Karen Kendall - After Hours

“Yeah. You okay?”

She nodded. “I don’t know if she is, though.” She gestured toward the house. “And there’s no way the children could have slept through this.”

Samantha was huddled in a corner, crying. Troy ran to her, knelt and put his hands on her shoulders. “Sam, it’s okay. Sam, where are the kids?”

She raised a red, blotchy face. “Bathroom. I told them to lock themselves in the bathroom.” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and let Troy help her up. “Coach—Peggy—what are you doing here?”

Sam headed for the hallway and the bathroom, her children her first priority, but embarrassment crept into her demeanor.

“Peggy and I were, uh, having coffee when you called.”

Sam nodded, then knocked on the bathroom door. “Derek? Danni? Laura? It’s okay now. He’s gone. Uncle Troy is here.”

It was Danni who opened it, her face pale. They’d all been crying. Sam and Troy hugged and kissed each one of them, and Peggy tried to swallow the lump in her throat.

Later, she made them hot chocolate in the kitchen while Troy persuaded Sam to give a statement to the police.

“It’s really hard when parents don’t get along and they split up,” Peggy told the kids. “Mine did the same thing.”

“Did your dad go away for almost a year and then show up yelling and kick in your door?” Laura asked.

Peggy put her arm around Laura and pulled her close. “No. My dad just got married to somebody else. But it sucked, because he also got a whole new family, and we were afraid he liked that one better.”

“Did he?” It was Derek who asked this question.

I have to be careful how I answer this. “Um, no. Not better. But my dad was a very athletic guy, kind of like your uncle Troy. And this new family of his had a boy who was also very athletic. My brother, Hal, was a competitive swimmer, but my dad liked football. So he went to Alan’s games a lot.”

“Alan was the new boy?” Danni asked.

“Yes.”

“What about your games? Did he go to those?”

Peggy ruffled Derek’s hair. “Not so much. I was a girl, and he didn’t think my games were that important.”

“That’s really unfair. He hurt your feelings.”

Peggy nodded. “He did. But I don’t think he meant to. Just like I don’t think your dad meant to scare you tonight. He just drank too much whiskey or something and felt guilty for going away. So, not thinking straight, he decided he wanted to see you at one o’clock in the morning. And of course that’s way past your bedtime.”

“I hate him,” said Derek, pushing his hot chocolate away. “He said really bad things to my mom when she wouldn’t open the door.”

“Sometimes people say things they don’t mean.” Peggy prayed she was handling this right.

“I think he meant them. Even without whiskey he used to be a jerk.” Derek’s eyes were hard and angry. “I was glad when he went off.”

Laura and Danni didn’t say anything. But the guilt on their faces spoke for them. Peggy wished she could say something, anything, to comfort these children. “It’s okay to be mad at your dad,” she began. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t still love him.”

“I don’t want to love him,” Danni blurted.

Peggy stroked her hair. “Yeah, but you probably do.”

“He doesn’t deserve it.”

Peggy sighed and stroked the girl’s cheek. “Well, that’s the funny thing about love. You can’t help how you feel about people, whether they deserve it or not.”

TROY EVENTUALLY CALLED a cab for Peggy, since he didn’t feel he could leave Sam and the kids alone. Mr. Creep might return. “I’m sorry the evening ended like this,” he said. “And I’m sorry I can’t take you back to your car personally. You make the driver wait until you’re inside with the doors locked, okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I mean it.”

“Thanks for dinner, even if I embarrassed you by falling off the bench.”

He gave her a tired grin. “Hey, I could care less. It’s not me who showed my blue panties to Benito.”

She winced.

“I had a great time earlier tonight. I want to see you again…. There’s something we should talk about, though.” He passed a hand over his eyes, rubbing at them with the heel of it.

“Troy. You deal with your family situation and don’t worry about anything else for the time being. You know where to find me once things are more settled. After Hours isn’t going anywhere.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Yeah.”

The cab pulled up and Troy handed her into the backseat, passing some cash to the driver once she was settled. “Troy, I can pay my own cab fare….”

He ignored her, gave the cabbie the address and then dropped a quick kiss on her mouth. “See you soon, Peggy-Sue. Don’t run off and get married.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fat chance of that. I’ve seen all I want of domestic bliss tonight.”

PEGGY DIDN’T EVEN TRY to go into her bedroom when she got home, since she knew she couldn’t sleep. Her apartment seemed particularly sterile, after the ugly but somewhat endearing geezer furnishings of Troy’s place. Peggy sat cross-legged on the pristine taupe carpet and stared at Marly’s painting on her wall. The girl on the faux television screen stared back at her, midkick. Her red hair flew in the breeze, her jersey slid askew against her body and her athletic pants were dirtied with smudges. The ultimate tomboy, she didn’t look like the kind of girl who’d ever work in a salon and day spa.

Peg twisted her mouth wryly, dug her bare toes into the carpet and started going through the mail she’d grabbed on her way in.

She discarded a flyer encouraging her to buy a house from a man with a smarmy smile, a notification for the previous resident that her cat was due for shots and a department store catalogue filled with all sorts of things she didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

She did open a couple of bills and a letter from the school where she coached. She scanned it, her disbelief turning to anger.

Dear Ms. Underwood,

We regret to inform you that the school’s athletic field will be undergoing improvements in the next few months, since we can expect relatively dry weather at this time of the year and must finish the process before the rainy season.

The school board has made the decision to move all of Woodward’s athletic activities—practice and games—to the fields at the Coral Gables Youth Center. Since there are hundreds of teams utilizing these facilities, we have been given specific time slots in which to hold our activities, and there are not enough to go around.

For this reason, we must regretfully inform you that the girls’ football program has been eliminated for the season. We realize that this may cause disappointment to both you and the young ladies affected by the decision. We look forward to the program resuming at some point next year, when the work on the athletic fields has been completed….

“What?” Peggy shouted aloud to the absent principal. “I don’t see anything about the boys’ program being eliminated!” It was the perfect ending to an already miserable evening: her pet project, meant to empower girls and teach them that there were no limits to what they could do, was being flushed.

TROY MADE SURE that Samantha’s attorney filed a restraining order in the morning. He tried to get her to take the day off, but she insisted on going to work while he dropped the kids off at school.

Then he coolly took Mr. Creep’s Dodge Ram to Home Depot and purchased another door, since the Lotus wasn’t much use for hauling supplies. He figured the jerk was still sleeping off his hangover somewhere, and would never know. When he got back, he left a window down and the keys in the ignition. It wasn’t his problem if the truck got stolen, and he didn’t want his brother-in-law breaking into the house to find them.