Cream of the Crop
Page 27

“Target marketing is up first,” I said, typing a quick note into my phone. I’ve drafted entire campaigns in the note section. “I want to chat with more of the business owners to create a slick sheet of quotes and blurbs about each of them. I’ll need to get a photographer up here next weekend probably. The sooner the better. Then I— What?”
I turned to see Chad smiling at me. “I’m just wondering if you’re talking to me, or just yourself.”
“Oh, myself. It’s how I take mental notes. I ramble and it all falls into place. Feel free to pay attention, though. This is all marketing gold for the taking.”
Chad and I walked back in the direction of our cars, taking the scenic route around the town square. In the center was the requisite gazebo and duck pond, but not so requisite were the thirty or so eight- and nine-year-olds dressed in football uniforms proudly bearing the name BF Lions while moms and dads praised and cheered on from the sidelines. And in the middle of all these kids, tackling each other left and right, was Oscar. Once again, like the tallest sequoia in a sea of reedy pines, he stood out from the crowd, as I imagine he would in any crowd. What caught my special attention, however, and what made me more than my usual swoony, was the clipboard he was carrying and the whistle he was wearing.
He fucking coached kids’ football. I can’t even.
Without missing a beat, in my head I began to hear Smashing Pumpkins: “Today.”
Chad noticed that I was slowing down as we neared the football game. To be clear, when I said slowing down I meant full stop. Because seriously, I needed to stop or I’d likely wander into traffic, unable to stop staring at this guy.
“Pretty, right?” Chad asked.
“Pretty. Right,” I breathed back.
“Sometimes he runs with the kids, and oh man, is it something to watch.”
“If he runs, I run.”
“How very Titanic of you,” Chad snorted, slipping an arm through mine and tugging me in the direction of the game.
“For the record, I’d drown Jack Dawson myself if it meant that I could get in Oscar’s lifeboat.”
“For the record, I’d drown Rose and take them both. But I get what you’re saying.”
The two of us walked down to the edge of the game, taking a seat on the end of one of the benches. We weren’t in the middle of the parents and kids, per se; we could have been just watching the ducks. In that duck pond about fifty yards away. And speaking of fifty yards . . .
I watched as Oscar pulled a kid off the bench, squatted down in front of him, and spoke into the kid’s helmet. I could see the helmet nodding. It was obvious that some kind of sports play was being discussed, perhaps a go long or a forty-seven scooparound.
Never watched a football game in my life . . .
He sent the kid into the game with a smack on the helmet and an encouraging, “Go get him, Benjamin!”
Benjamin was “bagged” within ten seconds. I learned a new term. Bagged is when the quarterback gets tackled. Apparently Chad played high school football. Learning new things is fun.
“So what’s his story?” I asked, leaning closer to the councilman.
“Benjamin? Good kid, wants to be a pirate when he grows up. Tells terrible jokes on Halloween, though—”
“I realize we just met, and I am really hoping to get to know you better, Chad; you do seem delightful. But spill it or I’ll cut you.”
“Ah yes, the story of Oscar. It’s all coming back, it’s coming back to me now,” he said.
“Can it, Céline,” I warned. “Dish.”
He glared at me slightly. “For someone that I hired, you are frighteningly bossy. Not to mention a bit rude.”
I blinked back at him, not saying anything.
“Although anyone who can pull off those boots can be bossy and rude, I suppose.”
“Thank you. Dish, please.”
“There is surprisingly little dish. He moved to town a few years ago, before I came back. As far as I know he keeps to himself mostly, works on his farm, makes his cheese, and sells it in the city on Saturdays.”
“This I know,” I said with a sigh.
“Other than that, I don’t know too much. He started coming to the cooking class Roxie teaches. Hey! That’d be a fun class to come to. It started out as just a few of us, and now there’s a waiting list to get in. Oscar doesn’t always come, but often enough. Other than that, he’s not what you’d call . . . communicative.”
“You almost don’t have to be when you look like that,” I thought out loud, watching him from across the field.
“He’s crushworthy for sure,” Chad said dreamily. As we sat there, in the fall sunshine, watching tiny football players running here and there, I had another flash to what it must have been like to go to high school in a town like this. Hayrides, apple picking, Friday-night football games, and crepe paper homecoming floats.
A homecoming float has nothing on the balloon inflation party that takes place at Seventy-seventh and Columbus the night before Thanksgiving.
True. Grass is always greener.
Or concrete’s always grayer. People would kill to live where you live.
Also true. But as I thought of grass versus concrete, I suddenly felt tingles all over. I looked up, across the huddle and the tackle, and saw Oscar staring at me. I wiggled my fingers hello, he lifted his chin back.
And grinned.
“I feel like you might be adding a chapter to Oscar’s nonexistent story,” Chad murmured.
“Everybody has a story,” I murmured back, and set off across the field toward him, determined to elicit that chapter.