“I saw her picking him up a few times. She never came to watch, though, just waited outside in her car. And even if the kid had had the shit kicked out of him, she never helped him with his bags or anything.”
Joanna glanced at the woman again. She had short, no-nonsense sandy hair and wore pearl earrings. A white oxford collar peeked over the neckline of her sweater. She smiled at the elderly woman handing out toothpicked samples of Gruyère.
“What about the father?” Joanna asked in a low voice. “Did he come to the matches?”
Scott shrugged. “Never saw him.”
Joanna raised an eyebrow.
“That mother, though. She’d wait at the curb, talking on her cell phone the whole time. She wouldn’t even say hello to the kid when he threw his stuff into the car, just look at him like he was this huge burden. This one time she was pissed because his shoes were dirty—we’d been running laps on the track outside, and it was muddy—and she was worried it would get all over her precious car floor mats. I heard her screaming at him.”
They both watched the boy’s mother, who was now perusing the baked goods. After a moment, she cocked her head and reached into her jacket pocket. Her cell phone blinked, silently ringing. They watched as she cradled it between her ear and her shoulder.
“I used to tell them to visualize things,” Scott murmured. “Like, reasons to fight, I guess. People’s faces, Satan, Jesus, I didn’t really care. I never asked any of them what they visualized, but I wondered sometimes, with a few of them. If I were that woman’s kid, I would’ve visualized her.”
Joanna remained very still. It felt as though she was close to finding something out about Scott, but she had no idea how to forge the rest of the way there.
Scott leaned back, put his arms behind his head, and whistled through his teeth. “This place. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still here. It’s so fucking stifling, don’t you think? I’ve thought about getting the hell away.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. Drive across the country. Settle in … who knows … New Mexico? Arizona? I could, like, be a rancher.” He glanced at her. “Would you miss me?”
She startled, jostling her coffee cup. “I …”
“Maybe a little?”
Her mouth felt gummy. “Sure. We all would.”
“Charles wouldn’t.”
Joanna rushed to correct him, but then stopped—it might be true.
“I probably won’t go.” Scott stared out the window into the parking lot.
Joanna had a thought, breathed in, but then changed her mind and clamped her mouth shut. Scott stared at her, sensing she’d been about to speak. “It’s just, if you need to get out of town, you could come with me to visit my mom,” she said.
A little smile blossomed on Scott’s face. Wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. His teeth were white and straight. “Really?”
Joanna touched her earlobe. Her stomach hurt; now she just wanted to get out of there. “Well, no. I mean, I was kidding. I don’t know why I said that. I mean, why would you want to visit my mom?”
He waited, that same smile hovering.
“I was just kidding,” she repeated.
“Well” —he balled up a napkin in his palm— “if you change your mind, I’d be happy to come.”
Joanna stood up to throw away her cup of coffee, eager to create some space between them. A few feet away, the wrestler’s mother finished her phone call and was heading to the back of the store toward the wine section. A college-age girl was heading in the opposite direction, and both were caught in a narrow strait between two cheese tables. The mother stepped aside, letting the girl pass first. She even smiled graciously.
It was amazing how appearances could so easily fool everyone. A clean, well-made trench coat, a nice necklace, decent manners, it all said this woman was a good parent, a respectable person. As Joanna dropped her half-empty coffee cup in the trash, she wondered what else she didn’t know about the polished, preppy people around her. Maybe the man in the three-piece suit lived in his car. Maybe the poised, stately woman with the butter-blonde hair, wearing the pink Lilly Pulitzer dress was so dreadfully unhappy she could barely drag herself to the store.
Then she peeked at Scott, who was still sitting at the little bistro table, fiddling with his cell phone and swimming in his sweatshirt, with his coffee-colored skin and thick, almost dreadlocked tufts of hair. What did people assume about him? How did it contrast with what was going on inside him? It was so hard to know.
She pivoted on her heel, gazing into the wide expanse of the store. Then she remembered her grocery cart. She’d abandoned it by a Jenga-tower display of organic biscotti cookies, but now it was gone. The store hummed, the price scanners made small, polite beeps, the butcher called the next person in line. Joanna could just see the well-scrubbed grocery boy who had rescued her cart, now removing the butcher paper from her purchased meats and slapping them back behind the glass. Two Cornish hens. Slabs of lamb. Gnarled hamburger. Everything back in its right place.