Suddenly, without her dad’s hours and her mom working half as much, her parents were in serious trouble. Their church rallied to help. They brought food, raised money toward the bills, and put together a volunteer sign-up sheet for people to stay with him so that her mom could go back to work.
But after a couple months that goodwill began to dissipate. People had worries of their own. You could see that plainly enough on Thursdays when the church provided to anyone who came—not just members—a free hot meal. She’d gone a few times with her parents in the years since they moved to Van Wert (“It’s just nice to take one meal of the week off the grocery list,” her mom liked to tell her dad when he was insistent that they didn’t need to go), but lately the church rec center had been getting ever more crowded. So crowded that the line sometimes went out the door. She and her mom went each week and brought a plate home for her dad until he could manage to get there using his walker. But one hot meal a week wasn’t enough, and Tina took on extra shifts, worked as much overtime as she could (although she was sure Gary was going into the computer and rounding down her hours). They made too much to apply for an EBT card, but her dad would never have allowed his family to take government handouts anyway. Van Wert had a food pantry where she could sometimes help her parents stretch paychecks, but even with extra dry cereal and Oodles of Noodles, they were overwhelmed.
One day she went outside on her break to smoke a cigarette without Beauty as her partner in crime (something she did rarely) and cry (something she did frequently). Cole must have spotted her and followed. He found her trembling with the mitten portion pulled back from her glove so that the digits were free to hold the cigarette.
“Everything all right?” he asked from ten feet away, like he was afraid to approach any closer.
She wiped her face and snorted back snot.
“It’s fine. I’m just a bit on the stressed side. My dad and all. Can’t wait to get my raise.” She laughed without knowing why. In April she was due for another $1.07 an hour. “It’ll make a big difference.”
“Look, if y’all need help, I’d be glad to help out,” he offered. “We got sorta different schedules, you know? I could, like, come over and help out your dad when you and your mom are at work. That way maybe you could pick up more hours?”
She sniffed, looked up at Cole. “Really?”
“Sure, it wouldn’t be no problem. I really like your dad.” Said as if they’d met more than that one time.
For some reason this made her cry even harder.
“I mean, I don’t have to.”
“No.” She sobbed, then sucked it all back in, wiped her tears with her jacket sleeve. “No, it’s just that’s really kind of you, Cole. Everyone’s been so kind.”
And that was how Cole began spending a lot of time at their house, the little two bedroom on Jennings Road. He’d sit and watch sports with her dad, help him to the bathroom, bring him newspapers or magazines, refill his water. One of the worst things about the injury was that her dad clearly needed the company. He hated being dependent on others, but Cole gave him an excuse. He could see it as just guys watching sports. Cole also brought over a lot of food. Casseroles and noodles and homemade burritos and salads and fried chicken and mac and cheese. Tina went from opening up their refrigerator and finding nothing but some butter, jam, and a dwindling loaf of bread to constantly finding Cole’s leftovers.
“Cole, you cook all this?” her mom asked him. “Not so bad for a boy. Let alone a bachelor.” Her mom had never looked at 56 this way, with genuine surprise and fondness.
“It was just me and my dad after my mom died, so we learned to cook together,” he explained.
Tina knew how much it was probably costing Cole to do this, but at least her trips to the food pantry became less frequent.
When she slept with him, it wasn’t necessarily as a thank-you. She’d started to think maybe there was something to what Beauty had said. There was something attractive about a person so selfless, so relentlessly decent, who clearly cared about her so much that he made her family the first priority in his life. Her parents went to the church’s Thursday night dinner, and she told them she wanted to skip to go see a movie with Cole. Instead, they went to her house, and he saw the ugliness of her stomach for the first time, heard her feeble explanation about a childhood accident while climbing a fence. He wasn’t nearly as bad in bed as she would have thought, and after kissing him that night, she stopped noticing the scar on his lip.
After gassing up, she kept on straight to New Canaan. The closer she got, the more she experimented in her head with what she’d say. She wanted so badly for it to be perfect, and now she’d spent weeks, possibly months (but really, years), thinking of what she’d tell him. Still, nothing seemed entirely right. How do you describe love, though? It was a totally ungrippable idea. A slick bar of soap you had to snatch out of the air with one wet hand.
They’d spent so much of the first part of the relationship just trying to figure out logistics. His mom wasn’t a problem, as 56 pretty much did what he wanted, when and where he wanted, but her parents were strict. Her mom especially did not like the idea of her dating a junior, and Jerry Ross always followed his wife’s lead on such things. She wasn’t allowed to ride in his truck; she could only see him at school, dances, or other gathering points (Vicky’s Diner or Friendly’s being the most likely hangouts). Her mother had just two moods: playful and severe. Around 56, she only showed the latter. Tina ended up lying a lot. Stacey mostly covered for her.
The first time he drove her out to a deserted strip of road, he took off most of her clothes in his truck. She stopped him right before it appeared he would take off all of his as well. This put him in such a surly mood that after he dropped her off that night, she lay awake panicking that she’d screwed things up. The next day at school when he casually put his arm around her shoulder, she could have sobbed with relief.
She decided to make the complicated simple: She was in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and told her parents they were starting a Bible study group in the evenings. That way she and 56 could take off after he got out of practice. She knew she was not the first teenager to think of such a scam, but it did surprise her how well it worked.
By dating him, she shot up the social ladder. She met him at his locker and enjoyed the glares from girls three grades above. They walked to every class together. He came by her study hall and lingered until Mrs. Northup told him to buzz off. She imagined them as celebrities. If the school paper (The Jaguar Journal, a black-and-white glossy distributed in the cafeteria once a month) covered gossip, their picture would have made every issue. (And in fact, it did make one: The JJ always had a photo collage of images from around the school culled by the photographers. These usually included sports, assemblies, but also candid shots; November’s issue featured a large, nearly half-page image of her and 56 holding hands while walking down the hallway. Taken from behind, it showed their heads turned in profile, her laughing, and he with that wonderful half grin. She bought seven copies of that issue. She put four untouched in a box in her closet and cut the pictures out of the rest. One went above her dresser, another in her locker, one inside her notebook.
At the sixth game of the season, Kaylyn Lynn found her beforehand and said, “You can’t stand in the freshmen section when your boyfriend’s a star. C’mon.”