Page 21 of The Cadence
“That’s a nicer way to look at it.”
“That’s the way I always saw the situation,” I said. “And now, I’m looking at this new situation and I can’t believe my luck. How many people fall on their feet like this? I’m fortunate and you don’t need to fix anything. Just give me a minute and I’ll be ok. I’m glad you care, though.”
“Mr. Bodine?” A group of boys had shyly approached our table, and Will signed some autographs. He didn’t tell them to go away or to come back when he was done eating. I watched and wondered how much peace he got in this town in Michigan, where he might have been just as famous as he was at home in Tennessee. From what I’d seen driving around, it wasn’t that large, but I hadn’t wanted to go too far. As I’d said, I didn’t want to put too many miles on that nice car.
I saw how he related to these fans, which was somewhat warily. He reminded me of a cat that I’d tried to befriend, one that had come around my grandmother’s front steps for a few months before disappearing. It had seen and done too much, mygrandma said. “She’s wild. She won’t make friends with you or anyone.”
I hoped that wasn’t true about Will. He wasn’t wild in the least—he’d once mentioned that he’d done cotillon class (and he’d explained what that meant) and I also knew that his mother had taught him to speak French, which seemed to be about the most civilized thing in the world. But he had that same wariness, even as he talked to these three excited boys and shook each of their hands. By that point, our food had started to arrive and their parents called them back over to their own table.
“I guess things would be easier in a big city,” I noted. “Probably if you were in Nashville, no one would look at you twice, not with all the country music people running around.”
“I like it up here.” He said it kind of quietly, but I heard. “I’m only famous for football.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. I can…I was going to say that I could understand that, but I bet that I can’t.”
“I think it would be hard for anyone to understand, but you know more than most people.” He stopped because the waitress arrived to ask if we needed anything else. She smiled widely at Will before she walked away, although he didn’t seem to notice. That made one of us.
“You never told me very much about your family when you tutored me,” I said, but he shrugged.
“I didn’t have to because everyone already knew about us. The Bodines arrived in Tennessee when it used to be a part of NorthCarolina and we’ve been making a spectacle ever since, as far as I can tell from reading the history.”
I thought of all those books on the shelves of his office in the main house, and I wondered how many mentioned his last name. “They were smart, too,” I added. “They had to have been to get so much of everything.” Money, land…they’d been wealthy and successful beyond anything that I could have imagined.
“They were grifters,” he stated plainly. “They used people, stepped on them, and stole from them to get ahead. There’s not a lot for me to be proud of in my family, and especially not in my father. No one needs to read a history book to know about him.”
No, they didn’t, because so many Chattanoogans had been able to watch the disaster of Mr. T. Franklin Bodine’s life happening in real time and had been able to report on it—they were still reporting on it, because he was still running around and making a fool and yes, a spectacle of himself. He’d been a grifter, too, but maybe not as smart as his predecessors. According to the ladies from church, almost everything that the Bodine family had amassed was gone: their distillery, their ancestral home, their cars and boats, their quarries, their bottling factory, their prominence, their wealth.
Now, that was all just a part of history, but their name and reputation remained. I remembered my grandma’s friends talking about Will’s father and I echoed their words when I said, “He lost it all.”
“Things had been going bad for decades,” his son disagreed. “We’d been circling the drain for at least a generation before him. My grandfather was also an alcoholic womanizer, but he did manage to stave off the worst of it. My father taking over meant that failure was guaranteed, but then he went even farther.” He winced. “He crashed his car into an ambulance. Who does that?”
“Someone drunk,” I answered, and Will nodded.
“He thought that I could fix it. He called me to rescue him, just like I remember him calling my grandfather. He talked in exactly the same whine. He didn’t care how he had injured the paramedics or that patient, but he was worried about getting in trouble. It was like dealing with a child and I haven’t talked to him since.”
But I remembered him saying that he had come home on the day of the funeral to deal with his dad. “Didn’t you see him when you were back in Tennessee?”
“I haven’t seen him in five years. When I go home, I only visit my mother.”
“How is she doing?” I asked, and he told me. As always, she was struggling—as you would if saddled with a husband who treated you terribly. She was working to support them both, but it sounded like she was taking quite a bit from her son, too. It was Will’s prerogative to spend his money as he wished but I had to think that in a way, he was wasting it. His parents lived in a large house that must have taken a lot to keep up and (in my opinion)was more than two people needed, especially if they couldn’t afford it on their own.
But he was also wasting money on me. I didn’t need to be paid for doing almost nothing while living in his guest cottage, either—and I knew he wouldn’t pay attention if I argued with him about that, so I kept it to myself.
I listened to him talk about his mom and it was clear he loved her very much, despite some exasperation. I remembered her pretty well although we’d only met the one time. Will had gotten his dark hair and grey eyes from his maternal side. His father was blonde but he had passed along his features to his son, the ones that had made the Bodine men famously irresistible to women.
Will told me other things about his family’s history, and I heard more at this dinner than I had in the weeks that I’d lived in Michigan. He noticed it too. “I didn’t shut up for more than an hour,” he mentioned as we left the restaurant.
“I liked it,” I said. “I wish you would talk all day.”
“I remember that you were a good listener.”
“My grandma used to tell me about her family too, like stories about her son when he was a little boy. She thought he was perfect back then,” I remembered. “But even when he grew up and got in trouble all the time, she still loved him.”
“That’s how my mother is, too. No matter how my dad acts, she won’t give up on him.” We both got into the car but he didn’t immediately start it. “Bad behavior should have consequences. At one point, someone has to say it’s wrong.”
“Grandma tried, but she didn’t want to lose him,” I answered. At least she had made an effort to steer her son, but in the Bodine family? It didn’t seem like they’d had ever had many consequences for their bad behavior—even now, his father wasn’t sitting in jail after his accident.
Will was thinking along the same lines. “Maybe now my dad will get his comeuppance,” he said. “For the first time in his life, no one’s rushing to save him. My grandfather’s dead and I’m not doing it. My mother would, but she doesn’t have the resources. Maybe he’ll just have to suffer.” His voice sounded flat and if I were his father, I would have quit the whining. It wasn’t going to work.
