The Last Whistle Page 5

  “Detroit?”

  “No, Chicago. I’ve been working there for the last few years. What about you? Where are you from?”

  “Minnesota, originally,” he told me. “I got recruited to play in college in Florida and then I spent five seasons with the Glaciers before getting traded. I’ve been with the Woodsmen for six years.”

  “Eleven seasons seems like a long time to play professional football. I would imagine that, statistically, careers in the United Football Confederation are pretty short, aren’t they?”

  “That’s true,” Gunnar answered, his voice clipped. “It depends on the player.”

  “It probably also depends on the player’s place on the field,” I mused. “Some positions must get hurt a lot more than others.” It was an interesting topic, because it turned football into math and statistics, which I liked. “Are you in a position with a lot of career longevity?” I asked.

  “Here’s my car,” he announced. “I’m going home. Get in if you want a ride.” He walked to the driver’s side and slammed the door behind himself. Very hard.

  I guessed that he was more upset than he’d let on about me hitting him earlier and the knocks to his male ego that he’d taken in the bar. Funny that someone so big and tough-looking would be so sensitive. I got in too, and Gunnar peeled out of the parking lot, not saying a word to me. He drove a lot faster than my old Bronco could have taken these roads.

  I looked around the car. “My grandpa had this same model,” I commented. “It’s funny that a young-ish guy like you has it also.”

  “You really have a way with words, don’t you?” he bit off.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “I have this car because it’s easy for me to get in and out of. I have—I had a back injury, so I needed something that wasn’t too high or too low. I know it’s an old-man car.”

  “No, I wasn’t trying to criticize!” I told him. “My grandpa loved this car. It was like the culmination of his ambitions. Like when he could buy this, he knew our family bookstore was a success.” I remembered my surprise when I came home from college one summer and saw that my dad had sold it, and replaced it with the beat-up Bronco.

  “It was too flashy for me,” he’d told me at the time, but now I realized—

  “Hallie?”

  I also realized that Gunnar had been saying something, but I had been lost in thought. “Huh?”

  “I asked you what you do, if you still work at your family bookstore,” he elucidated. “I know you don’t have a job that involves you getting up and dressed very early in the morning.”

  Oh, yes, he remembered my fun AM meet and greet with the surveying crew he had hired. Maybe they had filled him in on how sweet I looked in my thong. “I’m a tutor now,” I said, because starting Monday, I would be.

  “Really? What do you tutor in?”

  “High school subjects,” I said vaguely. “Math, et cetera.”

  “I had a ton of tutors,” he mentioned, and I nodded sympathetically.

  “School is hard for some people,” I answered.

  “I didn’t struggle in school,” he told me, his voice tight and angry again. “Don’t make assumptions that just because I’m a football player, I couldn’t do well in my classes.”

  “Well, explain why you had tutors, then.”

  “Because I was a football player—”

  “Ha!” I said triumphantly.

  “Because I was a football player,” he continued with a raised voice, “and about seventy-five percent of my time was spent either playing, practicing, watching film, or lifting. That left a little time for eating and sleeping, but not a lot for schoolwork. Since we had to keep up a minimum GPA to keep playing, the university had a squad of tutors for us. Not because I’m stupid.”

  “I didn’t say that you were stupid.”

  “You implied it,” he told me.

  “No, just because school was hard for you—”

  “It wasn’t,” Gunnar interrupted.

  “Ok,” I said with exaggerated patience, “just because school is hard for some people who aren’t in this car, it doesn’t mean that those other people, who aren’t you, are dumb. School isn’t a measure of intelligence, just how well you might learn things in one particular way.” I paused. “I meant that last ‘you’ in a general, universal sense.”

  “I get it. Is this what you tell your tutoring students?”

  “I haven’t actually started yet,” I confessed. “But I will tell them that, for sure. My dad used to say it to me and it’s good advice. Ugh, I just realized I’m going to start work there with a shiner.” And bruises on my knees from that latest fall onto the sidewalk, but I could cover those with pants. I pulled down the visor so I could check my throbbing face in the mirror and a sheaf of papers landed on my head. Good grief, wherever I went…

  “I’ll take those,” Gunnar said, scrabbling around my lap with one hand to pick up his stuff. “That’s all the paperwork from the sale of the house.”

  “You keep it in your car?”

  “Everything is messy right now,” he said, and I looked across at him in the darkness. We were already out in the country where there were no streetlights, so I couldn’t see him very clearly, but he had sounded very depressed when he said that. I recognized it well, from when I’d talked to my dad on the phone before I’d decided to come home. I wondered if Gunnar had the same look on his face that my dad used to get, too: exhaustion, like he felt some kind of invisible weight on his shoulders and couldn’t shake it free.

  “Like what?” I asked softly. “What’s so messy in your life?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “I meant, my papers,” he told me finally, and he crumpled them together in his big fist.

  Sure. And by the way, papers like that were fairly important to keep, and not meant to be tossed on the floor of the back seat like he’d just done.

  “About the house,” he said. “About the property line—”

  “I don’t want to get into an argument,” I announced, and now Gunnar burst into rolling, deep laughter. I listened to it and forgot to be upset that it was at my expense because it was such a nice sound, and I was glad that he didn’t seem so sad anymore.

  I forgot for a little bit, anyway, but then I snapped to attention. “Hello! Why are you laughing at me?” I demanded.

  He managed to stop himself, with difficulty. “It was just funny to hear that you don’t want to fight about something. That’s all you’ve done, since I met you. That, and try to injure me.”

  “I don’t hurt you on purpose, and I’m not argumentative,” I argued. I slid open the mirror in the visor and the little lights came on, so I got a good look at my eye. It was already swollen and I knew from experience with accidents past that it was going to bruise up pretty well. “I’ll have a black eye, too. We’re kind of matching now,” I commented.

  “He got you that hard with the tray? Or was it a glass that gave you that?”

  “Could have been either,” I sighed. “I just saw something coming fast and it was too late to duck. My reflexes aren’t great.”

  “Your reflexes seemed fast enough when you punched me in the face. But if you want to, you can work on that,” Gunnar told me. “If you go to the gym—”

  “If I go to the gym? That better not turn into a remark about how I’m out of shape,” I warned. “Or if the word ‘chunky’ is going to cross your lips—”

  “I’m not going to call you chunky! Why would I say that?”

  “You wouldn’t, not if you wanted to live,” I told him.

  “I’m pretty sure you mean that literally,” he said, sighing. “But what I was going to say was that if you like to go to the gym, I can tell you some exercises to do there to work on your reflexes. If you don’t go to the gym, you can run some other drills outside. I have to work a lot on my reaction time, personally.”

  “Oh. Ok, thanks, that would help me.” I considered. “I wonder how much reaction time dec
lines with each year of age. Like, I bet if we put yours on a graph, we could probably see a clear deterioration across your career as you got older and older and older. And older. I wonder what else you’ve gotten worse at, what other of your skills have degenerated. Have you ever thought about it?” He didn’t answer, and I continued, lost in thought. “There must be a lot of metrics to determine when a player will have to retire. We could graph all of them, like decreased speed, agility, recovery from injuries. I bet your team already does things like that, if they’re smart, especially around contract negotiation time.” I thought what formulas I might use and imagined the smoothed curves of the graphs. “Wouldn’t that be interesting to look at?” I asked him.

  “The decline in my metrics? How I’m degenerating? Sounds fascinating,” Gunnar said. He didn’t sound fascinated; he sounded furious again. What was with him now?

  The engine was roaring to life and I looked over at the speedometer. “Why are you driving so fast?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to make this ride end as quickly as possible,” he said grimly.

  I stared across the car at him. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had said to make him so angry, but by the way, I was the one who had been humiliated tonight—not him. I was the one who’d been laughed out of a bar, not him, and I was the one who had a black eye, bruised knees, and a broken phone because of it, and not him. If anyone should have been angry, it should have been me, and I decided that I was. I sat back and stewed.

  With the way he was driving, like he was behind the wheel at the Indianapolis Speedway, we got back to my cottage extremely quickly, much better time than what Gaby and I had made on the way to the Silver Dollar. Gunnar may have been angry at me for whatever reason, but he did turn into my driveway instead of depositing me at the road. He pulled all the way up to almost the front porch, where he stopped with his headlights illuminating the trees where I had first seen him blundering around. My trees.

  “Thank you for the ride,” I said coldly. “Sorry that your car smells like you’ve been drinking and driving. I think my phone and wallet dripped out onto your floormat.”

  “It’s fine. Goodbye.”

  I opened the door and the dome light came on, but I still hesitated. I hadn’t meant to offend him or make him mad, but I didn’t know what to say about it. I seemed to upset him with most of what came out of my mouth.

  “Yes?” Gunnar asked impatiently, but then his voice changed. “Are you afraid to go inside alone or something?” He looked across the car at me, his forehead creased.

  “What?” I started to laugh. “I’ve lived here for twenty-four years! Why would I be afraid?”

  The concerned face turned into a scowl. “Fine. Fine! Just get out. Get out of my car.” He pointed. “Go inside there!”

  “Fine. Fine! I will go inside there!” I harrumphed myself out to stand in the driveway. “I’ll go inside my own cottage where I own one hundred percent of the land, and I’ll—”

  Gunnar reached across and closed the door in my face. He reversed, spun the wheel, and left a cloud of dust as he sped down the dirt driveway out to the road. I watched his car go about a hundred yards then turn into his own asphalt driveway. Thankfully, I couldn’t see the ugly Feeney place from my porch, so when the headlights were out of sight, he was gone.

  Yes, thankfully, he was gone. I stood in the pitch darkness, because I had forgotten to leave my porch light on and my phone wouldn’t light up at all. The big bushes around the front of my cottage, the ones that I had meant to cut back, could have hidden anyone there. A serial killer, for example. But good, I was glad that Gunnar was gone, because he was so darn touchy—it was hard to know what would set him off!

  I thought back through what I had said to see if I could discern the problem. “Give yourself two shakes to think before you speak,” my dad had always recommended to me, but I realized I hadn’t done that in the car.

  Case in point: I may have mentioned several times how old he was and how his football career was almost over and how he wasn’t as good as he used to be. Yes, in retrospect, that may have been a bad idea; I certainly wouldn’t have appreciated if someone had come into the bookshop, told me that I wasn’t doing well, and counted down the minutes until I failed and the business went under. Ok, sure, I had said those things to Gunnar, and I had also implied that I thought he wasn’t very bright. Although I had tried to explain myself, there was a remote possibility that he might still be offended by that.

  Well, I was doing absolutely great in my campaign to get along with him, I frowningly congratulated myself. Good job, Hallie. I had now insulted him in several ways and injured him twice. And speaking of injuries, my eye had started to throb more. I walked slowly into the dark cottage, watching for serial killers coming from behind the overgrown bushes, and feeling for the familiar light switches. I turned on every one because despite what I’d said to Gunnar, I didn’t actually enjoy going into the silent, shadowy rooms. I got some ice and put it into a kitchen towel that my grandma had hemmed, which was almost translucent with age. I went out onto the back deck where I could hear the water and I treated my face and my knees and thought about where the evening had gone wrong, and what I was going to do to correct things. It seemed like there was a long list.

  ∞

  “Marley, this is Hallie Holliday. She’s going to be your tutor,” Linda, the director of the learning center, introduced us. She smiled at me, but this girl, Marley, had absolutely no expression. Her face was a total, perfect blank, so empty that I was almost impressed by her talent. But yes, I was also definitely unnerved, which was probably her intent.

  “Hi, Marley. It’s nice to meet you,” I told her.

  “Is it?” she responded. Never had so much boredom and ennui been packed into two short words.

  “It is for me,” I said, and forced a smile onto my own face. My boss was watching, after all. I took out my graphing calculator, Spanish-English dictionary, and copy of 1984, and spread them neatly on the table. I had tried to cover all my bases when I’d packed my tote bag that morning.

  “What happened to your eye?” Marley asked, in a tone utterly devoid of curiosity.

  “I got hurt learning capoeira,” I said, and rushed to a new topic. “What are we going to work on today?”

  “Why don’t you and Marley get to know each other a little before she shows you what she’s doing in summer school? Oh, and here.” Linda set down a thick file of papers on the Formica tabletop. “These are her progress reports from her last tutor so you can see what they did.” She smiled at both of us again before hurrying off to another table where a kid was holding up a protractor like he was going to use it as a weapon rather than a learning tool. They left the room together.

  “So…” I said slowly, leafing through the inches of paperwork left by my predecessor. “This seems like a lot. Your old tutor was very thorough.” I wished I’d had time to review all of this before she sat down, because I liked to be prepared. “What was the last guy’s name?”

  “Tristan,” she said, her voice exactly the same. “He was a huge dick.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. Did he teach you anything, though?”

  She languidly checked her phone. “He spent most of his time staring at my tits and trying to get into my pants.”

  “What?” I was outraged. “You’re fifteen! How old was he? Does Linda know about this?”

  She sighed, as if I had made her even more bored. “I’m fucking with you, Heather.”

  “It’s Hallie. You shouldn’t use that word,” I informed her.

  “What word? ‘You?’ ‘With?’” she asked me. “Oh, you mean ‘fucking?’ Is ‘fucking’ the word I shouldn’t use?” Marley stared at me. “I shouldn’t say ‘fucking,’ is that what you mean? So, for example, I shouldn’t use an expression like, ‘My new tutor is a fu—’”

  “Yes,” I agreed, grinding my teeth slightly. “That’s exactly the word I meant. That last one you mentioned.”

  “You sh
ouldn’t interrupt me. It’s important for me to have a safe space where I have the freedom to express myself,” she informed me. “It’s great for my self-esteem. Doesn’t it say that in there?” Marley reached over and tapped the binder that Linda had given me at the end of my interview, when she’d hired me and told me where to go to get my fingerprints checked to make sure that I wasn’t secretly a criminal. And yes, I had read the binder’s section on safe spaces and self-esteem, and it sounded like Marley might have, too.

  “I don’t want you to say that word again,” I said to my student, and when she opened her mouth, I held up my index finger. “Your safe space doesn’t include the F word.”

  “Hm, ok.” She tilted her head like she was thinking. “I know that one of the things they tell you guys to do first is to lay out ground rules. Let’s do that together,” she said agreeably, and I got immediately nervous at this sudden change in her attitude. “Tristan had a binder just like that. He showed it to me so we could laugh at it together. I remember that there was a whole checklist of stuff you were supposed to do with your client. Me,” she pointed out. “You work for me.”

  “I would say that we’re working together,” I corrected levelly. My jaw was starting to hurt from the grinding I was doing. “Together, not like I’m your employee.”

  “You’re employed here for me, so it’s really like you work for me.”

  “No, not really…”

  “I’ve had six tutors already and they’re all gone.” She examined her fingernails, and I wondered what had happened to the previous tutors. Was she checking to see if there was still any blood on her hands?

  “That’s a lot of different people. Many transitions,” I said, remembering another word that the binder had used a lot. Transitions were difficult for many children, it had said, and I had trouble with them myself. Transitions meant change, and change was bad.

  “I like transitions,” Marley stated. “Otherwise it’s boring. Right? But I don’t like being here every day of my summer vacation, so want me to tell you how this is going to go for you?” She stared at me. Daring me.