“Not so much,” Bill says with a laugh. “I was busy convincing myself that I might actually play in the big leagues, and I remember coming out of the locker room with my hair still wet, my gym bag slung over one shoulder, and a huge smile on my face. I really felt like the coach had picked right after all, and that maybe he’d seen something in me I just couldn’t see in myself.” Bill shakes his head now, recalling the self-congratulatory bubble that had popped the second he stepped out into the hallway of the high school after that game. “But then Virginia Hellman brought me right back down to earth.”
“Oh?” Dr. Sheinbaum looks amused. “Who was Virginia?”
“The coach’s daughter.” Bill taps his knee with his fingers and waits a beat to give the story the right amount of pause before he delivers the coup de grâce. “Apparently she’d begged him to give me that position so that I’d be grateful enough to take her out.”
“Ouch.”
“Indeed. And it was a real ‘ouch’ moment because Ginny Hellman wasnotsomeone who caught my eye. Don’t get me wrong—she was a nice girl, and God forgive me for saying this—but Ginny was enormous. Huge.”
“Oh no.” Dr. Sheinbaum puts a hand over her mouth as she shakes her head slowly. “Oh, Bill.”
“And I don’t mean she was fat,” he adds, holding up one finger. “I mean she wasenormous. Ginny could have taken on any one of the guys from the basketball team and given him a run for his money. This girl was six-foot-five if she was an inch, and she probably weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds. She ran laps at the school track, practiced her free throws before and after the boys’ practices, and she had this absolutely unforgettable head of hair: bright orange and as frizzy as a pile of hay. My God…” He holds in a chuckle. “She was a sight. The other guys had all kinds of names for her that they never said around the coach: Ginny Smellman, What the Hell Man, Virgin-till-she-goes-to Hell, Man—you can imagine the rest.”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Anyway,” Bill says on a sigh, “Ginny was quick to let me know she was responsible for my new station in life, and it took her all of ten seconds to tell me she expected to be asked out the next Friday night.”
Dr. Sheinbaum gives a low whistle. “I hope she became a government agent of some sort.”
Bill smiles wryly. “Who knows. I don’t go back to Arizona much, and now that Margaret is dead, I never go at all.”
“I want to get back to that,” Dr. Sheinbaum says. “But first, finish your story about Virginia.”
“Yeah, well. I think you can guess how that went. I felt pressured to take her out once I realized what kind of pull she had with her father. As much as I didn’t feel like I deserved the spot as captain of the team, once I got a taste of that crowd cheering, and of the feeling that comes with scoring a fair amount of points, I wanted more. I certainly didn’t want to be kicked off the team for slighting Coach Hellman’s daughter.”
“So you took her out?”
“I did. And it was as disastrous as it sounds. She tried to pin me down on the front seat of my car one night after we went out for burgers, and Dr. Sheinbaum, if you can believe this, I almost couldn’t escape from that beast.”
Dr. Sheinbaum is clearly doing her best not to laugh out loud, though she’s barely holding it in. She has one hand over her mouth and her shoulders are shaking. “Oh, Bill,” she says, giving one vigorous shake of her head to clear the image that’s hanging between them. “I imagine she didn’t take it well when you ultimately ended things?”
Bill looks at his lap. “I didn’t have the guts to end things.”
“What did you do?”
Bill shrugs. “I did what any self-respecting man would do: I pretended to have a top-secret relationship with another guy on the basketball team.”
“Oh, you did not!” For once, Dr. Sheinbaum has broken professional protocol and is engaging with Bill as though they’re friends sharing gossip over a cup of coffee. “Weren’t you worried she’d tell everyone?”
“I honestly would have preferred that to being suffocated beneath the weight of a girl who had six inches and seventy pounds on me. I could have at least denied it to the guys, and I know they would have believed me. Regardless, I just wanted out of that particular obligation, and now I think you can see that I do, in fact, have experience feeling as though someone helping me can quickly morph into me owing them something,” Bill says, holding up a hand. “And I do not want to go through that again.”
“Okay, that’s understandable.” Dr. Sheinbaum picks up her pencil again. “But now I’d like to backtrack to Margaret for a moment, if we can.”
Bill clears his throat. Without warning, just saying and hearing her name have brought to the surface several complicated emotions he prefers to just stuff down and not deal with. “Alright. I think that’s fine.”
“You mentioned during our first meeting that it was her laugh that made you love her initially. Do you remember that conversation?”
“I do.”
“So, you fell in love with her laugh, and then things got complicated, as relationships do. What made you stay?”
“My obvious answer would be ‘my vow to do so,’ but as we both know, I eventually broke that vow, so I’m not sure it holds any weight.”
“I think it still does, Bill. You left because of extraordinary circumstances, not simply because you got bored or things were a little bumpy. My understanding is that Margaret had gotten to where she was unable to navigate daily life and that she was somewhat belligerent.”
“That’s a generous description,” Bill says. “She was angry, she often didn’t recognize me at all, and for her own safety, she was sedated and sometimes restrained. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t a marriage anymore.”
“Let me cut right to the chase.”