Page 140 of False Start

twenty-nine

We’d been homefor a week. We’d done interviews with local TV and the newspapers and a goofy ceremony turning over a big-ass check.

Yes, the numbers were big, but it was the actual check ironically that was big. Obnoxiously so.

Three feet wide to be exact.

We gave them all the tap dancing they wanted after getting their personal guarantee the program would live on for an additional year and we’d have a grace period every year to come up with more funding.

Gee, look at us twisting their arms, when really they had us by the tits. They got money and us doing the work for them. But I didn’t give a shit. I wanted my kids and being able to look into Rylee’s eyes and tell her with absolute certainty we weren’t going anywhere was worth being small-town show ponies for a while.

A win.

And it gave me a focus.

With her worries gone, it took those kids less than sixty seconds to change the topic to Rockabilly’s and the banked track, asking when they were going to see Priest again, if he would skate with them, if maybe he’d teach them how to do roller derby.

Just like that they’d latched on to him even as he let go.

I was trying not to be a bit butt hurt that they didn’t ask us to teach them.

Really, guys?

I’d gone through all the motions in the past one hundred and sixty-eight hours since the last day of the exhibition. Smiled when I was supposed to, put the kids off about Priest by changing the subject, telling them he had to go on a trip—basically lying to them—and when the performance ended, I went to my apartment and cried.

And cried some more.

When I told him he could go and I would wait, I didn’t know I was committing myself to the pain of being sliced in half, all the essentials still connected to support life, while I went back and forth between total and utter agony with brief periods of numb shock before drowning in the pain all over again.

Flaming asshole.

My teammates called. Eve even stopped by, threatening me with an intervention, but I didn’t need an intervention.

I needed a hug.

And not by them.

By him.

I wondered if he knew he was a good hugger.

The best hugger.

And he probably needed one too. That was the worst part. Remembering that look in his eye. Knowing his penchant for punishing himself with no one there to remind him just how worthy he was of love and having someone who cared for him the way he cared for others.

“Maybe decaf ain’t so bad after all,” Milton said, taking a sip of his second cup that morning.

“What decaf?” I asked as I shot Gerald a look over my shoulder, catching him in the act of slipping his hand toward Milton’s bacon. “Yours is coming. Be good.”

“I’m a little disappointed in you, young lady. You’re slipping. I’ve already taken one piece,” Gerald grumbled.

“Don’t be thinking I don’t know what you’ve been doing back there, Maisy Jane. I let you get away with it because you put up with an old curmudgeon like me,” Milton said.

I rounded the counter and put my arms around both of them. “I love old curmudgeons like you.”

Milton patted my hand and tipped his head against mine. “I hate seeing you sad like this, sweetheart. He’s going to come back, you know.”

But it wasn’t just that, it was also the way he left. My last moments with him in an arena six hundred miles from home.

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