the hallway, watching the bathroom door, waiting. She motions to me to come over. I look behind me to make sure it’s me she’s talking to. She laughs. She laughs.
Then it’s time to walk to the ballroom. We separate ourselves from the pack somehow. There are people three feet in front of us and behind us, but here we are, walking alone, together. I want so badly to be interesting. But she is so cool, and I don’t know how to be cool. I’ve not been cool a day in my life. I am warm—burning up—sweating through my shirt already.
She starts talking, thank God. She tells me about the book she’s about to release. She says, “But things are hard right now. You’ve probably heard.”
“Heard what? I have not heard. What would I have heard, and where would I have heard it?”
She says, “The news, maybe? ESPN?”
“Um, no, I have not heard the news on ESPN,” I say.
She speaks, slowly at first, then all at once.
“I’m a soccer player. Was a soccer player. I just retired, and I’m not sure what I am now. I got a DUI last month. It was all over the news. I watched my mug shot scroll across the ticker for days. I can’t believe I did it. I’ve been really lost and depressed the last couple of years, and I just…I screwed up. I’ve always been about honor, and I ruined my whole legacy. I let everybody down. I hurt the whole team, maybe. And now they want me to write my book as some kind of hero athlete puff piece, but I keep thinking: What if I’m just honest? What if I write the truth about my life?”
I am sad for her, but I am thrilled for me. In our four minutes together she has asked me about the three subjects I know best: drinking, writing, and shame. This is my jam. I’ve got this. Hot damn.
I put my hand on her arm. Electrical currents. I pull back and recover enough to say, “Listen, I have a rap sheet as long as your arm. I’d write it all. I’d be honest. I don’t know much about the sports world, but I do know that out here in the real world, we like real people.”
She stops walking, so I do, too. She turns and looks directly at me. It appears that she’s about to say something. I hold my breath. Then she turns and keeps walking. I start breathing and walking, too. We enter the ballroom and follow the other authors through a sea of round tables, white tablecloths, thirty-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers. We end up at the dais, climb the stairs, and see that we’ve been seated next to each other. We walk toward our places, and when we arrive, she puts her hand on the back of my chair. She cannot decide whether to pull it out for me. She does. “Thank you,” I say.
We sit down, and the writer seated next to Abby asks where she’s from.
“We live in Portland,” Abby answers.
The writer says, “Oh, I love Portland.”
Abby says, “Yeah.”
Something about the way she says “Yeah” makes me listen very, very hard.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there. We moved there because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”
I can tell, just by the way she says this, that there is no we left. I want to save her from follow-up questions, so I say, “Oh, people like us can’t live in Portland. We’re Portland on the inside. We need sunshine on the outside.”
I am immediately embarrassed by what I’ve just said. Portland on the inside? What the hell do those words even mean? People like us? Why did I say us? Us? How terribly presumptuous to suggest the concept of us. Us.
Us. Us. Us.
She looks at me, her eyes widen, and she smiles. I change my mind. I don’t know what I meant, but I’m glad I said it. I decide that heaven is saying anything that makes this woman smile like that.
The event begins. When it is my turn to walk to the podium and speak, I disregard half of my planned speech and say things about shame and freedom that I want Abby to hear. I look at the hundreds of people in front of me and think only of her behind me. When I finish, I sit down and Abby looks at me. Her eyes are red.
The dinner