Field of Schemes (15 page)

Mimi checked her oh-so-official looking clipboard once again and nodded. “You’re in luck. Do you want number two for Savannah?”

“Yeah, number two ’cause she’s the shit,” he said, laughing.

“How about you, Claire? I know this being Rachel’s first year on a club team, she hardly has a
legacy
number, but is there one she’s fond of?”

“Well, she was number nine last year,” I said.

Mimi looked at me as if I were a moron. “That’s Mia Hamm’s number. Every girl in America wants to be number nine.”

Wow, I thought it was cool because it was the title of a trippy Beatles song.

Mimi continued, “Kelly Greer’s been number nine since she was three years old.”

I am so embarrassed. Not.

“How ’bout number one?” I asked. A few people giggled. Ron patted my leg and whispered, “Goalkeeper’s number.”

“Why don’t you tell the new people what numbers are available?” Ron suggested.

Mimi glared at me.
What the hell did I do?
“We’ve got numbers seven and thirteen left and—”

“Violet wants number seven,” Raymond said. “Lucky little number seven.”

“Okay, then, that’s settled,” Mimi said. “Claire, Rachel will have to be thirteen. You’re not superstitious, are you?”

Trying to show her that I could not care less about her jersey number, I laughed. “Please, who believes in that nonsense?”

I stopped dead in my tracks.
Shit. Please tell me Raymond missed that comment.
He folded his arms across his chest and tapped his right foot with annoyance. “That’s right, the ignorant black man and his Voodoo.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“If this team is unwelcoming to black folks, I’d just as soon know it now so we can—”

Mimi looked at me annoyed. “Raymond, we value our African-American players as an integral part of our multicultural, multiethnic, multi-ass-kicking team,” she said, making sincere eyes at Leo and Raymond. “Can we please move on to team business, Claire?” Visibly irritated by me, Mimi flipped another page on her clipboard and continued.

After an hour, Mimi finished outlining her expectations for the season as Gunther sat seemingly in a state of rigor mortis. “Okay, someone call the girls upstairs, so I can show them the DVD of last year’s season highlights. Most of you know that Cara’s grandfather owns a production company and put together this totally rockin’ DVD for them. I’m sure even if you saw it at last year’s end-of-season party, you won’t mind watching it again, right?”

“A production company?” I whispered to Darcy.

“Shhh, you don’t want to get in more trouble with the general, do you?”

I laughed quietly. “I thought she said the family business was importing.”

“Oh, they import, all right.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Lowering her voice almost inaudibly, Darcy confided, “The Shastas have
lots
of different businesses, but rumor has it that they’re all just fronts to launder drug money.” I made a horrified quizzical expression, begging her to continue. “There’s no way you get
this
rich off importing wicker baskets.”

“I bet the Pier One folks are pretty loaded,” I whispered as I glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping.

“Trust me, the Shastas are on another pier altogether. The DEA could never get the evidence they needed to prosecute Freddy Shasta, but the IRS nailed him for tax evasion.”

“Really?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, he’s doing two years in federal prison now. It’s Santa Bella’s dirty little secret. Even if anyone knew something that could hang Freddy, they’d never talk because he gives so much money to the community. You know that new playground?” I nodded. “Shasta money. The Shasta Eye Center at Santa Bella General, the New Globe Theatre, the Fine Arts Museum. This whole town is built with Shasta’s dirty money.”

I thought I was bringing Rachel to the land of milk and cookies, not the set of
The Sopranos
.

“Are you sure?” I asked, desperately hoping that Darcy’s report was simply overblown rumors.

“Like I said, the DEA never proved anything, but at the very least, this family has a few unethical accounting practices.”

“Wow.” As I absorbed this, the girls trotted up the stairs and settled in. On a giant TV screen, a picture of last year’s team appeared. The lights went down and the theme from
Chariots of Fire
began.

The next morning, I noticed Rachel’s goldfish, Jaws, was floating at the top of his bowl on the kitchen counter. Mentally, I went through my schedule to see when I could buy a replacement fish for Rachel before she got home from school. Even though it was just a fish, I preferred replacing it to having to tell Rachel that her pet died. Granted, it wasn’t like she bonded with the slippery little bugger after a mere four weeks. I just thought it better to avoid any minor bumps in a road that was finally smoothing for her.

I looked at my watch and realized I was late to pick up Darcy for our shopping date. She was planning an “old fashioned” seventh birthday party for her Veronica, and asked me to join her to buy supplies at Party City. I found it amusing that “simple” birthday parties were now in vogue in Southern California. Darcy explained that, between Kelly and Veronica, she’d hosted every kind of birthday party from ice skating to rock climbing to scavenger hunts to laser tag. When Kelly was into princesses, Darcy hired Snow White, Cinderella
and
Sleeping Beauty, and transformed their home into a pink glittering castle. Every guest received a gown, wand and tiara. After three-year-old Veronica uttered, “Stars is pretty” one evening, Darcy threw her baby a birthday party at the planetarium. Now, the ultimate one-upsmomship was hosting a modest backyard party with Pin the Tail on the Donkey and a frosted white sheet cake with a single color of icing.

Last week, Darcy explained that she would buy plain pink paper products and a single candle with the number seven. I laughed at how much effort she was putting into her simplicity theme. “For entertainment, the kids can play old-fashioned games,” Darcy said, beaming with pride. “I’m not hiring a single entertainer either.” I swore her head sprang a little with pride. “What do you think?”

“You, my friend, are positively Amish,” I told her.

I was enjoying having a best friend who lived next door. It reminded me of the sitcom childhood I never had.

I flushed Jaws and walked to Darcy’s house, hoping she’d be ready to leave right away. If we got back before lunch, I could head over to Fish World and pick out a body double for Rachel’s floater.

For a guy who was always at the hospital, Ron seemed to cross my path often. Funny, but until soccer tryouts, I’d never seen him. Now he was my shadow. He opened the door wearing a charcoal gray Armani suit with a crisp periwinkle shirt and striking textured silk tie in an abstract pattern of bright yellow and red. It was a different—and completely appealing—look for him. “Come in,” he snapped. It came across like, “Don’t just stand there.” Clearly, this man was not attracted to me or he would handle me a bit more gently than that.
Good,
I reminded myself.
I don’t want him to be attracted to me. And I don’t want to be attracted to him. This is a good thing. This is the right thing. This is the only thing that is good for everyone.

I detested myself for my next thought, but couldn’t help wondering
why
Ron didn’t seem interested in me. I mean, not that anything was ever, ever going to happen between us. Never. Never, ever, ever. But why didn’t he have a secret compartment in his heart with a shrine to me, complete with my photos, a lock of my hair and a sexy jazz tune playing in the background? Not that I had one for him. (I mean, really! Where am I going to get a lock of his hair?) But what was wrong with me that my lustful feelings were unrequited? Like I said, I hated myself for having these thoughts; nonetheless, they flooded my mind like an overflowing toilet—one with a dead goldfish in it.

“Is Darcy here?” I asked meekly.

Then I heard her voice from another room as she continued an argument with Ron. She sounded hard. “So are we in agreement? I’m not going to have another situation like we had at Kelly’s party where I’m running around doing everything and you’re sitting out back yucking it up with the dads, got it?”

Ron smiled at me in the same way he did that first time I saw him on the soccer field. It was inviting. But was he issuing an invitation? Or was he inviting in the same way, say, a slice of chocolate cake was—unknowingly, scrumptiously tempting without doing a single thing? “Claire’s here, so you might want to tone down the nagging just a bit,” he shouted upstairs. Then turning to me, he said, “I’m sorry.”

Darcy rushed down the stairs, apologizing. “Why didn’t you tell me she was here, Ron?!”

She
was apologizing? Please. Last night I dreamt that her husband and I had sex every which way possible in locations I didn’t know existed. Even in my dreams, I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, doesn’t this guy have a wife?” Then the magnificent feeling of Ron’s body enveloping mine was replaced with the self-loathing that came from seeing Darcy’s weeping disembodied head floating through the sky. The dream ended with Mimi tackling me to the floor and throwing shorts over my face.

He snapped, “What part of ‘Claire’s here’ didn’t let you know that Claire’s here?” The tone of his voice punctuated the sentence with a silent
dumb ass
. Now I knew what Rachel was talking about. These two were relentless.

I noticed myself backing toward the door, desperately hoping Darcy would cancel so I could exit immediately and head to Fish World. “Darcy, if this is not a good time, I have a couple—”

“It’s a great time,” Darcy said. “Let me grab my keys.”

“Why don’t you let her finish, Darc?” Ron said. He was bitter chocolate to be sure. Good thing for me, I don’t find nastiness at all sexy. Ron’s chocolate factor began to slip. The bad thing was that my friend Darcy was married to a bastard.

They both looked at me expectantly, so I spoke just to fill the silence. “It’s just that, well, we could do this another time if you two want to, um, finish chatting because—”

“No, now is a good time,” Darcy insisted. “The closer we go toward the weekend, the less stuff they’ve got, and everybody’s doing simple this year.”

“Jesus Christ, Darcy, why don’t you let the woman finish her sentence?” Ron asked. “Go on, Claire. How come you want to go later?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, squirming to try to make my way out from between them. I hated being in the middle of another couple’s fight. I hated conflict so much that I didn’t like being in the middle of my own fights.

“It’s not nothing,” Ron said. I glanced past him at their kitchen clock, watching the morning slip away. “Tell me, what were you going to say?”

Now Darcy was looking at me expectantly. How embarrassed would I be when I revealed that my big agenda item for the day was replacing Jaws to protect my daughter from the horrors of goldfish death? “Go ahead, Claire,” Darcy urged. “Tell us. If you have something else going on, it’s okay.”

I laughed, trying to show how ridiculous my original plan was. “You guys, it’s nothing. I was going to buy a goldfish for Rachel because her old one died and I just don’t want to deal with it. It’s really very silly. Come on, let’s go. I’ll just tell her Jaws died and I flushed him, no big deal.” Darcy assured me she could do the errand without me. “Of course you could, but it’ll be fun. Let’s go. Come on, let’s go already.” I felt like I was escaping from a burning building.