Chapter 19
“This goddamn watch is such a piece of shit.”
“Mommy!”
Willa looked up to see that James was in earshot of her tirade against her fitness tracker, which did not do its job pretty much ever, instead shutting off or — as happened during today’s run — pausing and asking “are you finished?” when she was in the middle of hauling ass for the final 50 yards against Kevin.
“Sorry, bud,” Willa said, closing the front door and taking off her running shoes. “I’m just frustrated with my watch.”
“It doesn’t tell time?” he asked, putting down his graphic novel for this serious conversation.
“Well, yeah. It does do that.”
He went back to his book.
“Good run, I take it,” Pete said, his back to Willa while he washed the dishes.
“I just don’t understand this stupid thing. It’s supposed to track distance, heart rate, calories burned, and it doesn’t seem to do any of that with any accuracy,” Willa said, tossing the watch on the kitchen counter and taking a cold La Croix out of the fridge, then popping the top. “It says I’m running an 11-minute mile! Like, what the hell? And why would a sport watch shut off when sweat gets on it? It makes me so mad.”
“Huh, interesting,” Pete said, even though it clearly wasn’t.
He could not pretend to care. Most times, Willa didn’t really blame him. She certainly couldn’t muster enthusiasm for cars, lawn maintenance, Rush, or “the Copa shot” in “Goodfellas” (“Look,” Pete would say, rewinding for the 315th time. “It’s three minutes, all in one take!”).
Opposites attract, and all that.
But sometimes, Willa felt stung when Pete didn’t seem deeply interested in the things she did, or accomplished, or found agonizingly annoying. For a little while she played on a post-graduate soccer team in Atlanta, and Pete came to a few games. When she asked what he thought of her corner kick, or the great save Naomi made, or how she’d bodied that defender, it seemed like he hadn’t really paid much attention. She sometimes saw him scrolling on his phone during play.
Willa had recently brought this up to Allison while they were drinking beers in a booth at the Porter in Little Five Points before getting an Uber to East Atlanta for small plates and wine at Argosy.
“Isn’t he supposed to be my biggest cheerleader?” Willa had asked.
Allison took a big sip of her beer. “I mean, I guess? Felix and I, we have similar hobbies. We’re both into sushi, outsider art, and bizarre taxidermy. So there really isn’t a situation where one of us is on the proverbial or literal sidelines, watching the other.”
Willa signaled the bartender for another round of beers. “Yeah, I guess I do ask him to ‘watch’ me a lot. It’s probably kind of exhausting. Maybe it’s like when I take the kids to the pool, and they stand on the edge and yell, ‘watch me, watch me,’ and I have to be cheering before they even break the surface or they’ll be crushed.”
Really, Pete never asked Willa to watch him. He didn’t seem to need anyone to gaze admiringly while he chainsawed an errant limb off a backyard oak, or tell him that his contributions to the 2018 annual report for Oglethorpe were outstanding, or pat him on the back for showing up with jumper cables.
He didn’t ask what she thought of his lemon bars, then decide her tepid response meant she didn’t love him at all anymore.
To Willa, reassurance was love. She’d craved it since childhood, when she’d insist her mother stay just a few minutes longer at bedtime to list all the ways in which Willa was worthy. When the lights clicked off, Willa would wish, and wish hard — for Simon to like her back, for Mrs. Shepherd to pick her to feed the bunny this week, for Cheryl to invite her to the next slumber party, for a time machine to take her back to the hair stylist who convinced Willa to go for a short, feathered look that got her mistaken for a boy during a field trip.
Though the footlights often made it difficult to tell who was in the audience at her school plays and summer productions, Willa still scanned the crowds and took attendance. If you, like her father, weren’t sitting there in rapt silence as she sang about pajamas or the love of a riverboat captain, you obviously didn’t love her.
Willa would later learn, from yet another therapist, that she had a tendency to take these “skills” from childhood and apply them to her adult life, which was understandable but not appropriate. She had to learn new ways to look at love — what it was, what it meant, how a person earned it, and how a person showed it.
But sometimes Willa just wished Pete cared that her stupid sports watch was being stupid.
She stood behind him and put her arms around his waist, resting her head between his broad shoulder blades, breathing in the faint scents of dog and Suave Extra Fresh Deodorant, and taking a moment to be grateful for his physical and emotional steadiness.
“I love you,” she said into his back.
“I love you, too,” he said, drying his hands. “Now, let’s eat.”