I steeled myself and looked up. Balding, some extra-long nose hair, knuckle tattoos. Whew. Complete stranger. Awesome. “Uh, yeah. A water and…what’s that?” I asked, pointing at the beer in front of Floyd.
“Lager,” Floyd answered.
“One of those, too.”
“You got it. Good to see you back, Marley,” the bartender said.
“Uh. Thanks. It’s good to be back,” I trailed off, not having a name to put with the stranger.
“Roger? Do I know Roger?” I asked. High school was so far back in my rear-view mirror, most of those years were a blur of early mornings and unfortunate acne.
“Rumor has it you graduated a year behind him and hung out with his sister, Faith. He claims he could have dated you if he wanted to.”
“Roger and Faith Malpezzi? Holy shit!” Faith and I had been friends from elementary school on up through our senior year. Her brother had been a blurry, vague presence farting and scratching himself on the outskirts of our sleepovers.
“Time is not kind to all of us,” he remarked.
“Wait, I’m not supposed to know you, am I?” I asked. Holy hell.
“Nah. I’m from the Gettysburg area. Landed this gig out of college.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Whole town’s buzzing about you being back.”
I bet they were.
Roger returned with my water and beer. I thanked him by name as if I’d come up with it myself, and he offered a smile that was missing a canine tooth. I skipped the hydration and dove straight into the alcohol. So what if I had a second practice today?
“Is that so?” I finally asked, coming up for air.
He laughed. “Small towns, man. So what’s your story? I’ve heard that you got divorced and are running from your ex. That you got fired from a big important job for sexually harassing an underling. And that you’ve decided to come home to find a husband and plant roots even though your eggs probably aren’t viable anymore.”
“Glad to know things haven’t changed that much around here,” I groused. “It’s none of the above, by the way. I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. Culpepper is a pit stop.” I was claiming responsibility for the ending of my relationship with Javier though it had been a mutual decision—that he mentioned first—to go our own ways. That happened twelve hours before my job went down the shitter.
“Well, happy to have you even if it’s just for the semester. Otterbach was nice and all, but it’ll be fun working with the talk of the town for a couple of months.”
I wondered if it would be acceptable to order a second beer, then decided against it. My every move was probably being dissected and catalogued.
Roger came back for our orders, and I made an effort at friendly small talk asking about his sister. He muttered something about nieces and nephews and then wandered away again.
“So what’s it like being a gym teacher?” I asked Floyd.
He swiped his beer mustache away with the back of his hand. “Best damn job in teaching. None of that testing bullshit, no homework to grade, papers to read. Just hang out with the smelly little hormones and try to keep them from killing each other during gym class.”
Huh. That didn’t sound too hard.
“Okay. What exactly does the job entail?”
We talked shop about fall fitness, what to do with the pregnant students, how grading worked.
“Then there’s the less physically gifted,” Floyd waxed. “Every class has its annoying athletes. Everything is a piece of cake to them. Nothing challenges them. Then there’s the ones who stand in the corner of the volleyball court and pray the ball doesn’t come near them. I like to think of my job as finding the balance between knocking the piss out of the smartass athletes and giving the wobbly ones a little bit of confidence in their physical abilities.”
“That’s very Zen of you. So are there any teachers I should watch out for? Any students?”
“Definitely watch out for Amie Jo Hostetter. And the Hostetter twins. Those idiots are God’s gift to sports, but they are dumber than a pack of glue sticks. Amie Jo has a tendency to go mama bear on any teacher that tries to actually make them do any real work. She keeps an eagle eye on things at school and won’t hesitate to report anything she doesn’t like to the administration.” He shuddered.
Twins. Of course they were twins. I doubted that Amie Jo would settle for anything less.