Page 35 of The Cadence
“This is a boot, but it’s mostly precautionary,” he explained. “I rolled my ankle in the third quarter but I can tell it will be fine after a few days. The trainers agree.”
“In the third quarter?” I repeated. “You played for the whole game, though.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It looks bad!” I said, pointing to the boot. It looked huge and uncomfortable, and also scary.
“No, not really.” He leaned back and I was very glad that he’d agreed to get this big couch, because he fit so well on it.
“Can I get you anything? Water? Aspirin?” I suggested.
“I’m good.”
“Ok, I’ll leave you alone,” I said, and his eyes opened.
“No, you don’t have to go. What did you think of the game?”
Since we hadn’t yet picked out a coffee table or other furniture for this room, I sat cross-legged on the floor next to where he lay. “Overall, I was pretty impressed. You were amazing and the offense wasn’t so bad.”
He shook his head but he smiled, too. “Tell me more.”
I shared some of my own insights and also those of the people who had been around me in the stands, because they definitely had more knowledge than I did. So did the other women I talked to in that family lounge, where I had paid attention to the conversation before I got so nervous about Will’s absence that I forgot to listen.
“This is interesting,” he commented.
“But not necessarily correct,” I cautioned. “It may be total malarky, as my grandma used to say. How about some dinner?”
“Sure.” He started to get up.
“No, no, I’ll fix it,” I told him, and jumped up myself. He said he was coming to the bar stool to watch, though, and we kept talking about the game and about my experience in the stands, too.
I had left some papers and markers on the counter, because I’d been sketching out ideas for what I would paint on the table that was my latest project. As we spoke, he looked at my drawingsand then started to line up the pens, perfectly straight and sorted by the colors on the caps so that he made a precise rainbow.
“Very nice,” I pointed out. “Sorry I left a mess.”
“Not a mess, a small pile,” Will corrected. “Organizing is a habit I have.”
“I know. I remember how you liked to have everything orderly, even the numbers when we did math.”
“Especially the numbers,” he told me. “Columns and neatness in math are very important.” He looked down at the pens and knocked them with his finger to mess them up.
But in the next moment, he was straightening them out again. “As I get older, it gets worse.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I get overly focused on neatness and order.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Sometimes,” he sighed. “The other things do more.”
“What other things?”
“I get ideas and then I can’t shake them. When I was staying on Mackinac Island with the team, I kept thinking that you hadn’t locked the doors here and that someone would be able to get in.”
“I locked them,” I protested. “I leave messy piles of markers, but I can remember to do that.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. I also kept thinking that I’d left the oven on and that the house would burn down. I woke up a few times, sure of it.”
