Scrimmage Gone South (Crimson Romance) (33 page)

“Townshend, I don’t have a mother. And no, things are not better. Do you know what she wanted? Do you have any idea?” His voice got louder with every word and gradually the noisy chit chat in the diner started to taper off. “Were you in on that with her too? Maybe you were going to get a cut.”

So much for not looking angry.

He was waiting for some kind of answer. “No. I don’t know. She wanted … she said she wanted to see you. That’s all. She said she was sorry and I should help her … she said she loves you, that she made mistakes.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “What she wanted was for me to advertise some sort of perfume with her. She didn’t say so, but I got the feeling it was both of us or nothing. She wanted it bad.”

Could that really be true? How could Arianna help but love him and want to be with him? How could anybody?

“I’m sorry. That’s all I can say.”

“Sorry?” His voice was thunder and now the diner was completely quiet. “Do you really hate me so much, that you would do this to me? That you would trick me into the same room with the woman who left me when I was a baby? Who let me lie in a hospital bed and beg her to come, who promised me she would but never did? I had to change my number so I would stop hoping she would call, and so that you would stop leaving messages.”

The room was completely quiet. Every ear was soaking up the details.

“Nathan,” she said quietly. “You don’t want to do this.”

“I don’t? Well, finally, you recognize something I don’t want. But it’s too late, Townshend. I think it’s about time you got your wish. Let’s talk about the past! Let’s do it right now, before these witnesses that are the good townspeople of Merritt, Alabama.”

Tolly had not looked away from his face, but she could feel every eye in the place boring into her.

“You are making a scene,” she said.

“So I am. The thing I hate most. Let’s air a little dirty linen too. Make it a triple star day! Funny, through the whole child molester debacle, we managed pretty well to avoid the things we hate most didn’t we, Townshend? For all the hoopla, there weren’t any scenes and there wasn’t any dirty linen airing. Oh, no. We were oh-so-poised, like a good little debutante and the one she had chosen to be her ass kisser of the moment.”

Tolly heard footsteps behind her, rapid heavy footsteps. Before she could blink, Harris took her arm and stepped between them.

“Nathan, Stop it. I am warning you — ” he began.

“No,” Tolly said, and suddenly, she was tired of waiting around for everyone to find out what she’d done, tired of the dread and the fear. “Harris, stay out of this. Anything that Nathan has to say to me I deserve. In fact, he doesn’t have to say it. I’ll say it myself. I caused his injury. It was my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, he’d have gone to the NFL; probably had some Super Bowl rings. By now, he’d probably be doing something else. Maybe coaching, maybe commentating, maybe something completely different. But he would be doing an amazing job and he’d be someone’s amazing husband and father. Because that’s who he is.
I
ruined his life!
Me
. I did it all by myself.”

There was no ice to calm her soul. For the first time, Tolly looked around. People were looking at her like she had just exited an alien space ship. And why not? Tolly Lee did not have outbursts. This was as foreign as green skin and two noses on top of a pointed head.

Even Nathan looked surprised.

Harris said, “What? That can’t be. You didn’t even know — ”

“Oh, I knew him all right.” She was on a roll now. “I snuck into a DKE party. I told him I was a junior at Huntingdon College. I let him give me the rush and I lapped up every single second of it.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Harris said with certainty.

“I did it. I talked to him on the phone every single day for hours. He called me after every game, never knowing I was at those games with our parents and grandparents, because we had come to see you play. The weekend that Alabama didn’t play and you went home and took Missy? I lied to Mama, said I had a big test and was going home with someone to study. Instead, I drove to Tuscaloosa to see Nathan.”

Harris stood there, unblinking. Then he began to frown. And blink. And chew his bottom lip. Anger moved through him like a freight train.

He turned it on Nathan. “She was sixteen years old. I ought to kill you.”

“You ought to,” Nathan agreed. “Borrow a meat cleaver from Lou Anne and do it now.”

“For God’s sake!” Tolly yelled. It had been a lot of years since she had yelled; it felt pretty good. “Nobody is killing anybody. We didn’t even have sex!”

“But you wanted to,” Harris said to Nathan.

“Damn Skippy,” Nathan agreed. “She wouldn’t.”

“But you would have,” Harris went on.

“What did you want me to do? Chop her in half and count her rings to see how old she was?”

Harris went quiet and then turned to Tolly. “I’ll deal with you about this other matter later, but you did not cause his injury.”

“You will deal with me on no account,” she shot back at him. “And I did. He went to your room that day and saw pictures of me. That’s how he found out I’d lied to him. Then he went on that field distracted.”

The quiet in the diner ended in a roar of agitated loud voices and judgment.

“Thought she was a good woman.”

“Ruined his life!”

“Spoiled little rich brat. I know her kind.”

“To think how we supported that boy when he was growing up and what it would have meant to this town.”

“Taking my business elsewhere!”

Tolly couldn’t tell who was saying these things, and it didn’t matter. It was true. She was finished here. She’d stick it out until Kirby graduated, but then she’d have to leave.

“Stop it!” Nathan yelled to the world at large. “I don’t owe a single one of you anything. This is nobody’s business but Townshend’s and mine. Don’t you dare judge her. You’ve spent all your judgment points on me over the past few weeks. Let that do you.”

She looked up at him in surprise.

“I’m not defending you because you deserve it,” he said. “I’m defending you because I can’t help it. I’m gone.”

He looked around wildly. Tolly her let eyes settle where his did. Lou Anne had been standing quietly behind the cake stand at the end of the counter this whole time.

“Lou Anne? I am going to New York and I’m not coming back.”

New York?
No, no, no!

“I’m leaving my truck at the airport. There’s an extra key in my desk drawer in the field house. Get someone to let you in. If you’ll go get it, you can have it. I’ll call you when I get there.”

And he turned and went out the door.

“Nathan, wait!” Tolly ran behind him, with most of the diner’s clientele behind her. “What about your team?”

“What about it?” he said. “I gave everybody what they wanted — a winning season. And it’s over. They’re good boys. They don’t need me. Somebody else will come along.” He took his keys out and took a step toward his truck.

“Please, Nathan. Please. Just let me tell you I’m sorry. You’ve never even let me say I was sorry.”

He made a quarter turn and looked her in the eye. “And for what, Townshend? For tricking me into a reunion with the mother of the year? Or was it for pretending that night at the DKE house that you didn’t know who I was? Lying to me and making me love you all those years ago? Making me think I could have someone like you, while you laughed at me behind my back? You should go get a job in reality TV.”

“It wasn’t like that! You won’t listen!”

“I’ll tell you what you should be most sorry for: making me feel like a pervert for years after it happened because I knew how old you were and I still wanted you. Hell, maybe I had coming what Jamie said about me. Not where she was concerned, but for what I wanted from you. Karma.”

“No, Nathan. No. You weren’t that much older. And you didn’t act on it. And in a different time or a different culture — ”

“We weren’t in a different time or a different culture. We were in the United States of America where there are laws and rules, where decent men don’t think about teenagers the way I thought about you. My God! You have no idea what your tricking led to.”

“I didn’t trick you. I cared. I certainly never laughed. I’ve been trying for months to tell you — ”

Nathan turned white with rage.

“Stop lying to me! Oh, but you can’t, can you? I guess I’ll have to stop it. And the only way to do that is to get as far away from you as I can.”

He made a fist and looked around frantically. For a moment, Tolly thought he might hit the side of the building. Instead, he picked up a pumpkin that Lou Anne had set on a hay bale outside the front door of the diner. Picking up that pumpkin was not a job for a weakling. It was a big pumpkin. Lou Anne did nothing half way.

With a primal cry of anger that could be heard into the next county, Nathan raised the pumpkin over his head and heaved it through the passenger side window of his truck. It might have lost momentum on impact, but not enough to keep it from splattering against the inside of the driver side window. Nathan rounded the truck, jerked open door, and raked seeds, glass, and pulp into the street.

Tolly stood paralyzed as he drove away. So did everyone who had been in the diner, not to mention those who had been milling around on the street. They were like a tin mechanical toy town that had run down.

No one moved. No one spoke. Merritt was paralyzed, right down to Missy Bragg and that was one miracle.

Gradually, there was movement. Missy thrust Beau in Luke’s direction and lit into Daryl Grayson, shaking her finger in his face. On a different day it would have been interesting to know what she was saying and what he had said to provoke it. Luke picked up Emma, took Beau by the hand, and headed back into the diner. At last, someone had thought to get the children out of the situation. Harris moved toward Missy, reaching for her.

Then Tolly saw Lucy and Lanie fighting their way through the crowd to get to her, with anguished faces and their arms outstretched.

She had to get away. If she gave into sympathy she didn’t deserve she would crumble.

Finally, Lou Anne sauntered over to Tolly. She would not run from this woman. She would listen to what Lou Anne had to say. She would revel in the judgment she deserved.

Lou Anne raked pumpkin pulp out of her hair. “You got a little backsplash, baby.”

Astounded, Tolly said, “You’re speaking to me? You heard what I did.”

“Is my good opinion of you really the most important thing on your mind right now? ’Cause I gotta say, that’s a lot of pressure for a diner owner.”

“I guess not. But you heard what Nathan thinks of me.”

Lou Anne sighed. “Tolly, do you love him? I mean, really, really love him?”

Was the sky above? Did bees make honey? Did pumpkins splatter when thrown through truck windows?

“I’ve loved him since I was sixteen years old. He is the only one I have ever loved.”

“Then go after him. He’s worth going after. You’re worth having who you love.”

“Kirby has my car.”

Lou Anne reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “The diner van is parked in the alley.”

“I don’t know where he’s gone and I’ve never driven a van.”

“Well, I guess if you are going to let those things stop you, you may not be worth going after him, after all.”

Just as Lanie almost touched her, just as Lucy almost closed in from the other side, just as Harris raised his fist and knocked Daryl Grayson to the pavement, Tolly nodded her head a single time and ran toward the alley.

Nathan was ten miles out of town when it came home to him that he was covered in pumpkin fallout. Plus, he hadn’t gotten it all out of the truck seat and he was sitting in the mess. Good thing the window was safety glass or his ass would need a few stitches by now. Still, not the most comfortable seat in the house.

At fifteen miles down the road, he realized the likelihood of being allowed on a plane in such a state — much less first class — was slim. Also, it was one thing to meet with the brass from ESPN wearing jeans and a game day shirt; that’s just who he was. It was another to show up after having been pumpkinated. Ha! No one could say he wasn’t a first-rate English teacher. He could make up words, good words. Why, he could be a professor of English at the finest university in this country and he just might if this ESPN thing didn’t work out. He’d have to have a more advanced degree, but he could pick that up.
I pumpkinate today, I pumpkinated yesterday. Next week, I shall be pumkinating.

Yep. The Pumpkinator. That’s who he was. But Pumpkinator or no, he couldn’t go to a job interview with pumpkin goo on his shirt and pumpkin juice soaking his underwear. The smell was making a statement now; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like in a few hours. Also, leaving his truck at the airport with a missing window might not be the sanest thing on earth.

Insane
. That’s what a lying, tricking debutante made you. Well, no more.

He took the next exit and headed back to Merritt. What had he been thinking? He hadn’t. That was the point. Hot anger had dropped in for a quick little visit and wiped out his brain function.

He needed a better game plan, and he needed his phone charger. Going to his apartment would be the logical thing to do, but he didn’t want to. That’s where a lying, tricking debutante would go to look for you because no debutante worth her tiara would ever think anyone would leave town without packing a suitcase.

Well, he might need a better game plan but he still didn’t need a suitcase.

But he had a change of clothes in his office. Come to think of it, he had an extra phone charger there too. They wouldn’t have changed the locks yet, no matter how crazy he’d acted earlier. He could take a shower, change clothes, and be on his way. But how? He could clean up his truck better, but he didn’t have a spare window in his desk drawer. He should. All Pumpkinators who are going to go around pumpkinating their own trucks should keep spare windows.

This might not be the best possible time to ask Harris or Luke to drive him to the airport, but Jim Leland would do it. In hopes of avoiding as many people as possible, he took the backstreets to the school and entered the stadium area by the alley exit.