The Hardest Cut by Jamie Bennett (book club recommendations .TXT) 📕

“They don’t hurt him,” she said, and blew up the image to study his abs.  Wow.  I leaned over to look too, but then shook myself out of it.

“He’s old enough to be your…big brother!  Stop looking at him like that and finish your math.”

“I already did it in study hall,” she told me, and the bell at the door rang for another customer who was there to shop, not just to get out of the March wind.

So when Hallie called later that night as I sat in her living room, I was able to say, “We sold a ton of books today!  Everything is going really well.  Hallie, don’t worry about anything.”

“I’m not worried about the store,” she told me, but I knew that she was always worried about Holliday Booksellers doing well.  She just had a drive to succeed in things that seemed to elude some of us.  I looked guiltily at the bag where I’d shoved everything for my own business.  I hadn’t opened it all day, not once.

“Did Marley do all her schoolwork?  Did she go to track practice?” she asked.

“Yes to both.  And she was very helpful at the bookstore, too,” I added.

“She’s awesome.”  I could almost see Hallie swelling with pride.  “She told me that you’re doing a lot of yoga or something?”

“I’m upping my workouts,” I agreed cautiously, but it sounded like Marley had kept my secret cheerleader audition to herself.  I started to stretch while we talked, leaning over my legs to put my palm on the floor as I held the phone to my ear.  “How are things going there with your father-in-law?” I asked.

“Not great,” Hallie answered, sighing now.  Her husband’s dad had been sick for a long time, and she told me that they didn’t expect him to be able to hold on much longer.  “Gunnar is a mess and trying to keep things together for his mom and sisters,” she said, and sniffed.  “I feel so terrible for him.  We may stay here until…until the end.”

I got teary, too, and nodded at the phone.  “I’m so sorry for everyone.  Don’t worry about how long you’ll be in Minnesota, because we’re absolutely fine.  I’m good to be here at your house indefinitely and the bookstore is great.  Marley can fly to you guys if you need her to come.”

“Thanks, Gaby.  I feel so much better knowing that she’s with you.  Don’t neglect your own stuff, though,” she told me.  “How is your business plan going?”

“Oh…I’m going to work on it tonight,” I said, and looked over at the bag again.  I definitely would, after I went on the treadmill in Gunnar’s home gym.

We hung up and I went for that run, pounding away and making myself go a little further than I had the night before.  And after I took a shower, I really did mean to work.  I even took out my laptop and put it on the bed with me to stare at the spreadsheets that Hallie and I had worked on together, the checklists she’d help me write up of tasks I needed to complete, the forms I’d have to fill out for licenses and certificates and all the other things necessary to open my own real estate business.  I rubbed my eyes, a little tired, and wondered if I would have bags and circles under them in the morning.  It was important to focus, though, because I couldn’t keep living on only a part-time job at Hallie’s bookstore.  If—when—I made the Woodsmen cheer squad, I would make a little more from that, but very little.  The job mostly paid in prestige and glamour instead of actual money.

So, first things first: I really needed to come up with a name for my company.  “Gabriella Carter Real Estate,” I typed, and then quickly deleted it when I saw how it looked on the screen.  I didn’t need everyone to be reminded of who I was, not immediately.  The real estate community of northern Michigan was small, and everyone knew that I’d been fired from my old job.  Everyone thought they knew why, too: incompetence.  My name wouldn’t exactly be a draw.

No crying, I reminded myself, and typed, “Woodsmen Realty.”  No, there was probably a trademark or a patent or something on that name.  The football team’s lawyers probably wouldn’t appreciate that it was meant as a compliment.  I thought about the Woodsmen and how next season would go, who would step in at right tackle now that Hallie’s husband Gunnar had retired, who was going to be the back-up quarterback for Davis Blake.  How things would work with the new quarterbacks coach, Ben Matthews.

I typed more on my laptop, but now I wasn’t working on my real estate business.  First I searched, “Benjamin Matthews quarterback,” and I read more about his athletic career.  He’d been highly-recruited coming out of high school in Arizona, and the two and a half seasons he’d played in college were outstanding after he got the starting job.  I thought he might have skipped his senior year to go pro, but then the horrible injury…I skimmed over the description because I couldn’t stand to read it.  There was the first surgery, then the second, then the third, and almost two years after he got hurt, his university put out a terse statement that Ben Matthews would not be returning to football.  I shook my head as I read it, thinking of the devastation that must have been behind that one, short paragraph saying that he was done.

Then, just out of pure curiosity, I searched, “Benjamin Matthews personal life.”  I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring on his finger when he’d bought the books for his daughter today, but there wasn’t anything online about him and a wife or a girlfriend.  Not that it mattered.

I also read about his younger brother, Kayden, who had been a backup quarterback for the Woodsmen.  He was starting for another team, now, but he was pretty inconsistent.