“Who?”
“The one you talk about all the time,” she said with a smile.
I was going to try to deny it, to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. But that would have been futile. Nothing got past her. Though I hoped she hadn’t caught on to the truth behind my move yet. I would tell her. When the time was right. But that wasn’t now when I was still working on getting my eyes all the way open.
“He’s did great. Finished second,” I said.
She looked at me with questions in her eyes, then nodded, standing.
“Tell me about it over lunch. I’ll be back later,” she said.
I smiled, happy to hear she was going to come back soon. It would be good to talk to someone who wasn’t there and wasn’t involved in the company about what happened. With the rest of the team, I still had to maintain some semblance of professionalism and felt the urge to not get too emotional, to respect they’d known him longer than I had. Almost as though that gave them some sort of possession of him and it would be too much if I was upset or too worried. Besides, it wasn’t like I could pour out to the others how afraid I was for Darren. It would come off as odd and possibly tip my hand before I was fully ready to show it.
I got Willa and me breakfast, then spent the next couple of hours playing with her. The extent of her imagination never ceased to amaze me. She was so tiny, but there was so much personality and individuality packed into that little body. We played with her stuffed animals, then with her doll, then with her stuffed animals again. Eventually, I started thinking about lunch and knew I needed to decide on something good enough to thank Pam for all she did for me.
Moving Willa into the living room so she could play while I was in the kitchen, I went to work gathering all the ingredients for a delicious meal. As bacon crackled in a pan ready to be transformed into toppings for amazing salads I planned on serving as restitution to my stomach alongside decadent croque madame sandwiches, I got out my phone and called Gus. He was also surprised to hear from me so early. I wondered what that said about me and their expectations of how I would respond to the pressures of a race. I made a mental note to figure out what it was about me that seemed frazzled and to fix it before the next race.
“I was just calling to check in on Greg. Is he doing any better?” I asked.
“He’s doing as well as can be expected. He’s in a lot of pain, obviously, and they are doing everything they can to control that. They want to keep an eye on his leg through today and then check it again when the swelling is more under control to decide if they need to do surgery,” he said.
“Oh, no. I certainly hope they don’t need to. That would be awful,” I said.
“It definitely would. Surgery would incapacitate him for a good while. It would be a long road to rehabbing it until he could race again. Hopefully they’ll see it will heal all right just being in a cast. All in all, though, he’s in pretty good spirits. I think he’s just happy to be alive.”
“Well, yeah. That was a nasty wreck. It could have gone much worse.”
“Speaking of wrecks, Darren is not handling this whole thing well. He’s had crashes before, of course, but nothing this serious. He feels guilty,” Gus told me.
“Why would he feel guilty? He didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not like he clipped him or anything,” I said.
“No, but he’s the one who encouraged Greg to race, and he feels like maybe they didn’t pay enough attention to Greg’s bike before this race,” Gus told me.
“So, he thinks it’s my fault,” I said.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Gus quickly covered. “He’s worried Greg overlooked issues with his bike because he’s not as experienced. He wouldn’t know to tell the team about them because he didn’t know they were a problem.”
“But this wasn’t his first race,” I pointed out.
“It wasn’t, but he’s still green. He’s still learning.”
“Well, this was a hard lesson to get through.”
“You got that right,” Gus agreed.
We ended the call, and my fingers tingled to pick the phone back up and text Darren. Just to check on him, make sure he was doing all right, and reassure him he wasn’t to blame for this. That was a completely valid thing for friends to do. But I chickened out before I even typed the first word. I was still shaky, still disturbed by the idea that it could have been him. That reaction left me with a lot to think about, and I needed to do that before I contacted him. As I continued to put together lunch, I developed a set of very mature plans that involved not thinking about anything I should have been thinking about until after I spent some time with Pam and possibly called Kira to beg her to move down here.
It was all very adult.
Pam arrived for lunch just as I took the second grown-up grilled cheese sandwich out of the pan. Smeared with fig jam and stuffed with caramelized onions that melted right into the gooey mozzarella cheese made them the perfect accompaniment to the salads. She was carrying a pitcher of sangria and did a little dance as she came into the kitchen. I laughed, deciding right then I was more than all right being a stand-in daughter for such a cool lady.
We carried the salads and sandwiches to the table and set them out. I brought over a regular grilled cheese for Willa and a plate of chopped vegetables.
“So, what happened at the
