Page 22 of French Kiss

9

Winning

Year Three - April

San Francisco

On the lastFriday of the month, under a full moon and by some crazy stroke of luck, our Ultimate team finally won.

Maybe the other team was having an off night. After running up the score in the first half of the game, Maddox all but phoned it in during the second half, running fast but not fast enough to make amazing saves and catches. For our part, we just played the same lackadaisical way we always did, but I didn’t trip and fall, and I managed to run between a couple of the players on the other team instead of running into them. So I scored the point that tied our score.

Josh and Heidi ran up and high-fived me before pointing and trash-talking with the other team.

“Maddox, the breakfast of champions is not a cereal. It’s the opposing team,” Josh said.

Maddox just shook his head as though certain our glory would be short-lived. But a few minutes into the second half, we took the lead thanks to Josh’s long legs and a brilliant throw by Heidi.

As she watched the Frisbee soar, she yelled, “That went fucking far,” right before Josh caught it and ran over the goal line.

As we headed back to Cole Valley, the feeling in the air was different, as though our win had destroyed the order of the universe. For the first time, Maddox said he had plans that night with a new girlfriend, Sheryl… Sherry… someone. Heidi was post call and exhausted. Jeremiah was heading straight from the game to the airport and flying home for the weekend to visit his family. Our Friday night get-together never materialized.

Instead, Josh and I stopped at the grocery store and loaded up on ingredients to cook Mexican food. We got to the checkout lane and watched the parade of tomatoes, onions, peppers, tortillas, beans and chips ride the conveyor belt while we got our money out. “Do you have a shopper’s rewards card?” I asked.

“I do, but I’m waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“You’ll see.” He watched the screen adding item after item to our bill. When the cashier was done, Josh triumphantly entered his rewards number into the machine. “Behold,” he said, pointing to the screen where the machine began pinging and the total began dropping as the rewards credits kicked in. “I love that!” He was positively giddy watching the tally go lower and lower until it stopped. It helped that he’d bought twenty-four cans of cat food and each one was discounted by ten cents.

“It’s the small pleasures, I guess,” I said.

“It’s one of my favorite things, ever. It’s like Vegas, only with cat food.” I’d never seen a person so excited to be a rewards member.

No question, he was one of a kind.

* * *

An hour later,I sat in the kitchen of the apartment that Josh and Maddox shared and chomped on the dregs of a box of cheese crackers, which tasted like a brown box.

“These are trying to masquerade as Cheez-Its, and in no way do they cut it,” I said.

“I know, they’re crap,” Josh said, not looking over from the cutting board, where he’d julienned two large tomatoes then turned them to cut crosswise into tiny squares. He dumped them into a blue bowl. “I didn’t buy them, but I appreciate you inhaling them so I don’t have to look at the box in the cupboard anymore.”

“Why would Maddox buy these? Has he eaten them? They’re dry and awful.”

“Maddox fell for the Whole Foods lie that if it’s the healthy version of something, he can eat as much of it as he wants.”

“But that doesn’t make them taste any better. Now he’s just given himself permission to eat a whole lot of something terrible,” I said, throwing the remains of the box into the trash without finishing the last of the crackers. “Here, I’m doing both of us a favor.”

Josh fished around in the bottom cupboard behind some pots and pulled out a pair of ski goggles, which he put on. “Excuse the fashion statement.” He proceeded to dice a large white onion and dump the pieces into the bowl with the tomatoes. I grabbed a napkin because my eyes were burning from the onion fumes. Josh took off the goggles and wrapped them around my eyes, immediately shielding them from the tear-jerking fumes.

“Sorry. I ought to have a second pair around here for guests. I usually cut my onions alone.”

“That sounds like a line from a country song.”

“A sad song,” he said.

“Most country songs are.”

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