Further Joy Read Free

Garner’s hand.
    â€œI didn’t know I was missing you until I saw you,” she said, her voice placid but a touch raspy.
    Garner’s throat went dry. Sitting here with Ainsley was making him feel grateful, an unfamiliar feeling of late. He drank the better part of his beer and signaled for the bill. He made sure to put down the single credit card he had that wasn’t maxed out. He could float this meal on credit and maybe a couple more, and then he’d be making a last stand with the cash he had left in the bank.
    He and Ainsley left the bistro, pushing out into the salty, still air of the evening. He walked her to her car and she invited him to sit in the passenger seat. He started to say something and she interrupted him and said she just wanted to kiss him for a while, like back when kissing in a parked car was all they needed.
    *      *      *
    When Garner got home he went to his bedroom and shut his door and lay there in the dark, dozens of things wrestling in his head. He wondered, not for the first time, why he couldn’t bring himself to come clean—why he couldn’t sit his mother down and explain to her that he’d gone outside regulations to secure a big account and had gotten caught, that the rule he’d broken was one he’d broken a dozen times before, that everybody broke, but that this time the account had been lost and that this had caused problems. It wasn’t a complicated story. There was the possibility that he wasn’t really duping his mother at all, that his mother knew something was wrong and was giving him space to figure it out himself. He knew at least part of what was stopping him from telling the truth had nothing to do with her, anyway. It was the town—what this sincere, right-and-wrong hamlet thought of him. He couldn’t tell whether he despised this place and couldn’t stand the idea of being pitied by it, or whether he still needed the town to be proud of him. He thought of Ainsley, of course—her lips, her fingers in his hair. After all this time, she still wanted him. She’d wanted him back before his success. She’d wanted him, he knew, for his toughness. That he’d ever thought he was in her league to begin with, back when he was the scrawniest kid on the high school football team, said it all. He wasn’t the type to give up, to be run off by long odds.
    He was up from the bed and pacing now, arms crossed, pulling in whole breaths. There his suits were in the closet, dormant, dutiful. A fly was buzzing around over near the window, probably trapped behind the screen. What Ainsley had told Garner about the fullback was picking at him. It was number 41. He remembered the mohawk. He’d noticed the kid last Saturday, easily the best blocker on the team, one of those kids who had that innate knack for colliding squarely with another human. He was stout enough to lead inside and quick enough to pull wide on outside runs, and when the offense got stuck they’d sneak him out of the backfield and throw to him. Usually that type of offense didn’t even use a fullback,but this kid was always out there. Several times Garner had even seen him directing traffic before the snap.
    Garner sat down on the bed and plucked his phone from the nightstand. He looked up the lines and found that Coastal was favored by nineteen points that Saturday. Almost three touchdowns. They were on the road, at North Florida. Three touchdowns on the road. Their star fullback wouldn’t be playing and nobody knew it yet.
    Garner reclined stiffly onto his back, the fly in the window quiet now, gone or else resigned to its fate. He stared into the dark and must’ve slept an hour here and there, and in time, as it had to, the sour bluish light rose up into the world. He showered and dressed and drove his mother’s Honda directly west on Route 8 until he came to a town two counties in where no one knew him.