The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [45]
“Maybe we should just call the cops,” I suggested.
“We could, but what would we say? ‘Hey, this is some kid and I want to report this guy for running a gambling ring inside my school. And he also attacks us with his car and leaves rodents in our lockers. Oh yeah. I also don’t know his real name or what he looks like. I don’t even know his age. But please, officer, get right on that!’”
“Good point,” I said.
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Want to know what my grandma might say at a time like this?” Vince asked.
I grinned. “Of course.”
“She’d say, ‘Sometimes I wish I was a manatee.’”
I laughed. She probably would say that, too. Seriously, Vince’s grandma is such a riot, despite also being really cranky.
After lunch that day we played catch. Vince brought up our financials right away. I think he thought I was blowing our chances of getting to the Cubs game by paying everybody so much to help us. I wanted to agree with him, but I hadn’t really had much of a choice.
“Let’s be honest, Mac. From the beginning you’ve been more worried about outdoing Staples than simply protecting Fred. This isn’t a contest about whose business is better or anything like that. Sometimes I think you forget why we started this business and our Funds in the first place,” he said.
“I’ve only done what I’ve had to,” I said. “It’s called confronting a problem.”
Vince gave me one of his looks and then threw me a fastball. Thankfully, I caught it in the webbing of my glove and not on the palm. He’d put some real heat on that one. I was a little annoyed about his implied accusation that I was more concerned about beating Staples than going to the game.
I threw a lazy curveball. He caught it without saying anything and threw me a circle change that I almost dropped. Silence isn’t like Vince when he’s around me. I could tell he was upset, and it was really irritating me. I know this will sound totally cheesy, but I kind of missed him even though we were together all the time. He was right here with me, but he might as well have been hanging out at the Great Wall of China.
“I think I may have you,” I finally said, getting tired of doing all the talking.
Vince raised his eyebrows. “We’ll see.”
“What was the original name of Wrigley Field?”
“Weegham Park. Easy,” Vince said as he caught my floating slider that broke all of half an inch.
I shrugged. It was going to be impossible to stump this kid. That’s probably why I hadn’t been able to do it in the two years we’d been doing trivia. Not like it mattered at that point. Honestly, I was too busy obsessing over why Vince had been acting so distant lately to come up with a better question. There had to be more to this than simply my spending too much money. I mean, for him to answer a Cubs question right and not do any gloating afterward is like a girl in my class leaving a shopping mall empty-handed.
We threw the ball back and forth in silence for a while. The air felt heavy, like we were in a giant sauna. I knew we were both thinking the same thing: What went wrong? It seemed like this Staples thing had taken over every part of our lives. We couldn’t even fully enjoy a simple trip to the lake anymore.
Plus, we had like only seven or eight days before we needed to buy tickets to the Cubs game, assuming they kept winning, and the tickets weren’t going to buy themselves. I felt myself wishing that I’d just told Fred good luck and sent him on his way. Maybe Vince was right. Why did I always have to get involved? But what am I supposed to do? Ignore everyone who comes to me with an inconvenient problem? Where am I supposed to draw the line?
“How much money do we have right now anyways?” I asked Vince after a long silence that had been broken only by the muffled thumps of a baseball hitting leather.
“Why?” Vince asked. It was the fastest he’d responded to a question all weekend.
I held the ball for a bit and just looked at him. He looked worried, but then he smiled a smile so phony I could have seen