Page 57 of The Cadence
“Cully, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And your mother is taking away your toys and putting you on time-out?” I asked him.
He got mad again, just like the day before. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying…”
“Yeah, yeah! I know what you’re saying!” He stomped away but after a little while, he came back to my register. I had been ringing up a few people who had rushed in for last-minute pregame purchases, but almost everyone was now at home and watching Herb and Buzz on their TV show.
“Do you want help out to your car?” he asked the final person in my lane, but she said no, picked up her fifty-two pounds of chicken, and ran out. “Calla?” he said to me. He sounded hesitant again.
I continued to clean the conveyor belt because that poultry had been juicy. “Yeah?”
“I get what you meant. You could be right about me and my parents.”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” I said. “I lived with my grandma for a few years and she also had a hard time accepting that Iwas growing up and that I needed her to treat me like an adult. It helped when she realized that I was already acting like an adult, so she could loosen up a little.” It had been difficult for her because she’d never stopped thinking about me as the little girl who’d disappeared with my mother, like I’d gotten frozen in time.
“I know that this situation…” He stopped and considered his next words. “I know it’s not the best. Kirsten and I have sex next to the loading dock because neither of us has our own place,” he told me. “You were right that it’s not romantic. It’s not clean, either, and she’s been saying that her shoes will get ruined.”
“Why don’t you move out of your parents’ house?” I suggested.
“You mean, I should move in with Kirsten?” Cully had been looking dejected, but he perked right up. “That’s a great idea!”
“No. No, that’s not what I meant,” I told him. “I was thinking that you could live with some friends. You grew up around here, so you must know people.”
He didn’t seem to hear that. “She hates living with her grandmother,” he told me excitedly. “She’s looking for a job, too, so she’ll have some money soon.”
I tried to imagine what kind of job Kirsten would be able to hold down. “Well—”
“Miss? Excuse me, miss?”
“Thanks, Calla!” Cully told me happily. “The game starts in three minutes. I’ll talk to her first.” He jogged toward the back, and I turned to deal with the customer. He looked familiar.
“Have you seen the state of your baguettes?” the man asked. He held up a loaf of bread that I thought he’d taken from the shoddy display that Cully was supposed to have fixed the day before. He definitely was supposed to have removed those baguettes because they weren’t fresh anymore.
“This is a disgrace,” the shopper announced. “Only the bag is keeping it upright. Watch what happens when I remove it from the paper! It’s—well, I hesitate to say it, but it’s phallic.”
Then I remembered him. The drooping carrots! “Why are you taking our bread out of the paper bags?” I asked, just as he triumphantly held it up for me. We both watched as it sagged to the side in another pathetic curve.
“Our loaves are stale,” I told him. “That should be as hard as a rock. Did you do something to make it droop over like that? Wait, is that even from this store? I don’t recognize the name of the bakery on the bag!” And Cully hadn’t recognized those carrots, either.
“I—” He looked at me, looked at the bread, and then dropped it like it burned his hand. He ran through the doors and into the parking lot.
Holy Moses, people were weird! I put on a glove before I disposed of the gross baguette and I asked my happy coworker to please deal with the rest of the bakery display at halftime. For now, we had a game to watch.
Chapter 12
Ijust couldn’t get the image out of my mind. It had been the third quarter and the Woodsmen had been down by seven points to the Rackers, which I definitely didn’t blame on the defensive players. The offense was just lackluster and it hadn’t surprised me that at the end of the game, the score reflected—
But the Woodsmen loss didn’t matter, not compared to what had happened in the third quarter. It had been a routine kind of running play on first down, a draw where the dumb Rackers running back had taken the ball from the dumb Rackers quarterback and tried to get a few yards ahead with it. There was nothing that had signaled to me that anything would go wrong.
It was only when the whistle blew and the play was over that I saw what was happening. Everyone else stood up but Will was still kneeling on the ground, resting his helmet in his hand. He’d stayed like that, almost like he was frozen there, and then Woodsmen personnel had run out onto the field to surroundhim. He had still been kneeling in the same position as the national TV broadcast had cut to a car commercial.
Cully had been standing next to me, watching the big screens in the grocery store, and I’d turned to him in horror. “Here, I have an idea,” he said, and took out his phone. “My mom always watches the games with the sound turned down so she can hear Herb and Buzz do their radio commentary. They might still be talking.” He had muted the store’s TVs and turned up the volume on his phone so that I’d heard the now-familiar voices.
“They’re getting Bodine to his feet and it looks like he’s needing a lot of help as they walk back to the sidelines. The crowd is giving some sporadic applause but we should be hearing more support from them, Buzz. I know our Woodsmen fans would step up and—”
