_*_ 27 _*_
The guys all shook my hand, polite and respectful as Dad introduced me around. The sight of them, the smell of so many soldiers in a room on a hot day, brought back a vague memory of living on base when I was little. I shook my head to clear it away.
“Is there going to be a quiz to see if I can remember your names?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” said several of the guys at once.
“Wait till you see the backyard,” Dad said.
As we walked through the house, he explained that they all served with an old friend of his, Roy Pinkney, and were on leave and headed north to Roy’s camp near Saranac Lake.
We stepped out of the back door and my mouth dropped open.
“Roy took one look at the backyard, hollered ‘Potential!’ and sent some of his boys into town to rent a mower,” Dad explained with a grin. “It only took an hour or so before they had the whole place squared away.”
For the first time in weeks, the backyard had been mowed. Mowed and neatly raked. A fire pit had been dug in the middle, circled with stones and piled with wood, ready to be lit. A soldier stripped to the waist was chopping wood with a splitting maul. Chairs and upended logs waited around the fire pit. Four small tents had been set up, too, poles straight and strings taut.
A tall, bald man walked up to us. “Do not tell me this is your little girl, Andy. No way.”
“Hayley Rose,” Dad said. “You won’t remember him, but this is Roy.”
I put out my hand to shake, but the man gathered me into a big hug and kissed the top of my head.
“Not possible,” he said, releasing me and smiling. “It is just not possible for you to have grown up this much.” He stepped back and looked at me. “I hope you thank God every night that you take after your mom instead of this ugly cuss.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Do you remember the first time you handed this angel to me, Andy?” Roy asked.
“When we were living next to the PX?” Dad asked.
Roy nodded. “You must have been about, what, five months old?”
“I don’t remember, sir,” I said.
“Three months, I think,” Dad said. “Rebecca was still alive.”
My mouth dropped open for the second time because Dad never, and I mean never, said my mother’s name out loud.
“You’re right,” Roy said. “I can remember her laughing at me. You see, Hayley, your father handed you to me just as you were starting to do your duty in your diaper. And it was July, as I recall, so all you were wearing was that diaper. I’d just come from, I don’t know where, but it was something that required me to be in my finest dress uniform and I looked good.”
Dad snorted but Roy ignored him.
“So I sit down in your folk’s apartment and your sweet mother leaves to pour me some iced tea and your face goes all red and you start grunting—”
(I said a quick prayer of thanks that the shirtless guy chopping wood could not hear this.)
“—and Andy hands you to me, and I knew nothing about babies so I laid you on my lap. And then your diaper exploded.”
Dad and Roy both cracked up and I waited for the earth to swallow me. Roy gave me another hug, and then Dad did, too, and finally I laughed and I realized that there was no way in hell I was going to the stupid football game.
I stayed on the edges of the conversations for the next few hours. I made three-dozen deviled eggs, ran the dishwasher, and kept an eye on my father, waiting for him to get drunk. But he didn’t. He drank soda and lemonade, even as all the other guys pounded beer and Roy sipped Scotch. This was a new version of my father, comfortable in his skin. Happy to joke about life over there and his scars and the bullshit they all had to deal with from desk-jockey officers and lying politicians.
I couldn’t believe what I was watching.
Dad hated talking about the war and never did it sober. Half the time he didn’t even want people to know he was a vet. Strangers often said things like, “Thank you for your service,” because they meant it and they thought that was the right thing to do, but the problem was it set off a series of detonations inside my father that sometimes ended with him punching a wall or the face of a jerk in a bar. The worst was when he accidentally found himself in conversation with the family member of a soldier who had been killed. The sadness in their eyes would blow another hole in his brain and then he’d go dead quiet for days.
And yet here he was, as sober as Spock and me, and being a soldier was all he could talk about. And he was laughing.
Roy had brought a couple of grills and soon the hot dogs and hamburgers were piled high and the guys in the backyard chowed down. I got a look at the cooler, which was filled with six kinds of ice cream plus whipped cream and a bunch of half-frozen candy bars that Roy told me were going to be chopped up and mixed with the ice cream, and I was a confused, but happy and grateful girl.
Until Michael showed up.
After Gramma died, Michael rented her house from my father; apparently, they’d been buddies in high school. He moved out when we moved in, but he came back more often than I liked. The way he looked at me creeped me out and I was beginning to think that he was the source of Dad’s weed. He’d never done anything that I could complain about to Dad, but whenever he walked in the door, I felt the need to be somewhere else. Roy and his guys would have Dad’s back if Michael wanted to do anything profoundly stupid.
Covering the football game for the newspaper seemed like a good idea after all.
_*_ 27 _*_
The crowd in the stadium roared so loudly I couldn’t hear what the mom manning the ticket booth said.
“Why?” I asked again.
She glared and waited a beat for the noise to die down. “Everybody pays to get into the game. No exceptions.”
“But I’m the press,” I whined. “On assignment.”
“Students get a dollar discount.” She put her hand out. “Four dollars or don’t go in.”
I paid her. Finn now owed me nineteen bucks.
The bleachers were a wall of people dressed in Belmont Yellow. For one second, it felt like they were all staring at me, that they all knew I came to the football game alone and didn’t know where to sit, but then a whistle blew and the football teams on the field behind me crashed into each other and the crowd cheered and jumped up and down. I was invisible to them.
I turned my back to the stands. On the other side of the field sat the enemy, the Richardson Ravens, dressed in black and silver. Beyond the goalposts at the far end of the field rose a gentle hill that was dotted with people sitting on blankets, little kids zooming around them, cheerfully ignoring the sad excuse for a football game.
The referee blew his whistle and the two lines of players crashed into each other again, grunting and shouting. I couldn’t see what happened to the ball, but the Richardson side of the field erupted in cheers.
I texted Gracie:
hey
After a long pause, she wrote back:
at movie ttyl?
I sent a simple smiley face, because my phone did not have a smiley face that was wrapping her hands around her own throat and beating her head against a wall.
The two teams ran to their huddles to plot out their next bit of brilliant strategy. They ended the huddle and ran back to line up, each face inches away from the scowling face of the enemy, feet pawing at the ground like impatient horses. The quarterback grunted, the lines crashed together, and they all fell down again. Everyone in Belmont Yellow screamed and whistled.
Should I be writing this down? I looked up at the stands. Wouldn’t anyone who cared about this game be here? Why would they want to read about it? Answer: they wouldn’t. My earlier plan to get the stats and eavesdrop for quotes first period Monday was still viable and even more attractive than it had been on the bus. I just needed someplace to go that was not my house. It was only a quarter to eight. I could probably make it to the mall before nine.
what movie, I texted Gracie.
She didn’t answer, which meant she was with Topher, which meant any hope I had of crashing her Friday night plans had just evaporated. How lame would it be for me to go to Gracie’s house and ask her mom if she wanted to hang out? Mrs. Rappaport was a big fan of home makeover shows. Last time I was at her house, she’d been talking about redesigning her kitchen. Maybe we could watch a few episodes about countertops.
I shuddered. I’d be better off spending the evening chasing rats out of Dumpsters.
The clock clicked down the last few seconds to halftime, the refs blew their whistles, and people raced for the bathrooms and the food stand.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered as I pressed against the fence that separated the spectators from the field. As soon as the herd moved past, I followed, intending to head for the parking lot, unchain my bike, and ride. Not home, not for a few hours. Just ride in the dark and hope that Topher and Gracie would have a huge fight and she’d call in tears and ask me to spend the night and mention that they had a lot of ice cream in the freezer.
“Great game, huh?”
I turned around, ready to spew venom about parents who were happy to pay taxes for football coaches but would be good-God-damned if they were going to waste their money on librarians or gym teachers.
“I was certain we’d be down thirty points by now,” Finn said.
In his left hand, he was holding a flimsy cardboard box loaded with cheeseburgers, greasy fries, and two soda cups. In his right, he held a third cup that was filled with marigolds that looked like they’d been yanked out of somebody’s backyard.
“What’d you think of that first-down denial?” he asked. “Great way to end the half, right?”
“What happened to your date?” I asked.
“She’s here,” he said.
“You brought your big date to this football game? You could have written the article yourself.”
“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “What girl wants to be ignored on a date? Hold this for me.”
He shoved the box that held the food and drink at me, pulled his buzzing phone out of his pocket, glanced at it, and typed a reply. Behind us, the marching band took their position on the field, drummers beating a solemn cadence.
“Okay.” Finn put his phone away. “Want to meet her?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I followed him through the crowd. “Is she a zombie?” I asked. “I bet she’s wearing Belmont Yellow. Oh, God, Finn—is she a cheerleader?”
“Definitely not a zombie or a cheerleader or a zombie cheerleader. I’m just getting to know her. Actually, it’s sort of a blind date.”
“That’s gross,” I said. “Old people go on blind dates when they get divorced and don’t know what else to do. You’re only, what? Sixteen?”
“Almost eighteen,” he corrected.
“And you already need other people to fix you up?” I laughed.
“This way.” He took the box from me and headed for the exit.
“Did you lock her in your trunk?”
“I’m meeting her up on the hill. I thought it would be more romantic than cement bleachers.”
The marching band launched into “Louie, Louie,” saving him from hearing my answer.
_*_ 29 _*_
I followed him past the giggling children rolling down the hills like sausages. Past their tired parents sitting on stained comforters with their arms around each other. Past people critiquing the performance of the band and the flag twirlers. We walked all the way to the top of the hill and into the shadows beyond the reach of the stadium lights.
“She dumped you,” I said.
“Not yet.” He put the box of food and soda at the edge of a plaid blanket.
“Maybe she had to pee,” I said. “What’s her name again?”
“Her name is Hayley.” He straightened up and handed me the cup of marigolds. “Hello, Miss Blue.”