Page 13 of The Cadence
“Totally normal,” Will said. There were whirring noises and the whole plane rattled. “Nothing to be concerned about,” he told me. I felt a thump from the bottom of the plane and we rattled again. “Standard procedure,” he announced. Then my breath stopped, because we were off the ground and rising through the air. The buildings and roads shrank as we soared above Chattanooga.
The sunlight outside the window disappeared when we entered the clouds that had been hanging over the airport as we drove there earlier this morning. The world outside was suddenly grey and wispy, and the plane shook hard.
“Turbulence. It will stop soon.”
“Ok,” I said.
“Why don’t you read the book you brought?” he suggested.
“Ok,” I repeated, but didn’t open it. “These clouds are thicker than I imagined.”
He took out his phone again. “It’s in airplane mode. Do you want to look at pictures of my house?”
“I do,” I said eagerly, and leaned over so that I could see. He flipped quickly through at least fifty shots. “Why do you have so many?”
“I bought it sight-unseen last spring, so the real estate agent took them to show me what I was getting.” He stopped scrolling. “This is the living room. It’s not much different now, basically empty.”
“It took my grandmother five years to afford her dining room set. She put money aside out of every paycheck,” I said. “Probably it’s not a money thing for you, though.”
“It’s a time and motivation thing,” he answered. “I don’t really give a damn about how my house looks.”
I reached and swiped across his screen to move to a new image, this one of the exterior. “Your house is so pretty, like a cottage in a book. There should be roses growing on it and a woman wouldlive there…I think she would be a photographer, and one day she posts a picture of a couple, something that she took when she was a teenager just learning her craft. It turns out that the woman in the picture died. So the man comes and finds her to talk about it, and then they fall in love.”
“But instead, I live in this house and I only post pictures of my workouts,” he said. “It’s not romantic at all, unless you’re into sweat. You should write that book about the photographer.”
I knew all about his workout pictures. “I’ll take a pass on writing. I like books but only to read them.” The plane suddenly dipped in the sky and the engines roared. I looked up at him.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he reassured me. “Do you read a lot?”
“You’ll be surprised to hear that I do,” I answered. “My grandma worked on Saturdays and I started going to the library. When it wasn’t a game day and I didn’t have a shift of my own, I’d stay there until they had to lock the doors.”
“A game day,” he repeated. “You mean football games.”
“I mean your games. I couldn’t care less about the rest of them,” I answered, and he grinned. I remembered trying to be funny so that he would smile like that. “I spent a lot of Saturdays reading and that really helped with the school stuff. You know it does, because you always had a book yourself.”
“Not fiction,” he said, tapping the pink spine of my paperback.
“You might really like it,” I tempted but he did seem a little sickened. I hoped it wasn’t due to the turbulence, becauseI’d just heard some sounds from the back of the plane that reminded me of when I’d been in his hotel bathroom after the whiskey and the very greasy hamburger…my stomach flipped and I made myself stop thinking about that.
I turned my thoughts to my new home, which I would see when this scary flight was over. I wondered if I’d be able to find a good used bookstore like the one I’d liked to visit before, which became one of my favorite spots after I had finished everything that interested me at the library. At that store, they’d had a bin where all the books went for a quarter. Maybe there was something similar in Michigan, or maybe they had a different selection at the local library and the shelves would be full of exciting things to read.
“How far is it to the library from your house?” I asked, but Will had no idea. I wondered where the closest laundromat—no, a house like one in his pictures definitely had its own washer and dryer and probably a specialized room to hold them. But I was realizing that there was a lot I didn’t know about the place I was going.
He flipped to the next picture. “Here’s where you’ll stay. The agent called it ‘the guest cottage’ and I kept doing it.”
“That sounds fancy.”
“It’s all right,” he answered. “It has the basics and if you need anything else, it’s only a hundred yards from the main house.”
“A football field away,” I noted. “Are you sure about me being there? Are you positive that you won’t need it for real guests?” I had already asked the same thing at least three or four times.
“No, I definitely won’t,” he responded, the same answer he’d given on every other occasion. I figured that after a while, I’d be able to move out and rent an apartment, and then maybe I’d be able to get some of my grandma’s stuff out of storage.
But I could see that the guest cottage, my new home, was very, very nice. “It’s basic, but you’ll be fine,” he responded when I told him so. “And there will be a security system installed out there on Monday.”
“Really? Do you live in a bad part of town?”
His eyes widened. “Not at all, and there’s not much of a town where I live. I have two cars and you can use one to get around.”
