“Here we go,” he told her, and she mostly draped over him in order to make it out to the street. I walked behind, carrying the raincoat she had insisted on bringing even though no woman our age wore yellow slickers of this type, the kind favored by toddlers. At least she had stayed dry on our long walk to the bars. The streets were now empty, since the Woodsmen hadn’t shown up.
“Where did you park?” I asked him, hopeful that he could drive us to our faraway spot.
“Oopsy daisy! One foot in front of the other,” he told my flailing sister. “I parked at my house,” he answered me. “I took a car over here.”
That had been a smart move if he’d planned to drink and have fun. Unfortunately, he’d left his half-finished beer and had no fun whatsoever. “Sorry I invited you,” I told him.
“That’s really rude, Molly! Why don’t you just say straight out that you’re not attracted to him?”
“Morgan!” I yelped. “That’s not true.”
“Then why don’t you like him? Is it because you’re worried about money?” She turned to Shane. “We’re going to lose our restaurant and she has this very misguided idea that she’ll bethe savior. I know that she tried to borrow money and she also tried to get another job making food deliveries. Because over Christmas, we all found out that my father had started gambling again—”
“Morgan, will you shut up?” I demanded. She stepped out of one of my shoes and kicked the other into the middle of the street so I had to retrieve them both. When I returned, I heard her still going on about me and our family tragedies.
“So Molly thought, ‘Hm, I know! I’ll get a boyfriend who can help me! I’ll take his money just like our parents appropriate from us!’ I don’t mean that they steal—no, they are stealing,” she told him. “My parents give money to Max all the time. It’s supposed to belong to all of us because it’s afamilybusiness. Mom keeps repeating that, it’s afamilybusiness, it’s afamilybusiness. But when he gets some dumb idea and they hand over funds that supposedly belong to all of us—” She tripped but he kept her on her feet.
“How far are we going?” he called back to me. “We might get there faster if I carry her.”
“Or we could leave her,” I suggested, but sighed. “Three more blocks.”
We eventually made it, although she had blabbed like an idiot for the whole time and forced him to listen to every poor decision that my family had ever made, from my father’s gambling habits and questionable loan sources, to my mother’s bookkeeping failures, to Max’s total stupidity, to my gold digger plan.
“There was no way that Molly was going to ever find a Woodsmen player to fund her lifestyle,” she told him, “but I get why she was trying. They’re obviously wealthy, with their cars and their houses. We get to see them when they come to the restaurant during their summer practices, so it’s right in our faces. It was a dumb idea but she’s not a dumb person, although I think that stupidity runs in our family. My great-grandfather started his restaurant in the worst place imaginable. The absolute worst!” she lamented. “There was literally nothing around there at the time because the Woodsmen practice facility didn’t get built until the nineteen-sixties. What was he thinking? Poor decisions flow through our bloodline, like your blue eyes. I bet someone in your family has those and they’re beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in you, either.”
“My loss,” he answered.
“Morgan,” I said again. “Please!”
She started telling him about her online boyfriend, who may or may not have been real. Sure, some nice, attentive, handsome guy just dropped into her lap? When had that ever happened in real life? I looked behind me at the bars where we hadn’t found any Woodsmen and then tried to do more damage control regarding the crap that my sister had spewed from her mouth.
“My dad does gamble and he did get a loan from the wrong people, but that was because we were trying to keep the restaurant going,” I said. “My mom messed up our accounting pretty badly and I told you about the flood there a few years ago. My brother really does have bad business ideas, as you heard, but it’s not like he’s a terrible person. He’s selfish and abackpack-whatever, that German thing, and he does squander all the money we’ve given him. He does refuse to listen when anyone suggests a more productive path, like trade school or working more at Walter’s where we really need him…” I wasn’t doing a good job with damage control but I kept trying. “I’m not unattracted to you, if you get what I mean. I think you’re so good looking that it’s hard to believe you’re not taken.”
“Thank you, I think,” he said. “Morgan, keep walking or I will have to pick up you, and I’m afraid that you’ll puke if I put you over my shoulder.”
“I may do that anyway,” she admitted.
“Can we just forget everything that happened tonight?” I suggested. I sounded slightly desperate.
“Your sister may not remember much.”
“I meant you,” I told him. “It’s not like you’re so poor! You have a job with a major football organization and you may not make a lot now, but it seems like you’re a hard worker so you’ll probably get promoted and do better for yourself in the future. You earn enough to afford a nice house.”
“It’s a rental, and it’s half of a house,” he said. “A duplex. There’s your car.”
“I’ll give you a ride home,” I said. “Can I do that for you?”
“Uh, sure,” he answered. He was preoccupied with putting my sister into the back seat because she was loudly insisting that she had to lie down and sleep, right at the moment. “Can you get some kind of belt on her?”
I crawled over Morgan to secure her with seat belts and then joined him in the front. “I’m very sorry. I’m sorry that my sister told you all that and I really don’t feel the way she said.”
“It doesn’t bother me if you do.”
Somehow, that was worse. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
We made it to his house and then back to ours with my sister holding down her stomach contents. There wasn’t much talking, since she was groaning loudly and also since I didn’t have much else to say. I had apologized for everything but it was hard to think that he accepted it and that his feelings hadn’t been hurt. Mine would have been, if some guy had told me that I wasn’t good enough for him. My feelings had been obliterated when Corbin the frat guy had said it with his actions, how he’d made me an object of ridicule.
And then I’d cried about that to Shane. He’d listened and offered advice, and then he’d given me his T-shirt so I could blow my nose. I still had that shirt, too, but he hadn’t demanded it back. I had washed it and put it in my drawer, and it made me happy to see it there.
