The rest of the summer she thought about almost nothing else. In church, during dinner, hanging out with her friends, Number 56 was never far from the front and center of her mind, ready to be rolled around and absently obsessed over like a hard candy on the tongue. And her place as number one on the list? He had to have voted for her. She could only speculate that the other guys followed his lead in this the way they did on the field.
It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Canaan, and through the dark summer night, the headlights of the Cobalt showed the way. She kept her eyes peeled for deer. She’d hit a deer a year ago, and the Cobalt still bore the crumpled scar on the fender. She’d smashed the brake when she saw the glossy reflection of its eyes on the roadside, but instead of hightailing into the woods, the terrified doe leapt back into the road, and she clipped it. Coming home from a long shift at work—and after Gary had screamed at her for knocking over a row of pickles, the jars shattering into a mess of glass and reeking brine—she’d been picking at the spot in her hair, digging out the roots with the blade of her fingernail, when the doe bolted. She got out of the car to assess the damage, saw the smear of blood on the headlight, the damage she’d done to Cole’s car, and then the deer scampering into the woods with its hindquarters pulped and broken in some grotesque way she only glimpsed briefly. She sat on the cold ground and wept for a while.
She absolutely could not afford to hit a deer tonight.
Glancing in the rearview mirror to check on a car overtaking her, she met herself now, almost ten years removed from high school. There weren’t many lists she’d top these days. She tried going to the gym on her day off, but it cost ten dollars, and she’d get on an elliptical for a little while, get discouraged, leave, and feel guilty for a week. It didn’t help that Cole kept sweets around the apartment (he had frequent cravings for Cool Ranch Doritos and Little Debbie Swiss Rolls), yet she was the one who gained the weight. He never added a pound to his stork frame no matter what he ate. They didn’t have a scale, but the last time she’d weighed herself at the gym, she’d been a dismaying 154 pounds. She’d never weighed that much before.
Cole had bought her a bike for her birthday the month before. It had sleek red and yellow colors and intimidating gear knobs.
“So you can ride to work in the summer.” Cole was great at that: understanding whatever was making her anxious or sad and finding a way to encourage her. She had yet to actually take it out, but she promised herself when she got back home she’d start.
Cole was an example of how you could grow love like a weak flower. If you gave it enough care and attention, you could create happiness from the most sickly of bulbs. They met not long after she started at Walmart. After her dad lost his job when Dave Kruger’s medical supply store went out of business, her parents moved out to Van Wert. She went with them. That was right after graduation, when she really needed a change of scenery anyway, what with her eating troubles and the pricks she had given herself. Her dad’s cousin Bishop worked at F & S Floor Covering and helped get him a job as a floor salesman, showing off carpet, tile, stone, laminate, hardwood, and the rest. Her mom got on part time with the YWCA janitorial staff, and Tina, without much of an idea of what she should do, had walked into the Walmart and asked for an application.
She’d been working for a month as an associate and only noticed Cole because he seemed to always need something from her register. He’d come through wearing the uniform of the Tire & Lube Express technicians to buy a pack of Little Debbies, a Snickers, a fishing magazine and ask her how her day was going.
“Fine.” She tried to keep it to one-word replies.
“We’re really backed up. Looks like you guys are too.”
“It’s always like this.”
One thing she learned quickly was that Walmart wasn’t a slacker’s job. She never had fewer than five people waiting in line when she worked the register, and Gary always assigned some additional stocking when the line finally went down. But complaining about the grueling pace was how she made friends. It felt like they were all in the trenches together. Her best friend at work was Beauty, who usually worked the same shift. They traded trashy true crime books and, on particularly stressful days, shared a cigarette out by the loading bay.
“He likes you, you know,” Beauty told her. Beauty was black and lived up to her name. She had rich dark skin and elegant movie-star features. She also had a jealousy-inducing figure, a black girl’s round butt that all the guys at work stared at without trying to hide it. Tina once saw Gary throw an elbow into the ribs of a young associate and nod at Beauty’s behind as she passed. Beauty never reacted or let on like she was aware of this. She had a boyfriend in Afghanistan—a sturdy, handsome farmer’s boy she’d gone to high school with—and they were getting married when he got back.
“Who does?” Tina asked.
“Cole.”
“Who’s Cole?”
“Cole, in the Tire and Lube Express.”
She had to describe him in detail before Tina put it together. The boy who kept coming by her register. Rail-thin with slumping shoulders, no chin, an Adam’s apple like a turkey, and several overlapping teeth.
“I’m not into it.” She’d been admiring Travis, who worked in the electronics section. He had a wedding ring but also the bulging shoulders of a former athlete.
“Cole’s sweet,” said Beauty. “Girl like you needs to recognize sweet more.”
“Would you recognize sweet if that was the guy who was sweet on you?”
After she went with Travis to the dark side of a strip mall parking lot, and then he never looked at her again, she started to see Cole differently. She could tell from the way her coworkers shut up when she walked by that Travis had told at least a few of the guys, and Cole stopped coming by her register. She ran into him in the break room and expected him to avoid her. Instead, he licked at his weak, embarrassed smile, and said, “I really like that new way you do your makeup on the eyes. Like how the lines come off and make your eyes look a little Chinese.”
This was so awkward, so dopey, and so genuine that at first she thought he was making fun of her. When his smile faltered and he forced it to beam again, she understood that he’d heard about Travis. That this comment was his marble-mouthed way of telling her that he was okay with whatever had happened, and he didn’t blame her; he just couldn’t come by her register anymore in case she had an obsession with a married man. At least this is what she inferred.
She went to the Tire & Lube Express the next day.
“Would you want to come to church with my parents and me this Sunday?” she asked. After stumbling through an explanation of how he worked Sunday but not until the later shift, his neck suddenly bright red and splotchy, he said yes.
So they met at her church (her mom and dad giving Cole their intrigued handshakes; Cole in full tie and jacket, dressed for a wedding instead of the Sunday sermon, his rigorous explanation to her father of what he did as a Tire & Lube Express technician, “That means anything, sir, from tire changes, oil service, battery service, but I’ll also stock shelves, or run the cash register. Oftentimes people will want to buy their groceries at the same register if they’re getting an oil service.”). The sermon had been about personal responsibility and community responsibility, how Jesus had instructed us to be kind and compassionate to our fellow man. Taking care of one another was the responsibility of the church, that’s what it was there for.