Page 53 of The Cadence
And I hadn’t been referring to Ray Bishop, either. “You said that you’re really busy on these trips,” I recalled, and he nodded and commented that he was getting mosquito bites and we needed to go inside.
I was recalling something else that Will had told me, though. It had been on our plane flight up here, the first one, when he’d let me look at his phone and I’d seen his pictures of the beautiful woman who had been his girlfriend, the woman who still lived in Alabama after she’d moved there for him. They still saw each other when he went back, that was what he’d casually mentioned to me.
What message would a word decoder have taken from what he’d said about her? Did he want to see her because he still cared? Was it only to check in about old times, or was there more? I thought, unfortunately, of pretty parts.
The mosquitoes were biting me too, and I followed Will back into the main house. But it stayed on my mind.
Chapter 11
It was awful, and how could I help? I wanted to get in Will’s car and drive myself home, immediately.
“Don’t even think about coming back here,” Miss Mozella told me. I heard her draw in a shaking breath, though, because she was also crying. “I’ll be all right. Your grandmother managed to deal with this, when it was your father.”
Both she and my grandma had terrible sons and I didn’t think it was fair! All they had done was try to make those men behave well and do the right things with their lives, and what was their repayment? Putting up their homes as collateral for bail and then wasting gas money on the long drives to various prisons.
But Miss Mozella’s son wasn’t getting bail this time, because what Brian had just done was the worst.
“He’s no murderer,” she told me. “It was an accident.”
Even if it hadn’t been intentional, her son Brian had sold the drugs that led to someone’s death, and it wasn’t going to end wellfor him. I didn’t think it should have and neither did she, but she was also remembering when he’d been her little boy and the future had been a blank page. She had believed that he was only going to put wonderful things on it.
Then he’d started getting into trouble, so she’d moved to a new neighborhood to separate him from his old friends. She’d gotten him mentors, taken him to church, waited for him outside of school, signed him up for teams, brought him to doctors and therapists, and done every other thing that she could think of to return him to the right track. My grandma had told me the story and it was like she was talking about herself, too.
But a big difference was that Brian didn’t have a daughter that her parents had forgotten about, or at the least, a daughter they hadn’t been interested in caring for. “I wanted to take you years ago,” my grandma had also told me. “But your mother…” My mother had left and she had hidden us, that was what it boiled down to. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with my grandma or anyone else from that family, out of what seemed like spite. And Grandma, with the little bit of resources she’d possessed, had tried to find me and tried to get lawyers to help her, but it had never done much good until the day that the man on the ATV had come and found me in the shack where I’d mostly lived alone.
So at least Miss Mozella wouldn’t be confronted with a giant, awkward tween on her front porch, like what had happened to my grandmother when I’d shown up. But it was bad enough to know that your son had done something terrible to another human being, and you hadn’t been able to prevent it.
“Do you want me to come home?” I suggested again, and again she told me no.
“I’m not sure what you could do here,” she sighed. “I can’t do anything, either.”
Later, Will had ideas when I explained what was happening. “Does her son have a good lawyer?” he asked.
“He has a free lawyer, appointed by the court,” I typed back.
“Send me her number and I’ll talk to her,” he told me, and I said thank you. Then he asked if I was upset and I said yes, mostly for her sake. I’d also known Brian for years and I’d done my own part to try to straighten him out. Not that he’d listened to me any more than he’d listened to his mother, my grandmother, Miss Theresa, our priest, his teachers, the principal, police officers, or anyone else…
“Do you want to fly to Chattanooga?” he asked me next, but Miss Mozella had made me promise not to come, since she said there was nothing that I could do except make her want to feed me. I said no.
“How are things in Alabama?” I asked, and he answered that they were warm. He didn’t mention seeing his ex-girlfriend, but that was none of my business. It just wasn’t, so I didn’t ask even though I was very curious. If Will wanted to tell me something, then he would.
He didn’t.
Later, I also talked to the other ladies from the church who were supporting Miss Mozella as she tried to deal with her jerk of ason, and I had furniture to work on and a double shift to pull at the grocery store. I had plenty to do today but I was also busy thinking about Will. He was in Alabama for his game and in the same city as his former girlfriend, the gorgeous Nicia. Of course, there was a reason they had ended their relationship! That was what I kept telling myself and it was comforting…but then I’d remember that she still could have been open to hooking up when he came to town. Why not?
And then I would also remember that there was a reason that he and I weren’t together either, and it was that he hadn’t wanted me. I thought back seven years before to the day of his graduation, when I’d waited beneath the bright May sun next to his car in the parking lot of our high school.
“Congratulations, Will!” I’d called, and he had seemed surprised to see me there.
“Hello, Calla. Thank you,” he’d answered. I could picture his eighteen-year-old self perfectly. No beard back then, and his hair had been a little longer. He had been huge but not quite as large as he was now—while we’d worked out together, he’d explained that strength coaches in college and when he made it to the pros had showed him how to lift. Back then, he had been just as good-looking and just as magnetic, though.
“I have something to tell you,” I’d announced. “No, I mean, I have something to ask you.”
He had stopped next to his bumper, his mortarboard and keys in his hand. “Ok. Shoot,” he’d offered, and then had started to remove the green gown that all the grads had worn that day.
“Ok,” I’d said. I had been practicing this for months and over the past few weeks, I’d honed my speech to perfection. I would tell him that I appreciated him for so many things and in so many ways. I thought he was wonderful. Amazing and spectacular! Perfect.
It turned out that we would also have been perfect together. I had heard girls in the cafeteria line talking about astrological signs and I’d looked it up—Will and I were totally compatible! We also liked the same music, which I knew for sure because I’d started to listen to all the songs on his playlist. If he was concerned about our age gap? I had the answer. Sure, we were four years apart in terms of numbers, but that didn’t matter because I was very mature. I was tall, wasn’t I? And if he was worried because I wasn’t nearly as pretty as his current girlfriend, I could have pointed out that I was on the right track. My hair had already improved, despite the wind that had messed it up as I stood in the parking lot.
