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“I bet if you cut back some of these plants, you’d have a better view of the water.”
I nodded. “It’s kind of gotten jungle-y but I think that it used to be a great view. It’s a beautiful little lake. When we go down to swim, you can see some of the houses that people are building around it. They’re tearing down the old cottages and putting up huge places.”
“It must have been fun growing up here and swimming whenever you wanted,” Bowie mentioned next.
Fun? I thought about that. No, I didn’t remember having a lot of fun. “I could swim whenever I wanted,” I echoed. “I did go all the time. And we used to have a little rowboat, too, that I went out in.”
“What happened to that?”
“It sank,” I said. “It had holes and it sank. Can I see what you brought?”
He had brought a lot of food, a whole lot. There were enough containers to fill the tabletop and I pulled over several chairs to use as extra surfaces.
“I wasn’t sure what you like, and I’m very hungry,” Bowie explained. But he waited for me to fill one of my grandma’s plates and take a bite before tasting anything himself. Then, while we were eating, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. He definitely did seem like he was starved, but there was so much of him to fill. I had no idea how much he weighed but now I was a little worried about the chair he sat on, because it was also from at least one or two generations back and I didn’t know how sturdy it was anymore.
That was true about a lot of things in our cottage. I tried to keep up on repairs but I wasn’t very skilled, no matter how many videos I watched about how to do things. It always seemed like the project didn’t work exactly like how the people on the screen did theirs, or I didn’t have the correct tools, or I didn’t have the money for all the supplies I needed. Anyway, I did my best.
After a while, Bowie’s fork slowed down. Then he leaned back and the chair creaked and I looked at it nervously. “I might need a minute before I get in the water,” he mentioned and patted his stomach. “It’s nice place to wait out digestion. Do you sit out here a lot?”
“I’m usually pretty busy,” I said. I rested my formerly injured foot on my other thigh and rubbed it. Even if I hadn’t been going all-out today in the routines, it wasn’t used to so much movement yet. My doctor, the one who was not a quack, had also told me to go slow and test things out carefully, but it had been hard not to keep up with everyone else. “I guess that I don’t get to sit very much. I go to college and I’m on the Wonderwomen squad, and I have two jobs right now.”
“What do you do?”
“I work at the NGS, the grocery store. If you need to shop around here, only go to the NGS, not Art’s Market,” I advised. “Art’s new owners claimed that they took care of the rat problem, but that wasn’t true.” I explained more about their infestation and he frowned.
“That’s something to remember. I can’t stand rats.”
I pictured Bowie screaming and jumping up on a table, one made of steel or some kind of outer-space metal to support him. “During the summers I have a job at a bakery, too,” I went on. “It’s called El Asturiano Dos and it’s great because it starts early so I have time to get to the NGS to work the register. I’m kind of an assistant manager there, so I help the owner with the ordering and with deliveries, payroll, stuff like that.”
“You are busy.”
“It will be easier when I graduate next spring. I’m almost done,” I said.
“Then what do you want to do?”
“I’ll get a full-time job, something to make more money. I don’t care what it is as long as it pays. I think this will be my last season as a cheerleader, too. It’s really fun being on the Wonderwomen, but I shouldn’t do it. I mean, we don’t make very much for all the time we put into it.”
“You ladies are a main attraction.”
“Maybe the football team should share their salaries with my squad,” I suggested, and he smiled.
“It wouldn’t hurt any of us. The league minimum for one season is more than my parents ever made combined in a decade.”
“It must be nice now that you can help them,” I commented. He didn’t agree with that, but he didn’t disagree, either. “Where is your family?”
“Kentucky,” he said. “My parents and two brothers.”
“Are they all big, like you?”
“No, ma’am. No one’s quite sure where I got my size.”
“How big are you?” I asked.
“Do you want the official answer, the one that the team puts on the website, or do you want the truth?” He laughed. “I’m big enough to play professional football.”
He was big enough to knock over my house by himself, and I remembered how he looked with his pads on last season. Like a tank.
“I bet you’re all of eighty pounds,” he told me.
