Page 26 of Base Block

“I really liked Indianapolis,” I said. It was where I had met him, after all, and he had a house there.

“We should go to a place with more fashion and clothes stuff.”

“Why?” I wondered.

“If you’re into that, then you should get a chance to try it,” he answered. “New York? It’s expensive. So is Los Angeles, but maybe you have more insight into that market.” He was playing with his knife, toying with it between both hands. “I wouldn’t want to stay in Michigan if I couldn’t play for the Woodsmen.”

“Victoria was talking about the development league team here, the Junior Woodsmen,” I said. “What about that? It’s a paycheck for football.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m not in the position to be picky.” He spun the knife. “What about you? What do you want to do, besides social media? Or we could keep doing that but make it about your life and not mine anymore,” he suggested.

“I’m not totally ready to give up on the Woodsmen. I think they may come through for you, even if they do make some strange choices about color and how they handle roster cuts. There are nice people working there, like Victoria.”

“What did she have to say today?”

I explained a little bit about our visit to Roy’s, finishing with, “I’m not sure why she wanted to go with me.”

“She probably thought you were fun and nice. She knew that you’re great to hang out with.”

“She didn’t know me at all,” I said.

“That was her chance to find out, then.”

“I liked her, and I also liked the kicker’s wife from the tour,” I mentioned. “I wonder how she’s doing.”

“She’s pregnant,” he said. “George told everyone today. He’s so happy about it.”

“Oh, no. Is he going to make the team?” Because if not, they’d have to move again, and then maybe again, and again. Kids needed to be in one place, secure.

“I don’t have an in with the special teams coaches, but from what I’ve seen of him in practice?” Callum nodded. “He has a great leg. If it doesn’t work out, I heard him saying that he might want to coach at the high school level. He’d be good at that, too.”

“I wish I had gotten that woman’s number,” I said. “But I’ll see her around at team stuff.”

“You sound pretty sure.” He started bending the knife and…

“Oh, hell.” We looked at what was now two separate pieces of metal in his hands. “I’ll pay for it,” he said. “I have to start focusing more on money, because we won’t have this per diem stuff. The Junior Woodsmen players work other places during their off-season but I don’t know if we can stay up here and hope for that, when you’ve had so much trouble getting a job that’s safe from kidnappers.”

Then we started going around again with the same issues of him doubting himself. We were both upset at the end of the dinner, so much that we didn’t even enjoy our first meal out together since we’d had Mexican food in Indianapolis, weeks before. He picked at the baklava and I got worried about calories, so I skipped it.

And it continued when we went home.

“I didn’t know anything about that per diem.”

I was brushing my teeth in the motel bathroom when I heard him talking, and the water sputtering from the faucet echoed so much in the small room that I didn’t entirely catch his words. I spat and opened the door. “What? Did you say something in Latin?”

“Yeah.” Callum sat up partway on his bed, leaning on his elbow. “I said that I didn’t know anything about the per diem.”

“You hadn’t read the email, due to not having a normal phone.”

“I could have gotten a laptop. Or a tablet, something. But that’s not the only problem,” he said. “I didn’t even know what the hell it was.” He lay back, shaking his head on the pillow. “I had never heard of that term and when you figured it out for me, I didn’t even have a bank account to put the money in.”

I stowed my toothbrush and sat next to him, so he moved his massive thigh to make more room. “I don’t have a bank account,” I mentioned. “I don’t have a credit card, or work experience, or a car.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” His eyes moved to the bedside lamp, where a large moth was fluttering helplessly under the shade. Callum picked up one of the plastic drink cups that the motel cleaners kept giving us and swung his legs around me so he could stand. “I wasn’t trying to say anything about you.” He neatly caught the moth in the cup, sealing it inside with his other palm. I opened the motel room door so he could free it outside.

“Jory Morin talked to me about signing with the team,” he said as he shut the door again. “He said that unless I really know how to negotiate and then read a contract, I should have an agent and a lawyer. He gave me some names and said he’d tell them that I’d be calling. Then he gave me that toad.”

I absently patted it. We had put it next to the TV that would only get one station, local access that had a lot of shows about cherries and fishing. “It sounds like a good idea.”