing that her little red-haired daughter was old enough to understand the meaning of that.
A dozen years later, a more mature Caroline had smiled a pained smile in the dormitory’s laundry room and spoke to the heavens while she looked down at her mother’s locket clasped around her neck. The borrowed clothes went around and around in the machine.
“Excuse the poor choice of words, but things go full circle, huh, Mom?”
Caroline had made up her mind in that moment to check out the Gentlemen’s Club after a good night’s rest. As troubled as ever, she had searched for some sort of permission. Her mother was the one person in her life who couldn’t protest. Caroline had also believed that her mother was someone—the only one—who watched all of her secrets unfold from above.
“I’m just going to go check it out,” Caroline had said quietly. “I’ll even go in daylight, Mom.”
A sobering sleep later, Caroline now stood in front of her dorm’s bathroom mirror, washing away the last spots of makeup and feeling less sure about the previous night’s plan. She knew she would have to get moving if she were going to go through with the visit. She may be skipping her first class, but she refused to miss her cheerleading practice at 3:30 that afternoon.
“It’s time,” she said decisively, before sneaking out of the dorm and leaving a bit of innocence behind her.
It was technically still morning, yet the Gentlemen’s Club in downtown Boston was dark. It reeked of a permanent party. The bulky front door was propped open to air out the combined stenches of sweat and booze.
Through the darkness, Caroline thought the venue could be worse. Always tough enough to search for the positive, she felt glad that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had passed legislation to stop smoking in public places in 2004. She also tried convincing herself that the atmosphere would probably appear less dingy at night. Wrapped in an old comfy sweater and jeans with a few little rips from heavy wear, she tried to picture cash flying around the poorly lit room. She wondered if it would be worth the consequences.
Caroline glanced timidly about the club for an employee and rummaged in her purse for the ad. Tall, thin, and beautiful, she looked like a picture of all the other girls on nearby Newbury Street digging in their designer bags for their lipsticks or cell phones. She wondered if the paper listed hours when the place was open to the public. Seeing nothing and no one, Caroline began thinking this was the wrong decision after all. She stalled a few moments more, looking around to take in the stage and poles, foreign objects that she recognized only from the occasional R-rated movies.
She turned and headed for the door. Each high-heeled boot stuck to the floor, and with every sticky step, she whispered the words of a prayer. Making it only to “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be,” she was interrupted by a large man dressed all in black with slick hair.
“I thought I heard someone,” he said. “Can I help you, young lady?”
Despite his somewhat intimidating appearance, he had a warm voice and a kind smile. He held out his hand as if he were kicking off a job interview.
“Phil,” he said as he offered her his hand.
She resisted offering her own name. He didn’t press for it.
Caroline’s boots squeaked on the grimy floor as she turned toward him. She shook his hand and forgot to finish her prayer. She was wrapped up in her own head, debating whether she should run for the door or tell the man she was interested in trying to win some much-needed money, just once, on amateur night.
Caroline’s natural beaut
y immediately hit Phil, a man who worked among scores of what he called glamazons, complete with extended hair, fake nails, and surgically enhanced features. He had good instinct and even better street smarts. He knew a moneymaker when he saw one. Not waiting for the redhead to answer his question or let her get to the door, he made his move.
“We had a girl quit last week ’cause her new boyfriend didn’t approve of the job,” he offered. “She gave her notice right away. How old are you?” Phil was desperate to fill the spot. Things weren’t going well financially at the club, leaving his family’s financial future in crisis too.
“I’m eighteen,” she answered.
“Well, the dancer we lost worked five nights a week, so we have some space to fill. Is that why you’re here?”
“Oh, well, I’m a college student, and I also have to balance work-study, classes, homework, and cheerleading,” Caroline said. “I need money badly, but I can’t do five nights a week. I could probably do two. Two max.”
The conservative girl couldn’t believe the words were coming out of her own lips. She pressed them together and spread the inexpensive gloss that she had applied that morning. Caroline could easily have been a fresh-faced pharmacy chain spokesperson for using drugstore products to look gorgeous. A regular job at this kind of place had not even been an option until now. She had just heard herself offer the most private parts of herself and sadly thought of how disappointed her father would be. It was as if the daring, wild side of her that she had always managed to keep bottled up—her mother’s side of her—could not be caged any longer. Caroline thought of her expenses. She thought of treating herself, for once, to something nice in a life of otherwise unbearable tragedy. She thought, too, of getting ready for dates with Devin.
Phil tried to hide his excitement over hearing the word “cheerleader.”
A genuinely nice college cheerleader. This one really would attract more regulars, he thought to himself.
