in the palm of my hands. One of its antennas had ripped off years ago and there were cracks in the green vinyl, but its yellow eyes still bulged out satisfyingly. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. Vinny would get the pump fixed under budget. The rink would flourish.
I’d find a great boyfriend who wasn’t Ryan. Maybe he’d be a professor at the university. We’d buy a small house and a cat and a dog that didn’t like each other. We’d have brunch with my parents on Sundays and argue about where to spend the holidays. We’d go on a vacation in the summer to someplace semi-exotic like Bali or the Galapagos.
We’d argue about whether or not to have kids until the day we realized it was already too late and then eventually we’d stop having sex and get divorced when he left me for a grad student who was pregnant with his baby.
Vinny pushed the door of my office open. The door would have slammed except for an excellent hydraulic piston at the top. “You wouldn’t leave me for a pregnant grad student, would you?” I asked him as the door hissed slowly closed.
He pulled off the ancient USS Sanctuary baseball cap I’d never seen him without. “Dunno,” he said, scratching through his enviably thick gray hair. “Does she have her own Harley or do I have to share?”
“Share,” I said. “Grad students are poor.”
He pretended to think about it. “Nah. You know Waylon is my best riding buddy.” Waylon was his old dog. Some kind of Great Dane mix with spots like a dairy cow. “Besides, how could I leave all this?” He waved his arms around the room, encompassing the old championships posters and trophies, stacks of papers, dented metal file cabinets, and my ginormous oak desk. I would have replaced it but there was no way it would fit through the door. I suspected that the office had been built around it. It was also rumored to be a replica of the Resolute desk from the White House. Maybe it was. Who knew?
“You’re a rock, Vinny. What would I do without you?”
“Get ripped off by contractors, probably,” he said with a grin.
“Probably,” I conceded with a sigh.
Vinny hiked one butt cheek onto the edge of the desk. “What’s up, Tiny? What’s with the mood?”
Vinny was one of the only people who still called me that. Hell, he’d probably called my father that. For the hundredth time, I wondered how old he was. He’d looked the same age since I was in peewee. It seemed rude to ask.
“Nothing. Just feeling my age.”
He scoffed. “My hat’s older than you, son. Try again.”
“Your hat hasn’t been beaten up as much as I have,” I said. “How old is that hat anyway? And what is that ship? Were you in the Navy?”
He took the hat off, looked at it like he’d never seen it before, and then ran his hand through his hair. “Corpsman. Medic,” he clarified off my confused look. “Vietnam.”
“I take it back. You and that hat have seen some shit.”
He laughed. “Hat’s not that old. But we’ve been some places.” He put the hat back on. “So, what’s really bothering you?”
I shook my head. “Second-guessing my life choices. You know how it is.”
“That’s not like you. You were always…” He made a gesture with his hand, a level slice of the air. “You had a vision. You were focused, one-track mind.”
“Yeah, well, the problem with that is when that track turns out to be a dead end. Then what?”
He stared at me, head tilted like he was trying to read my mind. Hell, my soul. He stood up, dusting off his ass. “I reckon you gotta go off-road then. Hop that fence and see what’s out there.”
Making things up as I went along had never been my strong point. That had been Jake’s job. My childhood best friend and my first love, Jake Karlsson was the one who’d had a head full of wild dreams and wilder possibilities.
I wonder what advice he’d have for me now. He probably would tell me to get the fuck out of La Crosse, go to Mexico or someplace like that, and open up a bar. Which, come to think of it, sounded like a fabulous idea.
Not that I’d thought about that asshole in years. A decade at least. Well, not for longer than a minute at a time. Maybe five. He didn’t deserve my mental energy. But since I’d