The Big Hit Read online

  He sat for a second before he spoke. “I don’t have any concrete plans for when I’m done with football. But it’s coming fast.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I can’t put my body through this for much longer. Something’s going to give and then it’ll be over.”

  “What do you like to do besides play? What are your hobbies?” I asked, and there was a huge silence. I quickly looked at the conversation topics in my lap. “How did you pick your major?”

  “My major?” Knox seemed confused by the question. “I didn’t pick it. The coach told us what to major in, what was good for football players.”

  “Really? You’re not interested in what you studied?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I never went to class or did much work until now, at Emelia Schaub.” There was another silence and I looked again at my lap, reading through my list for something else to discuss. Nothing written there seemed very appealing to me now.

  “I’m not good at school. I never had much of an aptitude for anything but sports,” he said.

  “I’m not exactly a brainchild myself,” I started, but Knox shook his head.

  “Not like that. I mean, I can’t do it. I never could. I heard a few times that maybe I got dropped on the head as a baby.”

  My mouth fell open.

  “It’s a joke,” he said calmly.

  “It’s not funny. That’s not funny at all.” It made me get so upset to hear it, I felt almost like I was going to cry. I quickly moved to the next topic that I’d typed on my phone, appealing or not. “What do you like to do around here? What have you seen in Michigan?”

  Knox tried, I would give him that. He searched around for things to say to me, about places he had gone, or people we both might know. He asked me questions about myself and my experiences. But I mentally compared the evening to watching Tatum and Nico together the night before, and I felt myself sinking farther and farther into a pit of unhappiness in this stuffy, fancy restaurant. It was not going well, not at all. I wasn’t saying sparkling, fascinating things, and he wasn’t laughing and smiling at me. He wasn’t doing his marble face anymore, but he didn’t seem that interested in me or in our evening together. He was more interested in methodically consuming every bit of food on his plate, and then he looked over at mine.

  “I’m done,” I told him. “We can switch, if you’re still hungry.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded, and we traded so that I had the plate with one clean bone on it. He had eaten every bit of his dinner except that bone, including the garnish. I looked again for another topic, but we had covered everything I had thought of, including other sports, current events, fashion trends, favorite animals, etc., etc. I was drawing a blank.

  “I’m sorry I said that before.”

  I lifted my head. “What? What did you say?”

  “About being dropped as a baby.” His big shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “I really don’t do well with reading, with studying. I used to get teased, before I grew some.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone trying to tease you,” I marveled.

  “They don’t anymore.”

  Probably they didn’t, if they wanted to live. The look on his face… “I got teased, too. Because I was always dressed really strangely, because we never had very much money, and my mom didn’t ever notice what I wore or if I was dirty or clean. She always had a hard time. And I was always really shy, scared. I didn’t make a lot of friends.” Any friends. “Now I’ve been hanging out with Tatum. You can’t really be shy around her.”

  “You don’t seem shy around me, either,” Knox commented.

  “I…” I didn’t know how to explain it, because I wasn’t shy around him. I hadn’t spoken more than ten words to my date the night before, or to Nico, either, except when he asked direct questions, but I didn’t feel shy around Knox. “I’ve worked a lot on it. I’m not ever going to be the life of the party, but I don’t really need to be, because I don’t like parties.”

  He laughed. Thank goodness.

  “Does everyone treat you right, at the college?” he asked me.

  “Yes.” I tilted my head, wondering what he meant.

  “That man at the library, Solomon? The professor you work for?”

  I was still confused. “Of course. Domenico is great, so is Solomon. What about the people you work with? What do you think about Nico Williams? I got the feeling that you weren’t really friends, when I saw you with him at the gym. And I was only there because Tatum really wanted to go,” I added, uber-casually. “I didn’t expect to see you, at all. Weird, huh?”

  “Nico isn’t a friend. I don’t have many on the team.”

  “Why not?”

  Knox thought for a moment. “We have different interests. Some of the guys have families, and they want to be with their wives and kids. Some of them are interested in women, parties, flash. That’s Nico. He works hard and he’s talented, and I respect that, but we’re not friends by any means.”

  “You’re not interested in the parties and the flash,” I said, and didn’t add, or the women. “Would you ever want the other side? A family?”

  “No. I’m better alone.”

  I looked down at the bone on my plate, and then Knox was telling the waiter that we were done, and paying so we could leave. I didn’t know if I wanted a family either, if I could even handle it, so why would that disappoint me so much? “I’m better alone,” he had said.

  “What do you keep looking at on your lap? Your phone?” His silver eyes were back on me.

  “Well, I took some notes on things we could talk about. I know, it’s ridiculous. I don’t have a lot of practice with going out.” He didn’t answer, and my cheeks burned. “Isn’t it silly?” I prompted.

  Knox reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he smoothed on the table. “Here’s mine.”

  When we left, I picked up his paper, because that made such a difference with everything.

  ∞

  “So that’s how you make toilet wine in prison,” Tatum concluded. “It’s all about the moldy bread.”

  “I don’t want to ask how you know that,” I called from across the room.

  “She’s fascinating,” Professor Amico told me. “I don’t follow at all how her mind works. Why did she tell us about how to produce the toilet wine?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea either.

  “I’d like to meet you in person,” he said to my phone. Tatum didn’t mind being on speaker, and her stories were a good distraction while we were working so hard.

  “I’d love to meet you too,” she responded to him, and they made plans to get together for coffee. Oh, God. I would have to ask her to please, please not have any designs on my 80-year-old employer. It didn’t sound like things with Nico were going so well, even though she had returned his wallet, so she said she was moving on. “I don’t care about him,” Tatum kept telling me, then talked a blue streak about a million other guys, but when she was quiet, she looked wistful. Or maybe I was reading too much romance into her. In any case, she hadn’t yet seen Nico’s personal equipment, and I knew she remained interested in that, so maybe there was still a chance.

  I, of course, had seen no one’s personal parts, either. Knox had driven me home after our dinner, walked me to the door, and said a brief goodbye. No hand-holding, no arm around my shoulders, no kiss. Not even a handshake, but I still had the list he had written of things we could talk about, and to me, it counted for a lot. It meant he had been thinking about me, and planning for going out with me. He had been worried, maybe, and had wanted to try to make sure that it went well. In fact, it made me feel so good that that list was in my pocket at the moment, where I brushed it with my fingers each time I got out or stowed away my phone. The phone that hadn’t gotten any message or call from him, and I was too chicken to make a move myself.

  “By the way,” Tatum said, “I’m not sure if you guys read what the other yoga gi
rls were saying about breath mints. Professor Amico, you’re a scientist, right?”

  He shook his head at the phone and I wanted to put an immediate stop to this line of discussion.

  “Tatum, don’t you have class?” I yelled so she could hear me over all the portable electronics we had going in the room.

  There was a short silence, then she said, “Gotta go,” and hung up.

  “Fascinating,” Professor Amico murmured. He wiped his forehead with an old-fashioned handkerchief. He looked exhausted, because he had been spending all his time up in the attics since the call from the Visconti family, working as hard as he could to find the portrait. We were still looking.

  When Luke Whitaker had given the college additional money to organize his family’s art collection, and the professor had left his Florida retirement to come to Michigan to take charge of it, they had insisted that all the works be moved out of the basement into more appropriate storage. By that, they meant a place where workmen wouldn’t gather for lunch and put their carryout containers on the boxes of priceless art, where it wouldn’t be at risk for a good soaking in a flood like the one we’d experienced in the library. The college had agreed, and very slowly and painstakingly under Domenico’s supervision, everything got moved up to the giant attics over Butterfield Hall, the largest building on campus.

  Which was better, but still not great, because temperature control and proper humidity were always issues. We had portable air conditioners and dehumidifiers humming constantly in the summer so the art (and Domenico and I) wouldn’t melt away in the big rooms under the rafters of the building, and in the winter, both of us rushed around trying to keep everything warm and not too dry. And Domenico worried about it, all the time.

  “What is that carton, thirty-six A or B?” he asked me, flipping through his papers. They fell onto the floor in a heap and we both sighed.

  “Thirty-seven C,” I told him, using a screwdriver to try to remove the hundred-year-old hardware from the wood. I was tired and my arms and back were aching. We weren’t doing much, if any, cleaning or restoration of the art; we were just unpacking, cataloging as best we could, then prepping the pieces to re-pack and store correctly so we could come back and work more on them later. Then everything we looked at and re-packed had to be moved across the hall to our second attic so we had more room to work, because the huge space was tight with crates to begin with and getting worse as we dealt with all the packing materials. We carefully carried and placed everything in the other room, making many, many trips back and forth. And by “we,” I meant, “me,” because Domenico was pretty spry, but it was too much for him to carry boxes, push dollies, and roll handcarts.

  I stood up, closing my eyes and rolling my neck a little. From here, I had to go to the library, and today I wasn’t looking forward to it. I was dirty, gritty with the dust and spiderwebs and dead bugs that had accumulated in and on the crates over their years of sitting in storage. Going home to loll around in the bathtub and moon over pictures of Knox seemed like a wonderful idea.

  “May I help you with something? Are you lost?” Domenico asked.

  I opened my eyes to see a large figure bending to pass through the door into the attic. “What are you doing here?” I blurted out.

  “You told me where you worked,” Knox answered. Standing at his full height, his head brushed the ceiling. “Is it all right that I’m here? It sounded like you needed help with what you were doing, about the painting.”

  “You are who?” Domenico asked him. He didn’t follow American football. “What do you know about our painting?” he prodded suspiciously.

  “Domenico Amico, please meet Knox Lynch. He isn’t here to try to steal your glory,” I assured the professor. “He’s, um, a friend of mine. He’s a football player for the Woodsmen.”

  “I’m a student here,” Knox told him, and I looked up at him in surprise. He hadn’t wanted people to know that he was a student at the college, but hearing it did seem to calm Domenico, to make him believe that Knox wasn’t an art thief coming after our Pisanello.

  The professor sized him up. “You look fairly strong,” he said to Knox. Now, that was the understatement of the year. “You can help us carry, if you wouldn’t mind.” More of his papers fell out of the folder he was trying to arrange them in and I saw that his hands were shaking.

  “Domenico, why don’t you go to your office and take a break? I need to leave soon, anyway, so we need to wrap things up,” I suggested. One of my tasks for the day had been trying to convince him not to do too much while I wasn’t there, and I thought he was listening.

  He nodded slowly, watching Knox. “You’ll be here, with the collection,” he said to me, and I nodded back. He raised his hand to Knox and slowly left the attic, making me worried with how carefully he was walking. If I was tired, he was exhausted.

  “Poor guy,” I said aloud.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Knox asked me.

  I gestured around the room. “Well, this is a lot! He’s overwhelmed with the idea of opening everything and the guy in California I told you about, the Enrico Visconti who wrote to us about the paining of his ancestor, he’s acting like a jerk. He’s calling a lot and putting pressure on Domenico to find it. We’re doing the best we can, but it’s just the two of us.” I angled the screwdriver and tried to lever it. “Visconti acts like the portrait belongs to him but as far as I can tell—” The metal head skittered across the crate and jabbed me. “Ow!”

  Knox walked over and looked at my hand where I had been poked. “You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s ok,” I told him, and walked to the area I was calling the doctor’s office, where I had set up all our first aid. “I’m up to date on my tetanus vaccine. I made sure after my first day of working here.” I wiped the back of my hand over my forehead, wondering how bad I looked, and partially glad that there was no way I could see myself. “How have you been?” I asked, dabbing on antibiotic ointment.

  “Fine. You?”

  “Fine.” Maybe I was going to need some more conversation topics, though, if we kept going like this.

  “Tell me what to do,” he said.

  Well, first you could call me, send me funny messages about how you’re thinking of me. Tell me how much you like me. Ask me out again, kiss me, touch me…my heart thumped. “Can you help break down some of the old crates I’ve emptied? They take up so much floor space. Here, this is what I use to do it.” I grabbed my crowbar and hammer for him, but he casually picked up one of the crates and broke it into pieces with his hands. My eyes widened. “Or you could just do that.”

  “Where to you want it?”

  I pointed to the hallway. “I’ll take it all down on my way out.” I tried to keep working, but mostly, I stood and gaped at Knox as he destroyed the wooden boxes, his muscles flexing in his back, his arms, his chest. His legs when he bent down to pick up debris, his butt. Oh, wow, his butt. I wished he were wearing something tighter, so I could see better. It felt hotter in the room so I checked the thermometer we’d hung on the wall to help us keep the art at the proper temperature. No, still 70 degrees. But Knox pulled off the sweater he had been wearing and now kept working in just a t-shirt. I licked my lips.

  “Daisy, these too?” he asked me. “Daisy?”

  I nodded blankly, then concentrated on what he was asking me. “Thank you so much, but that’s enough for today. I have to get to the library.” I hurried around, gathering my backpack and purse, and I ran my hands over my hair.

  “Here.” Knox wiped his hand on his jeans and walked to me. Very carefully, he brushed his thumb over my nose. “Dust,” he explained.

  “I think I’m a big mess,” I said. We were standing very close.

  “No,” he answered, then gently wiped the back of his fingers across my cheekbone. “Just a little bit.” He dropped his hand. “I was going to call you or something, but I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Maybe just ‘hi,’” I offered. “‘Hi, I was thinking ab
out you.’ If you were.”

  “I was.” Knox stepped back. “I’ll carry the wood down.”

  He did, all of it, to the freight elevator we used to go out to the dumpsters behind the building. Today it was working, which made the trip down a lot faster. I dropped my bag and helped toss everything into the dumpster, thinking that the campus was pretty busy at this time of day, with lots of students coming in and out of Butterfield Hall. “How did you get here?” I asked Knox curiously.

  “I drove to the college, parked, walked.”

  “I mean, did you go through a tunnel to get across campus or something?”

  He got a funny look. “Are you thinking about a scene from one of your books?”

  “No!” I could feel the blush. “I didn’t know…you like your privacy. You said that you didn’t want people making a deal out of you being a student here.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, but I wanted to come, so I did. Let’s go.” He picked up my backpack and slung it over his shoulder.

  We did get plenty of stares as we walked to the library. Knox looked into the distance over everyone’s heads, which wasn’t hard since he was a foot taller, and his face resumed the mask of vacant indifference. I tried to imitate him.

  “Why are you doing that?” Knox asked me. “Why are you making that face? Is your cut hurting?”

  “No. I’m trying to look like you, like I don’t care about anything,” I explained. “Everyone’s staring and it’s so strange. Usually I’m incognito.”

  “You think no one’s staring at you? Every time we’ve been out—”

  “The two times,” I interrupted.

  “The two times we’ve been out, every eye in the restaurant has been on you,” he told me.

  “No.”