Page 47 of Under the Lights
“Yeah. You’d figure it out and make it work if you had a strong enough reason to stay.”
A reason like Kelly. With the clock ticking down on his stay in Stewart Mills, Chase had to admit he’d been thinking about her a lot. It was hard to believe that when the weekend was over, he’d be heading home and he just wouldn’t see her again.
But he could almost see the look on her face if he told her he was spinning his life further into chaos by bringing it all to Stewart Mills, where there was a good chance he’d end up doing small home repairs in exchange for homemade pies and banana bread. He’d probably be the last man she wanted around, and Coach wouldn’t be too impressed, either.
“Have you seen your mom?” he asked Sam, not just to change the subject, but because he knew it had been weighing on the guy’s mind.
“Yeah.” Sam picked at the label on his bottle of water. “Mrs. McDonnell told me she’s been sober awhile, so I stopped by. Mostly just to make Mrs. McDonnell happy, because I stopped giving a shit a long time ago.”
“How did it go?”
Sam inhaled deeply through his nose and blew out the breath. “She cried. She knew I was in town, but she was afraid to see me, so... she cried a lot and kept telling me she was sorry over and over. Like she’d do back when she was drunk.”
“But she’s not drunk now.”
“Happy for her.” Sam took a long swig of water. “I gave her my email address.”
It was a start. Email was a lot less personal than his phone number or home address, and the messages were easy to ignore or delete, but maybe his mom would at least have the opportunity to open a dialogue.
Not that Chase blamed Sam at all. His childhood had been ugly, filled with alcohol and anger and pain. The entire town had breathed a sigh of relief when Sam’s old man had finally taken off for good, but his mom had spiraled even deeper into the cycle.
Without Coach, Sam probably wouldn’t have graduated from high school. There was no way he would have stuck it out, and he would either have run away or ended up in jail.
“Say cheese,” Sam muttered, and Chase looked up to see Alex pointing his camera their way. They both flipped him off.
A minute later, John Briscoe joined them, popping the top on a can of beer. “I’d ask if you guys started practicing for the game before I got here but, since we’ve had to retrieve the football from the neighbor’s yard twice and almost broke the living room window, I’m thinking no.”
“We didn’t want you behind the curve,” Sam said, and they all laughed. “How’s Rhode Island?”
“Not too bad. Things are going well.”
Briscoe, as wide receiver, had been an important part of the championship Eagles team, but he hadn’t really been one of Coach’s boys. He’d grown up in one of the finer houses in town, with nice parents, had done well in school and gone off to college, where he met his wife.
Chase suspected if John and his wife hadn’t seen an opportunity for their kids to visit their grandparents, Briscoe would have passed on the Eagles Fest invitation.
“What’s next on the agenda?” Alex asked, pulling up a spot on the deck railing.
Chase noticed they all looked at him. “We have to make sure all the decoration contest entries got logged, because tomorrow afternoon’s the deadline, I guess. Jen said she’d explain better when I meet her at the school. Spaghetti dinner tomorrow night. We’re supposed to judge the decoration contest on Thursday, but that won’t be a big deal since it’s all photographed. We can just look at the pictures, assuming we don’t screw up tomorrow and miss some.”
“We should probably practice at some point,” Briscoe added.
They all nodded with a notable lack of enthusiasm. “I need to round up the parents and staff members who’ll be filling out the roster. We should at least be able to recognize them on the field.”
“It’s an exhibition game,” Alex said. “For fun.”
“For Coach,” they all said together.
13
Twice a month, Kelly and Jen tried to meet for breakfast to touch base on the kids. It wasn’t necessarily in either of their job descriptions, but sometimes they felt like the first line of defense for the community’s children, and they’d do what they had to do.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” Jen said, sliding into the booth across from Kelly. It was a bad booth at O’Rourke’s, wedged in a weird way between the kitchen and the alcove for the restrooms, and they always asked for it. If they talked in low voices, it was as private as one could get out in public. “I have to meet Chase at the school in a little while.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. They’re doing the final legwork for the decoration contest today, and I have to give him the lists.”
Kelly wanted to ask more about Chase, but there were more important things on the agenda. After the waitress brought them coffee and took their orders, Kelly filled Jen in on what had happened with Emily Jenkins and the feminine hygiene products heist.
