They told me some about Coach, more about Angus. Things she’d not told me herself, such as being one of the smartest in her college class and winning awards. Her major was psychology, which I knew, and she planned to go back for even more school, which I didn’t. To be a counselor. I’d been around the block now, so was not like most guys I know, that would yell “headshrinker” and run for cover. Angus would be awesome at it. I told them I thought so.
After supper Mr. Dick went to bed, Miss Betsy put her apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I’ve got this. Miss Betsy acted like she’d never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn’t.
I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked questions. How often did she come down here, did she still have her Jeep Wrangler. Was she still working her badass angle, not that I used those words. What I really wanted to know was, is she still the same Angus. What kind of question is that? Obviously, if she was married or pregnant or anything along those lines, she’d have told me. But Miss Betsy had been hearing parts of her story that I hadn’t. I kept going at it sideways, like casting a line in the water and holding your mouth right. Getting no bites at all. Finally I asked Miss Betsy straight up: Does she have a boyfriend?
I was scrubbing the glass dish she’d baked the bean casserole in. I didn’t look at her, just kept on digging with the steel wool. Finally she said, “I have my hunches about that.”
I was careful not to drop the dish. I turned around. “What kind of hunches?”
She’d taken her glasses off, and her face was like a snail without its shell. Slowly, slowly she cleaned the two-tone lenses with the corner of her apron. “I oughtn’t to say.”
“Meaning what? She doesn’t like guys?”
She seemed unshocked by the suggestion, which just slipped out. I’d wondered the same of Miss Betsy. But she said that was not her thinking.
“O-kay,” I said, faking patience. I went back to the casserole dish and got that sucker clean as a whistle and nothing else was forthcoming from Miss Betsy. If she got up and left now, I’d probably shame myself by following her upstairs, wheedling.
“I really don’t think she’d care if you told me,” I said. “She’s like my sister.”
“But you’ve not asked her that question yourself.”
“No,” I said. Busted.
“Well, maybe you ought. I think she has set her cap for one fellow in particular.”
With a statement like that, and Angus, you had to take it as cash on the barrelhead. She would set her damn hat. The guy would know. “Somebody she met in Nashville, then.”
“I oughtn’t to say. She never told me outright. But you know me, I’m seldom wrong.”
I was a good sport. Good for Angus. I hope they’ll be very happy.
That night I stayed in the same bed as before, the ship with a wooden flagpole on each corner. I laid awake half the night running up every flag I could think of. Help. Surrender. Angus was my sister. I couldn’t want any more in the world than for her to be happy. So I would go to the wedding of her and Mr. Nashville. I would be her man-bridemaid, just like Dori in her sweet foggy brain had stood Angus up as my best girl-man in ours. Angus would have done that for me. My turn now, to throw popcorn at the happy couple. I let her go. It’s what I had to do, so I could get up in the morning and go see Coach.
64
The road from Murder Valley back to Lee County made me uneasy. Again, too many IEDs. This drive was where Angus and I had our only real fight, because she’d confessed to wanting to skip out on us all, to go to college, and I was counting up the hardships nailing me to the cross I’d dragged down this road: Here I got robbed by a truck-stop whore. Here I slept in a haystack. Shaking my mean little piggy bank of wrath. It set my teeth on edge, that memory, along with the sound of the wiper blades scraping a rime of hard frost on the windshield. The temperature had dropped overnight.
I was so lucky, I realized then. That Angus put up with me as long as she did.
The apartment building in Norton where Coach lived was the nicest place around, to the extent it almost didn’t belong here. Fancy paint job, gray with white trim on the outside stairs and porches. New planted trees and mowed grass all around the parking areas. Sidewalks. I saw kids out there tipping skateboards, like pavement was a normal thing. No clue.
I’d called ahead, so Coach wasn’t surprised. The shock was on my side. Out with the red cap and whistle, in with the leather slippers and sad old man smell. The bushy eyebrows were white. He clapped me on the back and sat me in his living room on furniture I recognized from the old house. But the apartment looked as new inside as out. Carpet with vacuum marks, never-used fireplace. Coach was a whole new man in a tidy room. That’s the deal of sober life: celebrate the fresh start, suck up your sadness for all that was left behind. In Coach’s case, a shit ton of random sports equipment. Angus had told me about her hasty bulldoze of the big house, shoving the crap into back rooms before turning it over to some NASCAR group for office space. It rented for twice what they paid for this apartment. So they got by, after he stepped down from his job to focus on pulling it together. He’d been here the whole time Angus was away, and still looked like a bird perched in the wrong tree. He told me they’d decided to sell the house. The renters had cleared out, and Angus was trying to get it fit to show. She was over there now.