Page 1 of The Cadence
Chapter 1
“I’m so sorry.”
I nodded and patted her hand, which rested on my forearm for support. “Thank you. I appreciate that you’re here.”
“It’s shocking.” Her fingers tightened to emphasize the words. “It’s shocking!”
It wasn’t. This had been coming for a long, long time but I understood that the finality was a blow. It was to me, as well. “I know what you mean,” I told her.
“I can’t believe it.” Now I felt her nails dig into my skin. “I can’t believe it! We met when we were six years old and she’s been my best friend ever since.”
I nodded again. “Miss Mozella, would you like to sit down?” I stepped slowly toward the couch, drawing her along with me.
“I can’t believe it, Bug,” she repeated as she sank onto a cushion. “It doesn’t feel real.” I pulled back and she reluctantly released her hold.
“Why don’t I fix you a plate?” I suggested. There was plenty to eat—people had been bringing food for days. I would never be able to get through all of it, which was why I’d been hoarding containers for the last few months. When they were finally ready to leave, I would send leftovers home with Miss Mozella and all of my grandma’s other friends.
“I’ll just have some water,” she told me, her hand now at her throat.
I nodded and went to the kitchen, where I’d also laid in a stock of glasses from the thrift store so I would have enough for today. I’d borrowed plates from Miss Theresa and purchased forks and a stash of paper napkins. I’d been preparing, in other words. I’d been getting dishes, saving containers, cleaning the house, and making sure that my black dress was ironed in the way that my grandma had liked it. I also confirmed that I had a supply of band-aids, because my nice black shoes always gave me blisters on my little toes.
I took one of the new glasses from the cupboard and turned on the tap as I listened to the murmur of conversation in the other room and the quiet clink of forks on the mismatched plates. After I gave this to Miss Mozella, I would collect the dirty dishes and make sure that there was enough food on the platters on the dining room table. It would mean circling through the small crowd again, and they would repeat that they were sorry and Iwould try to comfort them, like I’d been doing all afternoon since we’d returned from the church and the internment.
But first, I put the glass on the counter because I suddenly had the idea that I was going to drop it. My hand was shaking and I felt a little dizzy. All right, I would go into my bedroom for just a moment, just a little break. I would sit on my bed and—
I tilted my head, listening, because the vague sounds of conversation in the living room had changed. The low voices were suddenly faster and more urgent, a definite difference that I didn’t understand. What was happening? Instead of hiding in my bedroom, I picked up Miss Mozella’s water and stepped out of the kitchen.
“Oh,” I said, much too loudly for the hushed room, and I did almost drop the glass. I hadn’t heard the front door open, but someone else had joined us.
“Hello, Calla.”
“Hi, Will,” I greeted him.
He looked so out of place here, but he always had. I remembered him coming over for the first time when I’d been in ninth grade and he’d been a senior, and how I’d immediately thought that he looked all wrong. Of course, he was so handsome—strikingly, eye-catchingly cute with his beautiful grey eyes and high cheekbones. That wasn’t the issue.
I’d been able to put a name to the problem that same year, because I’d taken an art class that explained it: proportion. Will Bodine was just too large for the space, as if the artist had really messed up and made the ceiling too low, the furniture toosquat, and the figure much too broad and tall. Either the other elements around him needed to enlarge and expand, or else he needed to shrink so that the composition made more sense.
Now he also looked out of place in another way. All the other people in the room were my grandmother’s generation, but he was only four years older than I was. And it wasn’t just that difference in age, either. We were all subdued and faded, but he looked alive and vibrant even though he had on dark clothes like the rest of us wore, and even though his hair was almost the same black color. Everything else in the picture fell away as your gaze rested on him, the focal point.
“Here you go,” I stated, and gave the glass to Miss Mozella. She took it but didn’t even turn her head, and it wasn’t only due to his looks and…I’d have called it his magnetism. She stared because this was totally unexpected. Why would Will Bodine have shown up here, in my grandma’s living room? Even if these people weren’t football fans, I was sure they knew him as one of the most famous people to come from our town. There were several sports people and singers, and it was also the original birthplace of one of the men who’d invented the cotton candy machine a few centuries before Will came along. Lately, a woman had also broken a record with the length of her toenails, but he stood out.
Everyone in this house knew about his family, too, because the Bodine name was also famous. With the way they were staring, I thought that he must have felt like an animal in a cage, a very small cage for a very large man. And I felt the need to help him.
“Will, why don’t you come this way?” I suggested, beckoning, and he followed me down the short hallway. He didn’t stomp but the weight he carried made the floors shake slightly and the row of framed photographs hanging on the wall quivered and bumped.
“I was really sorry to hear about your grandmother,” he told me. He ducked his head so he could pass through the doorway, and the proportionality got even more out of whack as his energy was constrained in my little bedroom.
“Thank you,” I answered.
He had never been in here when he’d come over in the past because my grandma wouldn’t have allowed it, if I’d even dared to ask. I watched him look around and wished I had been able to cover the bulletin board, or at least that I’d moved a few of the items into hiding at the back. I was twenty-one, not a little girl, and the cartoon and heart stuff was embarrassing. It was also embarrassing that some of the things I’d tacked up related to him, Will Bodine…I stood in front of the closet door to block his view.
But he didn’t comment on my bulletin board. “She was a nice lady,” he continued. “I remember how she always baked something.”
“She knew you liked oatmeal raisin cookies.” She had doubled her recipe when he was expected because yes, she had been a nice lady. Suddenly exhausted, I sat down on my bed but then he was so far above me that I stood up again. “How did you find out what happened?”
“My parents must have mentioned it,” he answered, settling in my desk chair. “They must have seen it somewhere.”
It made me glad to hear that he and his family were still talking, because he had never had the easiest relationship with them. It made me worried to see him sit in that chair, because it was not the sturdiest. At least he now seemed more appropriately sized, but it was just another trick of the eye. I knew that William Franklin Bodine was an almost six-and-a-half-foot expanse of muscle, even larger than when I’d known him in high school. He also looked older, which made sense. He’d gone away for three years of college before he’d been drafted and then he had played several seasons of professional football. I’d watched him from afar, but we hadn’t been face to face in seven years. I probably looked older to him, too, and I wondered what he thought about how I’d changed from when I was fourteen.
