Page 16 of Base Block

“He did exactly that,” Callum said.

“It was funny how they left,” I mused. They must have gotten into a car at 20 Grand and obviously, I wasn’t there with them. But they just drove away. They obviously knew that I wasn’t with them when they took off from the hotel, too, because Millie left me the envelope at the front desk. Sage didn’t leave anything, not even a note, and I had thought that she was a friend. Kind of. We used to talk about stuff,” I went on. “She has a kid back in Sacramento, living with his dad.” She’d had a few pictures from when he was little and I’d thought he was adorable. I had imagined holding him, his warm body cuddled with mine. The dreams I still had about the baby were so vivid. “She missed him a lot but she didn’t call very much. She said it was because we had such a different schedule from his, but I think the reason was that it made her too sad.”

“It probably made the kid sad to be without his mother. I didn’t always have mine and I lied to myself about it, dreaming up excuses for her. After a point, you have to acknowledge that people make choices to be with you or not. If they’re not calling, they don’t want to.”

“Sometimes there are good reasons,” I said.

“Sometimes, like getting pinned under a rock or being in a coma.” He shook his head. “It’s too bad for her kid.”

I nodded because I had thought so, too. “I’m not really sorry that they left me. I feel a lot better now that I’m away from them, especially Damian. He was an asshole but I was going to ride it out for as long as I could, and I didn’t want to get left with nothing at the end. Millie kept saying that we’d finish the tour on the East Coast. Maybe I would have hopped off there.”

“Then what?”

I shrugged again. “Why do I have to have a plan? You have one now but that’s not how everybody does things. I could just roll.” I moved my chip like a wave to demonstrate.

“I was thinking that you might want to come to Michigan.”

I dropped the chip. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. You don’t have anything to do, right? Nowhere to go, no friends, no family.” He paused. “I’m not trying to be an asshole myself. Sorry.”

“No, you don’t have to apologize,” I answered. He was right that I had nothing. I had been living in Damian’s rental in Calabasas but I didn’t have any possessions there, either. “I did have some money and a nice lipstick in that purse I lost. It’s too bad about that.”

“Yeah, well, you could come to Michigan while I’m trying out. You could get a job and make more money, then buy a new lipstick.”

“Yeah,” I echoed. “I could. I could have a regular job.”

“Did you ever work like most people, with a schedule and money withheld for taxes?”

“Not really, but I could learn. I used to do ok in school, especially math,” I assured him. “I would be able to help with your food and housing expenses.”

“They emailed something about that.”

“Who did? The Woodsmen team?”

Callum nodded. “I didn’t really read it at the time. I can’t check emails on my phone so I used to look on the computer in the lumber department, the one we used to put in orders. But I couldn’t do it very often because we weren’t supposed to be on there for personal stuff. And now I can’t do it at all, since I quit.”

“Hold on. The football team is emailing you and you don’t know what they’re saying?” I asked. “What if it’s really important?”

“They also text. That’s how I’m in contact about practices and stuff like that.”

“We have to get my new phone to work so you can check your emails. I didn’t read mine from my old high school, not ever, and it turned out that I missed a lot.” I had gotten suspended, but I’d kept showing up for a while until they thought to tell me in person. They had also sent letters, but I hadn’t ever checked the mailbox. There was too much bad news in there.

“It’s probably unimportant, just a lot of junk. That was what I usually saw in there when I looked,” he told me.

“The problem is not knowing,” I said. “Actors have people handling this kind of stuff. Millie used to talk about them, how agents would contact her department at the production company and annoy the crap out of her and her colleagues. Do you have that kind of person?”

“There are sports agents but no, I don’t have one,” he answered. “A guy got my number and bugged me about it for a while, but I figured that he just wanted a cut if I got signed. Why should I give him anything?”

“As far as I could tell, actors have agents so that they don’t have to do anything themselves, because the majority of them are hapless and witless. Damian’s not an actor but he’s in that orbit, and he couldn’t even open a pill bottle on his own. The child-proof stuff stymied him,” I said. “He had several people working for him, like a lawyer who would fight with his record label and a booking agent who set up gigs. Some artists let managers take over their whole lives, from their social media presence and brand to what jewelry they wear, and Millie did a lot of that for cheap. Because of…” I pointed to my nose. “In spite of her problem, she did always check his emails.”

“We could get a chip for your phone and I could look there.”

“If we do that, then I could also see everything, all your private stuff,” I pointed out. It didn’t seem to faze him—in fact, he was nodding.

“That would be better.”

“So, you would need my help,” I ventured. He nodded again.