À la Carte

by Nia Forrester

  It’s only been a short time since the breakup, but she already looks better. I can’t imagine she’s over her split with SJ, but I can tell she’s begun to find a way to accept it.

  “You don’t need to apologize,” I say, shaking my head.

  “No, I do. As if you didn’t already have enough going on, I lay this thing on you and … anyway, I’m sorry. Everything felt so final, and …” She shrugs.

  “Have you heard from him?” I ask.

  “I blocked his numbers. I was going crazy counting all his calls and text messages, trying to gauge from how many there were whether his interest in me is waning.” Jennifer gives a harsh laugh and shakes her head. “I was going out of my mind.”

  “You’re not going out of your mind. He’s been a huge part of your life for so long. It’s natural to worry about how to fill that space. It’s natural to wonder whether he’ll have an easy time doing it himself.”

  “Anyway. Enough about me.” Jennifer looks around the living room, and then glances significantly toward the side of the house where Eva is ensconced in the guest suite, probably reading or watching television. “This turned into an extended stay, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say, lowering my voice. “Long story. But basically, it would have been irresponsible of us otherwise, and …”

  Jennifer smiles.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You’re a good person, Danielle. I mean it. Most women would never in a million years …”

  “She’s Rocket’s grandmother,” I say, shrugging.

  “Still, it’s a lot.”

  “And she’s been a huge support for me too. Just this morning I overslept and when I got downstairs she’d gotten him up, fed him a full breakfast, and had him all ready to go. All I had to do was get in the car and drive him. I could get used to that. Especially now.”

  “You going to ask her to move in on a permanent basis?” Jennifer teases.

  “Maybe I’ll get some household help, I’m thinking. Is that horrible?” I wrinkle my nose. “It sounds so …”

  “Sensible?”

  “No,” I say. “Extravagant.”

  Jennifer waves that concern off and rolls her eyes. “Some women in your position have two people helping around the house, Danielle. One for the house and one for the kids.”

  “Which is crazy to me.”

  “Maybe. But you could use at least one person. There’s nothing extravagant or crazy about that. Especially when you’re raising two kids, and one is an infant.”

  “I’ll ask Rand.”

  Jennifer laughs, and opens her mouth to say something, then changes her mind.

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask him, Danielle. Tell him that you need help. And then just go ahead and hire someone.”

  I appreciate the tip, but that’s not how Rand and I communicate. We’re a team. And a good one. Slipping off to the doctor without telling him, and even just announcing that I’d picked a name are not typical of how we roll. Although we have been, lately.

  Eva has been helpful while she’s here. She hasn’t been too much of an imposition. And I even enjoy our talks; but maybe Rand has a point that something about having Faith’s mother around all the time has upset our balance.

  “I’ll talk it over with him when he gets home,” I say.

  Then I remember that I haven’t told Jen about Rand’s reaction when I brought up adoption. I consider telling her now but something holds me back.

  I like having confidantes—both her, and Freya—that I can do relationship dissection with, but suddenly, it comes to me. I don’t want to make a habit of sharing grievances. If Rand and I have troubles, I want us to sort through them together, not make them the subject of griping sessions with girlfriends.

  Funnily enough, it was something Eva said that’s reminded me of this. About when she was first pregnant and could do things her way without the interference of her family.

  ‘I had my husband and my baby,’ she said. ‘And it was enough.’

  Something about that stuck with me. It isn’t that I don’t need friends, or a support circle. I do, and I’m grateful that Jen and I are going to be okay. But I don’t need anyone’s early warning system but my own.

  I don’t need to “tell” Rand that I need help and then just hire someone. We decide things like that together. He’s my best friend, and I know that I am his.

  And the further irony of this epiphany is that even though Eva was the one who helped me have it, I see now that Rand is right. I think it’ll be better when she leaves our home. We’re just starting out and figuring out how to be a family. And even if Eva maintains a discreet silence about what she sees and hears of how we live, and how we parent Rocket, both Rand and I will be hearing a Greek chorus of imagined judgment and criticism in our heads.

  I blurted out that question about adopting Rocket in a way that was ill-considered, ill-timed, and not to mention poorly-phrased. And I know that it was mostly because Eva was there and I felt threatened. That wasn’t how I wanted to have that conversation. It may have been one of the most momentous conversations Rand and I ever had to have and I made it sound like a demand and did something that I know Rand doesn’t react well to—it backed him into a corner. No wonder he panicked, and said the only thing he could say, to give himself more time.

  “You still up for lunch?” Jennifer asks, rousing me from my thoughts.

  We’d planned to go into town, and she said she would treat me to a foot massage and pedicure afterwards. But we wanted to get the heavy conversation about our little tiff out of the way first.

  “Yes,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

  I try to stand quickly, hoping to convey how excited I am to get out of the house, but the motion unsteadies me. And it isn’t just that I am heavy and ungainly either. My head swims, my vision blurs, and the next thing I know, I am on the floor.

  I am surrounded by pillows, and at my side is a tray with an empty teacup and the remains of a ridiculously large roast beef sandwich that Eva and Jen made me. Jen stuck around for another three hours after I fainted, and between her and Eva, they arranged for Freya to get Rocket from school and have him spend the night there.

  I have a doctor’s appointment first thing in the morning, and Jen has agreed to come back to take me to that.

  I am sitting here, television off in the dim light of the bedroom, fidgeting with my phone, and trying to decide what I should tell Rand. There is every likelihood that the fainting spell is nothing. But if it’s not nothing, he will be livid to hear about it later. Eva took my blood pressure, joking the entire time that when you get to a certain age, you tend to carry around all kinds of medical equipment.

  Then she explained, more seriously, that her own blood pressure has fluctuated on the high side for years, and that she makes a habit of monitoring it. Mine, she tells me, is low. And when I called the numbers in to my OB, they said I should take it again after eating, and then come in in the morning.

  I still haven’t decided what to tell—or not tell—Rand when my phone rings and I see that it’s him. Forgetting my dilemma entirely for a moment, I answer right away, just happy that I’ll be hearing his voice.

  “Hey,” he says. There is laughter in his voice. “The phone didn’t even ring one time on my end. You must miss me.”

  “I do,” I say.

  “How much?”

  “Lots.” I feel my eyes fill and shake my head in amusement at myself. Damned hormones.

  “Miss you too,” Rand says. “And now that I’m here, I don’t even know why they make us come up so early. Nothing to do except schmooze for two whole days.”

  “Well, the schmoozing is part of the game though, right?” I slide back, and settle into the pillows, and into the sound of his voice.

  “I guess. Ran into one of my old teammates. Mike Allen. I didn’t even know he was up here. Lost track of him a long, long time ago.”

  “Yeah? And how was that? Reminisced about your time together on
the gridiron?”

  “Something like that,” Rand drawls. There is a note in his tone I can’t interpret. He sounds pensive. “But listen … I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

  “Okay?”

  “About the adoption stuff.”

  “Oh. Rand. Yeah. About that? We don’t have to have that conversation now. I mean, I was thinking about it too, and …”

  “No, I think we should have that conversation. I want to. If you’re … if it’s fine with you. I mean, I want to clear something up. Before it becomes bigger than it should be.”

  I take a breath, bracing myself. “Okay.”

  “I want you to adopt Rocket. I think we should do that as soon as we can arrange it. I know I said it last night, but I was drunk then, so maybe you think I was just being … I don’t know …”

  I smile. “I did think we would need to have a more sober conversation about it, yeah.”

  “Well that’s what this is. The sober conversation.”

  “And you’re … sure about it? I mean …”

  “Yes. Look, I want you to adopt him and I want to do some other things too, like change his name for one.”

  “Let’s not go overboard,” I say, only half-joking.

  “I mean, we can always call him Rocket, but I want something else to be his legal name.”

  “Like what?”

  “Randall Reese II.”

  That makes me smile wider. “Not Rand Reese, Jr?”

  “Nah. I thought about it. I don’t want my son to be ‘junior’ to anyone. Not even to me. But he can be ‘the second’. I want him to have my name, but not live under its shadow. He’ll be the second Randall Reese, but a man in his own right.”

  I sit with that a moment.

  “It sounds like you’ve been giving this a lot of thought,” I say. “All this stuff about Rocket, I mean.”

  “Yeah. But not just about Rocket. About us, our unit, our family. I want to be intentional about stuff, y’know what I mean? Not just trip into a way of being and relating to each other …”

  I’m not sure I do know what he means, but I listen anyway.

  “Like, if we don’t pay attention and protect what we have, we could slip into all kinds of bad habits. Like me staying out drinking …”

  And me neglecting to tell him relevant information about my pregnancy.

  “And I don’t want that. I want to keep what we have. ‘Cause what we have is good.”

  I can’t even respond because my throat has tightened, and I am in real danger of bursting into tears. This is Rand as I love him most—vulnerable about the fact that we are learning together about how to be together; vulnerable about the fact that he desperately, desperately wants to get it right.

  “Baby?” he prompts me when I am still silent. “Right? What we have is good?”

  “It is.” I manage to speak past the clog. “It’s very good.”

  ~9~

  I’m not even nervous for the live broadcast, because my mind isn’t on the game like it should be. Instead I’m excited to get home. Excited. To get home. Not that I didn’t always like to be home with Dani and Rocket. I do. And that’s pretty new as well for me, feeling at peace in my home. But this is next level. I barely recognize myself right now, and I think I have SJ and Mike Allen to thank for that.

  SJ, because when I was on my way up here to Buffalo, I finally had a moment to think about his situation with Jen. That whole deal with his woman of more than a decade deciding that not only did she want their relationship to be over, she didn’t even want a parting conversation?

  What kind of shit would a man have to pull before a woman felt driven to that extreme?

  Seeing SJ on the game circuit, he looks like a man who’s living the life. Great stats, good health and probably another five solid years of playing time. Even though he’s still pretty young, the words ‘Hall of Famer’ sometimes get mentioned along with his name. But there is no way I would trade anything he has for what I’ve got. He might be too dumb to know it right now, but I think when he lost Jennifer, he probably lost his last chance to hold on to what’s real.

  Now that she’s gone, I can write the script of the next few years of his life. It’s going to look like fun for a minute—unfettered partying, fast women, fast cars. And then will come the long, slow, excruciating realization that he is surrounded by people who don’t really know him, don’t really care about him, and who all want something from him.

  I would tell him if he was in a state of mind to listen, that I’ve been there.

  Last night, I bumped into Mike Allen in the lobby. He was heading up to one of the suites to do an interview with some other ESPN show. I ribbed him about why he wasn’t doing mine instead. We exchanged a few words about how long it had been, and how messed up it was that we hadn’t made more of an effort to keep in touch.

  But Mike was never that dude, who would sit on the other end of the line and listen to a grown man cry about how he did his wife wrong, and how he regretted every single second of it even though he maybe never loved her like a man was supposed to love his wife. I mean, I’d always known that about Mike, so when Faith died I never heard much from him, and never expected to. And we’d always been more of friendly rivals than we were friends, anyway.

  So, Mike and me planned to meet up at the lobby bar after his interview and we did. He was on that Maker’s Mark like it was the eve of Prohibition. People don’t realize how much drinking there is in the League. Hard drugs aren’t worth the risk, so those who want an escape choose booze, or women.

  Mike was on both. While he downed his whiskey, he talked non-stop about this chick who was crazy and wouldn’t leave him alone, and that chick who was such a good lay he couldn’t leave her alone, and the baby momma who was all drama, and the other one who told him she was pregnant again. I told him I was expecting. Or rather that Dani was.

  And he laughed, because that was the way I said it: ‘me and my girl are expecting any day now’ or something like that.

  ‘What? You a female now?’ he said. ‘You ‘bout to give birth an’ shit?’

  I laughed it off, because that’s what dudes do. But after that I felt kind of low. Like sad. And not for me, but for him. Because he has kids. And from the sound of it, he’s about to maybe have another one. And yet, there is no part of him that feels connected to that.

  I don’t judge him for it, because I was there myself at one time. I was a dude whose wife was pregnant, and I felt like it didn’t have anything to do with me. And it was lonely and scary and sad, and pathetic. And I see Mike downing that whiskey and I know that there’s part of him that feels the way I felt. So, I feel bad for dude.

  And then I felt like I needed to talk to Dani.

  Just to hear about her day, have her tell me how the baby kicked and what funny thing Rocket said. I went up to my room and called her. And she sounded quiet, and subdued and her voice—just her voice—gave me peace.

  I told her how I felt about the adoption, and about wanting to change Rocket’s name to something more meaningful, something that’s less a residue of who I used to be. Something that’s more about who I am now.

  After I hung up, I stayed up a long while, thinking.

  I thought about Faith and how beautiful she was.

  I thought about how much better I wished I could have been for her.

  I thought about the love she deserved, that I never gave her.

  And I prayed that wherever she is, out there in the universe somewhere, she’s forgiven me. And then I decided that it was time to forgive myself.

  So, right now, finishing up the live broadcast, I’m not nervous. I go through the motions and say all I have to say, getting all my cues and my stats and factoids in on target. But football is the last thing on my mind.

  This couldn’t be happening. Not now, not today. I knew I should have left last night after the game.

  Looking out the window during the ride to the airstrip, I know before we get there that
I’m not taking off. The sky is a foreboding gray, and heavy raindrops are pelting the windshield of my hired car.

  Once we arrive, and I look out at the twenty or so feet between the car and the entrance to the small regional airport, I hesitate, preparing to be drenched.

  “You want me to wait a few minutes, just to see?”

  My driver is thinking the same thing I am. Flying in this weather is unlikely. But I have to give it a shot. I need to get home.

  “Yeah, man. Thanks,” I tell him. “Lemme go in and check things out.”

  I open the door and dash through the downpour, using my shoulders to shove against the double doors leading me into the small building. Some regional airports, including this one in upstate New York, look like bus stations, and when you get inside there is little to convince you that they are more than that.

  There are two customer service stations for the single regional airline, and one for the baggage claim attendant. To the right is a unisex bathroom, and near that, five vending machines that will provide the only refreshments you should expect, since there is no in-flight service.

  As I get to the first customer service desk—and the only one where there is an agent—the young woman in light blue shirt with dark-blue cravat is already shaking her head.

  “Sir,” she begins. “I’m so …”

  “Canceled?” I ask, already grimacing.

  “Yes,” she tells me, her brows knitting in regret. “I’m afraid so.”

  “I thought you might have an idea when it might clear up a little …”

  She glances behind her, through the large plate glass window at the small runway where several small passenger planes are hard to see because of the torrential rain.

  “That’s not expected to happen for another couple of hours,” she tells me. “And even then, the wind shears, the lightning … I’m sorry. The crew just doesn’t think it will be safe to fly until much later this evening.”

  “This evening?” I grit my teeth. “You don’t … my wife is about to have our baby … I have to get home soon. Here’s my ID.”