Page 4 of The Progressions

I didn’t know what the ass thing was, but I was aware that six carats was big. Very. I wore my mother’s engagement ring on my right hand and that held a diamond that weighed a quarter of a carat, set in gold. I tried to imagine something twenty-four times that size hanging from each of my ears. I knew that my local pawn shop didn’t really value diamonds very much, because I’d had to discuss selling my mom’s ring and they weren’t going to give me crap for it. But the earring we were looking for? It had to be worth a lot.

“We better find it,” I said.

“Shay doesn’t care.”

I stopped.“What?”

“My girlfriend Shay doesn’t care,” he repeated, and I had heard him but hadn’t really understood. “I saw that it was missing when I took her to her flight, but she said she could just get another one.”

He seemed angry about that response—as I would have been, too, because it was bananas! If I dropped a nickel, I stopped to get it. A six-carat diamond, cut in an ass shape? Yeah, I would have been looking.

Tyler Hennessy had moved ahead of me and I hurried to catch up, but he went quickly. Weather came up quickly here, too, and above us, clouds were gathering in the west. The rising wind stirred his hair and ruffled his t-shirt, which was fitted—tight, just like his pants. He wasn’t built like the defensive linemen who had lived here recently, Baines and Hatcher, and he wasn’t like the running back, Cisco, or the kicker, Diabaté. Tight ends like Hennessy were kind of in the middle. They weren’t big-boned, heavy-weight giants; they weren’t muscle-bound, short guys; they weren’t svelte and lithe. They were big and strong to break through the defense when they carried the ball, agile and fast to run routes to catch it, and tall and broad to block for other guys when they had it instead. And in my humble opinion, they looked very, very good. This tight end sure did. His new Woodsmen bio put him at six-six, which I could easily believe, and two-fifty, which also seemed about right. He seemed exactly right.

“Are you looking?”

“Huh?” I tore my eyes away from his body as he turned to stare at me, because I had been. I had been looking hard…

“Oh, you mean for the earring? Yes, I’m looking, yes, definitely. I want to find it,” I swore. I made those statements true by putting my eyes to the ground and practically boring a hole in itwith the force of my penetrating gaze. How hard could it have been to find a giant diamond?

“I don’t think it’s out here, anyway,” he mentioned. “I remember seeing it when we were in the bedroom, and she said that she realized it was gone when she looked at the picture she’d taken on the steps as we left.”

“She didn’t want to mention it then, so we could have tried to find it?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. I kept my eyes on the ground anyway, just in case, until we arrived at the condo.

Once again, I struggled with the lock on the front door. “I’ll get this fixed, if you decide to rent from us,” I mentioned. We eventually gained entrance and we split off to search.

“She didn’t go upstairs,” I reminded him when he came back down. He moved lightly and in a way that was very controlled. Like a tiger, I thought. I could practice that, too—there was a whole lot I would go over tonight.

“Why are you on the floor?”

“It’s a trick I learned in gym class,” I said. “Whenever anyone lost anything, like a tooth or something else small, our teacher had us get down and put our cheeks on the ground, to look in a parallel way across the surface. You can find a lot of things, mostly dirt and bits of crud, but maybe six-carat diamonds.”

“I wanted to see the upstairs since I missed it before, on your tour,” he mentioned.

That hadn’t been my fault, but I didn’t remind him that the reason he’d missed it was due to his tongue in his girlfriend’smouth, his hands gripping her butt, and his crotch pressed into the V of her unitard-covered legs. “Those are good-sized bedrooms, and isn’t it a great feature that each has its own bath?” I nodded to answer myself since he hadn’t bothered to. “Will you have a lot of family visiting?”

He walked across to the main bedroom. Ok, fine, we could go back to the non-verbal routine, but I’d thought that he’d decided to act more like a human. Excuse me for my mistake, big boy, I wanted to call, but instead I bent to examine the floor again before joining him in the other room.

He was standing in the walk-in shower. “She didn’t go in there, either,” I said.

“I wanted to check if I fit under the shower head.”

“Oh, we had them all raised when the Woodsmen started leasing here,” I told him. It had been costly, because we’d had to redo both the plumbing and a lot of tile to make it work. “All the other guys have fit, even the really big ones.”

“I’m big.” He sounded offended.

“I meant that they were bulky,” I said carefully. “I’ll look around the bedroom.” If that earring was anywhere, it would have been near the door where they’d been mauling each other. I resumed the position on my knees and bent down. This floor was a lot grimier than I would have expected because we paid plenty to a cleaning service that was supposed to keep it nice, and there was a lot of crud to look past.

We searched everywhere, all through the whole condo. Then we looked again, then again. Both of us put our cheeks on thefloor, but we encountered nothing but dirt. I also put my hand into the drain to feel around the garbage disposal in the kitchen, and I pulled up the stoppers in the bathroom sinks to look down there. We searched all kinds of places that it couldn’t have been, like in the pantry cupboards that they hadn’t opened, through the upstairs where she hadn’t walked, out on the little back patio neither of them had noticed, and around the water heater that they hadn’t inspected. Renters never did, and that was why they were surprised by the suddenly cold showers they got. The water heaters in our complex were undersized and old.

Anyway, the diamond couldn’t have been there and we didn’t find it. And I needed to get home. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ll come back tomorrow and look again.”

I saw him mouth something, probably a swear word, but he didn’t answer me out loud. I followed his path toward the front door, which he opened, but then he stopped. A grey curtain of rain fell heavily onto the stoop outside it.

“Good grief, it’s pouring,” I said conversationally. “We’re going to get soaked on our way back.”

He turned to look at me. “Can you run?”

Could I run? “Yes, I’ve always found that my legs and lungs function just fine.”

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