Page 32 of The Cadence
She continued on about her children, her husband, her business partner, and that woman’s family as we toured the house, and the whole time she also got texts from various people and wrote furiously on a legal pad she carried. She asked both me and Will a million questions and darted around with a tape measure as well, and I had no idea what was going to come of this.
Annie stopped in front of the chest of drawers, the only piece of furniture in one of the guest bedrooms. “Did you paint this?” she asked me. “It looks like the bedside table you were working on in the garage. I recognize this blue.” She pointed at one of the stripes.
She was more attentive than I realized, then. “I got that for free and worked on it some,” I answered.
“She fixed the whole thing and then painted it. Calla is really artistic,” Will filled in, and I turned to smile at him.
“I can see that,” Annie answered. “Do you mind if I take a picture?”
“No,” I said, although I couldn’t think of why she’d have wanted to. Then we moved on to several more rooms and she finally told us that she had enough to start on.
“I’ll send you both a detailed proposal…wait a minute, Calla, I don’t think I have your contact information.”
“Mine?” I asked. She nodded briskly so I gave it to her, watching Will as I did. He didn’t seem to have an issue with that.
She flew off in her giant car and he had to go, too, so I was left standing in the garage again. I picked up a brush and the blue paint I’d mixed, but then I still just squinted after the cars, thinking.
Chapter 7
The silence went on long enough that I felt the need to repeat myself. “I’m very sorry,” I said.
“It’s not me you need to apologize to.”
“Miss Mozella, does Jesus really care—”
“Calla Easterly!”
It was, of course, bad news that she didn’t call me Bug and that my last name came out, too. “I’m very, very sorry, and I won’t question anything about how Jesus might feel,” I apologized. “I’ll go to Mass next Sunday. I swear it.” I meant all that. I would have gone the Sunday before except that another of the Woodsmen had a party because it was the last weekend before their games started. I had really, really wanted to attend, enough that I’d been willing to risk the wrath of Miss Mozella (and maybe higher powers, too, but I had felt like everyone would understand).
The party had been very fun. She forgave me enough to keep talking, asking me about who I had met and the friends I was making, and then telling me about the Mass that she had definitely attended herself. As she discussed the homily, I let my mind go (sorry, again, to any higher powers).
It had been a very busy time, and not just because I was being more social. For one thing, Annie Whitaker-Gassman had been in touch a lot and because Will was also so busy with the season starting, I’d become the point person for a lot of the decisions regarding the changes in his house. I’d been working for him, doing the tasks that he lined up for me each day, and I’d also kept doing my shifts at the grocery store.
When I did, I made sure to look my best and I felt a little strange interacting with customers. Were they going to take my picture? Maybe they would say that I needed to try harder with my outfit, or that I needed to reconsider the arch of my eyebrows. There had been a debate in the comment section of a video about that issue, and most people seemed to feel that I should leave them natural. But everyone agreed that my clothes sucked.
It didn’t bother me all that much, but it felt very high school-y. This was all so high school, the whole reunion with Will and how I was feeling—
“Bug, are you listening to me?” Miss Mozella demanded. She sounded miffed again, but I was glad that I was back to being Bug. I said yes, and then she said she had something serious to tell me. There was another problem with her son, who had (again) done something terrible.
“It breaks my heart,” she said. “He’s grown, but he’s still my child, and it’s so awful to watch him make bad choices like this. It was the same for Calla.”
She meant my grandmother, and I knew that she was right. I remembered our drives back from the state prison and how Grandma tried to hide her tears over her son. “I can’t understand it,” she’d said over and over. “Where does it come from? I never taught him to act that way.”
“She was so disappointed by him,” I said.
“But he did step up for you, finally,” Miss Mozella answered.
He had “stepped up” by telling his mother that I was now her responsibility. It had been wonderful for me, and I thought that she had benefitted from it, too—I hoped so. “I was very lucky,” I answered.
“You both were,” she told me, and then I had to go because I needed to start getting ready. I’d been watching a lot of videos to prepare and the process was going to take a while. On top of that, I needed to leave here very early because today was not only a Woodsmen home game, but the first one. Will said that the fans would be out in droves.
“People start tailgating hours before it starts. The traffic is legendary,” he’d said, and then had taken a map of the stadium out of a folder that he carried.He’d highlighted the special parking lot where I would leave his car and the section where I would sit, and he’d also drawn arrows to show me the preferred routes to reach those locations.
I had studied it all very carefully, like I used to do with my school materials before he’d come over to tutor me. “I can follow this,” I assured him. He was also concerned about me sitting alone in the big stadium, but I further assured him that I had sat alone plenty of times in my life. That made him frown heavily, and he’d flipped to a different piece of paper in the folder he’d prepared. This one was another map that directed me to the lounge connected to the players’ locker room, where families and friends hung out after the game.
“You can head right home, but you could also meet me there. If you want to,” he’d added.
“Heck, yes! How long will I have to wait before I get to see you?” I asked, and that had made him smile instead.
