Page 61 of Breakaway
"She's not always mad at me. She has a range. This is specifically directed anger."
"How can you tell?"
"The tail. The tail is communicating displeasure."
"You're reading the tail."
"The tail is readable. You just have to know the index."
I almost smile. The bit is running. The bit is running and I can hear the other thing underneath it, the frequency that is not the bit, the one I heard on the island when he rated the lime and the timing was late and the laugh reached his mouth and stopped there.
"Wes? I'm going to go. I need to unpack and feed the angry cat."
"Okay."
"Talk tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Talk tomorrow."
"Love you."
"Love you, baby."
The line cuts. I sit with the phone in my hand and the screen goes dark.
The photographs are still on the screen. I scroll back to the beginning of the grid and start over. First frame: the villa, the blue shutters, the bougainvillea on the wall. I took it before he arrived. Before the door opened and he was standing there with his bag and his voice doing the lime bit and his face carrying the thing I spent five days trying to read.
I am reading it now. In the apartment, alone, with the photographs on the screen and the ocean outside the door, I am reading what I was looking at in Aruba and couldn’t figure out while I was standing next to him. He was performing. Not for a locker room or a team dinner or a road trip hotel bar. He was performing for the beach. For me. The one week each year when we’re both supposed to be free from that.
I close the laptop.
***
Practice is at ten the next morning. The facility lot is half-full when I get there. I park in the same spot I have parked in for eight years and sit in the car for a minute with the engine running.
Paulson finds me in the weight room.
"Mercy. You're back. How was the break?"
"Good. Quiet."
"Quiet. You went somewhere warm and you came back with quiet. That's very you."
"Aruba was warm and quiet. Both things."
"I went to Sarasota and ate my weight in grouper. I have opinions about grouper now."
"You've always had opinions about grouper."
"These are new opinions. Refined opinions. My grouper index has expanded."
"You don't have a grouper index."
"I have a grouper index now. Berger's thing is contagious." He towels his neck. "You hear from him lately?"
"No."
The word comes out before I choose it. I said no. Paulson asked if I heard from Berger over the break and I said no. We spent five days in the same villa in Aruba. I had his body against mine in the shower and his hand in my hand on the beach and his voice across the table at every meal and I said no because no is what the answer has to be.
