Table for Two

by Nia Forrester

  “Hey. Those people pay my bills,” she says, beginning to rinse her cereal bowl in the sink.

  “I could pay your bills,” I say.

  I don’t know where the words came from, but once they’re out, I don’t regret them so much as I am surprised by them. But Dani doesn’t miss a beat, because she assumes—reasonably—that I’m kidding around.

  “So, I could stay home and eat bonbons?” she asks, taking the bowl and putting it in the dishrack.

  “All the bonbons you want, baby,” I say, playing along with her assumption that it’s a joke.

  “For one; that would be boring as hell. And two, I would regain a lot of weight. So, I’m going to have to decline.” She turns and leans against the sink. “What time are you two going to hit the road?”

  “Why you so eager to get rid of us?”

  When she’s not around, it’s like I’m missing a rib, for real. The Saturday nights when she doesn’t come up to Bristol with us feel as empty as did those endless nights in the two years after Faith died. Just me and Little Rocket, eating Velveeta Shells and Cheese for dinner, sitting in our drawers in front of television, watching some action movie that is probably inappropriate for a kid.

  We could do the exact same thing with Dani around, and it would feel like night and day. There have been more than a few times when the three of us drove up to Bristol late in the evening, and realized that there was no food in the fridge, and ordered pizza. The only place nearby that delivers late, happens to make crappy pies, with sauce that is a little like watered-down ketchup. But sitting around eating shitty pizza with Dani, Rocket climbing all over her, talking like someone on speed, my life feels different, and more like … a life.

  Sometimes, she leans over my shoulder while I’m reading all my prep material for the show. Pointing things out, she asks questions, and nods with interest while I answer. We’ve been talking lately a lot about all kinds of stuff I never gave much thought to before. Like when she told me that since I’m on television I need to ‘choose my own archetype.’

  ‘Or other people will choose it for you. Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not.’

  I feel her on that. I should be the one to choose whether I’m portrayed as the Funny Black Guy, the Angry Black Guy, The Jive-Talkin’ Black Guy. I’m going for none of those. I’m going to be Rand “The Rocket” Reese, whatever that might mean.

  Though, lately, people are making me out to be Woke Black Guy, because of that early stance I took on the anthem kneeling. There are worse things than being thought of as woke. But it can be a cage, just like all the other archetypes. If you can’t live up to it.

  “No kidding around. You should probably leave soon,” Dani says. “Just so Little Rocket can be settled in before it gets too late. And did you call the sitter for tomorrow morning?”

  “Shit. No. I better do that now,” I say.

  Little Rocket has another sitter in Bristol, one he doesn’t like as much as he does Annie. But I think that might be because he doesn’t know her as well, and she’s older, and of the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ school of thought. I got Freya’s help in hiring her, and she thought it was better to go older when hiring in an unfamiliar city. ‘At least at home, I might know the sitter’s momma,’ she pointed out. ‘Or their momma’s best friend. There’s no one up there in Bristol who you know can vouch for some young girl to look after your son.’

  Which was true. Our township is small enough for that. But Bristol is still a sea of unfamiliar faces and places, and Little Rocket and I don’t feel completely at home there, even after a fair amount of time has passed.

  I go to make the call to the sitter, and she agrees to come early on Sunday morning to look after Little Rocket while I work. We’ll be up there through Monday evening and return on Tuesday, but Monday, he’ll be hanging with me all day. At ESPN, the on-air personalities have a lot more leeway around things like bringing your kid to work.

  After the sitter is scheduled, I shower and throw a few things into an overnight bag. I get our stuff loaded up, while Dani stands at the open door in the rear, leaning in and talking to Little Rocket about what I have no idea. She kisses him goodbye and shuts the door, straightening up to face me.

  “Have a great show tomorrow,” she says. “See you Tuesday?”

  I pull her against me, kiss her jaw. “Yeah, Tuesday. And sorry about that whole … missing our reservation at Amada. We’ll make it work next Friday.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t care about that so much. I mean, we did go to Q’s party and had that fun interlude of almost getting arrested. So, we had our Date Night. Just not the one we planned.”

  I shake my head and grin, telling her to get in her car, and that I’ll drive off at the same time she does. Part of it is the revival of all those gentlemanly habits that Freya taught me, which never seemed to take hold until now.

  But the other part is that I don’t like to watch Danielle leave. Not unless I’m leaving, too.

  ~3~

  Rand’s co-host on the show is a White guy named Hunter Pollack. He’s blonde and movie-star handsome. I think he played in the League for five years, but I know he had to retire after an injury. One weekend in Bristol, he and his wife invited Rand and me over for dinner. We brought Little Rocket along because Hunter has kids around the same age. Rand instructions were that under no circumstances was I to mention Hunter’s career-ending injury.

  ‘Not unless you want to see a grown man cry,’ he said, only half joking.

  For some people, Rand explained, football is right up there with God and country. And Hunter is one of those people.

  So, now, Hunter and Rand have this banter that works onscreen. Hunter is the guy who thinks the NFL and everything about it is sacrosanct. And Rand is the irreverent challenger of the status quo. I watch their show every Sunday, just to see how Rand does. He’s performing really well, and is a natural even though I don’t think he realizes that about himself yet.

  The players—most of them Black—love him and talk to him openly, and like a literal brother. With Hunter, they are a little more guarded, a little more rehearsed. Hunter, to them, represents The Man, The League, the guys in suits who sign their paychecks and might trade them if they misbehave. Rand represents one of their brothers-in-arms.

  Every week, I watch that dynamic play out—Rand connecting effortlessly with players that he is meeting sometimes for the first time on-camera. And Hunter, being rendered the second-string in the conversation, often struggling to keep up with the urban slang being tossed back and forth. I like it that Rand is the more popular of the duo, but I am always watchful and mindful that he not eclipse Hunter entirely, so that if and when it happens, I can counsel him to dial it back a little.

  Sometimes, until you know the lay of the land, you don’t want to run too fast, or too far ahead. Someone may be waiting just over that hump, planning to trip you up.

  Today, while I work on brunch for me and, Trudie, who is coming over after a long period of us not hanging out, I keep one eye and one ear on the television while Rand and Hunter goodheartedly debate the issue that seems to have waned a little, but hasn’t gone away. There are players who, now routinely, take a knee during the national anthem. And there are still people who routinely complain about them. Hunter is one of those complainers.

  “It just doesn’t sit right with me,” he is saying onscreen. “I mean, what would it cost them …”

  Rand lets Hunter talk, and listens. Since he isn’t saying anything, I amble back into the kitchen to work on the shrimp ‘n’ grits. I’m daydreaming and wondering whether I remembered to ask Trudie to bring over champagne for the mimosas we’ll be having when I hear Rand chime in.

  “Look, I got stopped just this past weekend. And I can tell you, it didn’t matter that I didn’t do anything. I was … I can’t lie … a little nervous watching the officers approach my car. Law enforcement doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it does to you, Hu
nter. It just doesn’t.”

  “Us. You,” Hunter repeats. “See. That’s what I don’t get, Rocket. Far as I’m concerned, you and me are the same. We both played ball, we …”

  “Hunter,” Rand sounds patient. “We’re not the same. Love you like a brother but we’re not the same, man. We’re just not. I could tell you all the ways we’re seen differently, and think differently, but we only got a thirty-minute show.”

  Hunter seems not to know what to do with this, so switches gears a little. “So about this stop … and tell the truth, were you going one-hundred in a fifty-five?”

  Rand laughs. “Nah, man.” But he doesn’t take the bait to explain the stop, recognizing that what Hunter is really trying to do is get the temperature down a notch, make things not quite so serious. He lets his co-host off the hook. “Okay … so I might’ve been doing seventy,” he lies.

  Hunter laughs, and all is well on television screens, and in living rooms across America. I agree with Rand’s instinct on this one. Some things you can’t force-feed. You have to let people taste an idea slowly, and get used to it, bit by tiny bit.

  “So, I see you’re still hell-bent on cutting your own throat on live TV.”

  Alexa comes sauntering into my dressing room while I am washing my face, to rid it of the powder that the makeup people insist I wear. I glance up at her.

  “You know me,” I say. “Love living on the razor’s edge.”

  “I don’t though,” Alexa says. “Know you, I mean. I’d like to, but …” I look at her out of the corner of my eye and she shrugs. “C’est la vie.”

  “You see me talking about that stuff as cutting my own throat?” I ask, partly to bring things back to business as much as possible, and partly because I still like to know my colleagues’ read on things.

  “Yeah, I do. But, I guess you know better than I do,” she says, meaning exactly the opposite. She takes a seat in the makeup chair, and I can feel her watching me. “Was that story true, or just part of your routine?”

  “What story?” I reach for the towel nearby and dry my face. I ignore her reference to a ‘routine.’

  “About you getting stopped.”

  “Yup.”

  “That had to have sucked.”

  “It was what it was,” I say. “They didn’t even pretend they had a reason.”

  “Was whatshername with you?”

  I straighten up and turn to look Alexa in the eye. “Yeah, Danielle was with me. Because that’s where I generally prefer for her to be. With me.”

  After that first go-‘round with Dani and Alexa, I don’t play with this particular stick of dynamite. Alexa is sexy as hell, I can’t pretend she isn’t. But I know what I have, and what I would lose. And it ain’t worth it.

  I know this, because Alexa is still sweatin’ me hard; and her game, which at one time seemed sophisticated, is actually kind of basic. She has one note that she plays the hell out of it—the sex siren. Now, if she tried a different tack, like maybe … intelligent conversation? I might have my curiosity piqued just a little. But she doesn’t have any other game than the one she’s playing. She is a pretty picture, and more than likely an above-average lay. But nothing new. Nothing that I can’t easily pass up.

  “That mean she’ll be on your arm for the ESPYs?”

  “No doubt.”

  I forgot about the damn ESPYs, now just a few weeks away.

  “We have to be out there maybe a week in advance,” Alexa reminds me.

  “Yeah. That should be cool,” I say, leaning against a nearby chair. “Who you bringin’?”

  Alexa gets up and offers me a sideways glance as she leaves. “Not the person I’d like to bring, so what difference does it make?”

  I watch her go—long, swinging ebony hair, swishing butt, high-heeled boots—and remind myself of the lesson Dani taught me last time.

  She. Will. Leave. Me.

  She wouldn’t like doing it, but she would.

  If it looks like it isn’t a good situation for her, she will leave me.

  If it looks like I’m doing her dirty, she will leave me.

  If I give any indication of unwillingness to be an adult in an adult relationship, she will leave me.

  That’s all I need to remember for me turn away from the view of Alexa’s departure, and reach for my phone. All I need to be doing right now is calling the sitter, and letting her know I’m taking my ass straight home.

  “An entire week?” Dani sounds uncertain.

  “Make a vacation out of it,” I say. “You and Little Rocket can see Hollywood. Go to Disneyland. Whatever you want.”

  “Rand, I’m not in a position to go on a vacation. I have bills. My client list isn’t what it used to be, and I need to make sure I keep the ones I have.”

  “How long can you come for?”

  “The weekend. That’s it. The awards show, and then back after that.”

  I say nothing.

  “You know I want to come for longer,” she says, and when I still say nothing, she sighs.

  This shit is new to me, I can’t lie.

  Faith never worked. She was busy, but mostly it was with our social life. Her social life, and her blogs and public appearances, just for the sake of appearing. And as for the other women I was involved with, most of them made it look like I was the priority.

  They never alluded to places they had to go to, people they needed to meet with, money that they needed to make, in order to pay bills. It was like playtime, all the time. Now I know that was because most of them didn’t have work of any substance, and could make time when I needed them to.

  Even Faith, if I asked for her company, made sure she canceled just about everything else to ensure that it happened. I didn’t do that often, but if I did, she was there.

  And in fairness, Dani goes out of her way to do the same thing, but she has a life outside of being with me. I have to get used to that

  On Thanksgiving, just after we got serious, she had sessions with clients right up to the actual holiday, causing us to have our first real fight. Some dippy chick who had recently become a vegan wanted to talk through some “techniques” for declining to eat her mother’s famous Thanksgiving turkey. Dani agreed to meet this girl at her apartment for an hour, just as we were leaving to go to Freya’s to eat.

  Naturally, I wasn’t cool with that, and it turned into a big thing which ended with Dani telling me that each of us had to “act according to our priorities” and that hers was to go see her client, but that she would come over after.

  ‘Come now,’ I said. ‘Or don’t come at all.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, cool as can be. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And then she shrugged. ‘Or not.’

  Messed me all the way up. Me and Little Rocket slinked over to Freya’s without her, and when Freya asked where Dani was, I played it off like I wasn’t worried about it. But my sister, being who she was, pried it loose.

  ‘Y’all are just … silly,’ she said.

  She called Dani up herself, and told her to come when she was done with her client, that we weren’t eating for another two hours anyway, and not to ‘pay Rand’s butt any mind.’

  Even so, I wasn’t sure she would show. But she did, wearing chocolate-brown figure-hugging riding pants, shin-high boots and an orange top that made her look like she glowed. I stared at her all through dinner, but we didn’t speak. Right around dessert, I punked out at the idea of not going home with her that night and cornered her in the kitchen to apologize.

  Danielle’s pretty damn stubborn when she wants to be. Maybe more stubborn than me. That was when I knew for sure that for once in my life, I was in a situation with a woman where not only didn’t I have the upper hand; she had me wrapped around her little finger.

  “I’ll come to LA that Friday,” Dani says. “That’s the best I can do, I think.”

  “If that’s the best you can do, that’s the best you can do.”

  Now, I’m not that needy dude who wishes he could wal
k around with his woman in his back pocket or anything, but the ESPYs … See, that’s like the scene of the crime from my old life. That was where my biggest ego-boosts happened, where I got indoctrinated into the life of the young, and entitled.

  Faith and I got lots of good press at the ESPYs, for who we were, what we wore, how in love we seemed. The ESPYs was where a lot of the myth was born.

  Having Dani with me feels like it might help neutralize those memories, and take away their power. I get tense thinking about being in my old stomping grounds. But less so, when I think about her being next to me.

  “Are you sulking?” she asks.

  “I’m not … sulking. What am I? Little Rocket?”

  “Sometimes I think you are. Because sometimes you act like him. Like if you don’t get your way, you don’t want to play anymore. You want to take all your toys and go home, or something.”

  I exhale and look at the ceiling.

  “Do you ever miss playing football?” she asks, seemingly out of nowhere.

  The question startles me a little, and snaps me out of my mood because as soon as she asks it, I realize she has never asked it before. How is it that we’ve never talked about that? Maybe because, of all the people I know, she is the one who least sees me as defined by my former NFL career.

  “Nah,” I say, after a while. “Not really.”

  “Really?” Dani sounds surprised.

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking of how to explain it. “I missed it for a little while, but … only in the way you miss a bad relationship. The predictability, y’know what I mean? Knowing what it comes next, and what the relationship is asking from you … But as far as playing the game, not really. I know that probably doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it does,” she says quickly.

  “I miss having all that time and space occupied. The practices, the game prep, the guys I ran with … but the game itself? For me, it was always just that. A game. And a job. So missed that part of it.”