Jennifer Lohmann - Winning Ruby Heart

His father shrugged before stepping forward to cross the street. “I guess they filled the role of a track team for her once she left college, but all I saw was a mother seeking fame through her daughter. Maybe I’m not being fair to the woman.”

“She isn’t your mother,” Micah replied, directing the conversation away from anything resembling sympathy to Ruby Heart.

“No, but the benefit of my mother is that once you realized she couldn’t be pleased, you could stop trying.”

His father hadn’t reached that point until Micah was nineteen, and it had taken a crippling accident for Micah to get there. From what Micah knew of his own mother, part of the reason she’d run off had been because she hadn’t even wanted to try to live up to his grandmama’s strict standards. Grandmamas love little boys who win football games.

“She’s dead now, so I guess I don’t have to worry about it.”

They crossed the rest of the park in silence. Only when they stood at the crosswalk on Lakeshore Drive, the whoosh of cars and busses nearly drowning out his voice, did his father respond. “I’m sorry, you know.”

“I know.” His father apologized anytime grandmama was brought up in conversation. He had never claimed he didn’t know what he’d left his son to deal with, but he’d also never shied away from any punishment Micah dealt out during his rehabilitation. And the first time his grandmama had said, “Cripples belong at home,” and Micah had been too doped up to do more than grunt, his father had ordered her barred from the hospital.

The light changed and they crossed the wall of revving car engines and exhaust before arriving at the lakeshore.

“Ruby looked good,” Micah said, changing the subject. With her natural plain hair, she’d looked fresh and warm and healthy. A Midwestern milkmaid whose slender figure hid muscles that could bench-press a cow before outrunning all the boys. Weak women were for weak men.

She’d gained some weight in her five years out of the public eye, adding a suggestion of curves to what would otherwise be a stick-straight figure. She looked less of a fantasy and more of a real person one would want to sit across a table from and share a meal with. A crazy dream. She was also a cheater.

“Yeah?” his father said, the question in his voice the only acknowledgment either of them would give to the interest Micah had given Ruby’s career before her doping was revealed.

His father had to slip behind him on the path to make room for some bicyclists. After the bikes passed and he caught up with Micah, he asked, “Are you going to interview her again?”

“She said no, but I’m not giving up.” Not to mention that Micah had determined the anchor spot was his and Ruby was the key. Despite the paucity of current information available online, he didn’t think Ruby was truly forgotten in the public’s mind. After all, the American public loved two stories more than any other: Judas’s downfall and the possibility of his redemption.

His father stopped to look out over the blue of Lake Michigan. “If I were her, I doubt I’d want to be interviewed by a man who couldn’t take no for an answer.”

“She’ll come to me.” Micah let the fact that he’d had Mike call her stay buried under the surface of the rippling water.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY Micah was sitting in his office when the phone rang and he knew, without recognizing the number on the caller ID, what voice he would hear on the other end.

“What part of no didn’t you understand?” The words were tight—angry—and Micah imagined the clench of her jaw as the words punched their way past her teeth. Well, she couldn’t fake doe-eyed innocence anymore. Indignation was probably as close as she could get.

“The part where you call me.”

“Yeah, to tell you to leave my mother alone. To tell you to tell Mike to leave my mother alone. I have no interest in helping NSN pay their satellite bills. Did that once, don’t plan to do it again.”

“Not even to show the world how you’ve reformed?” He threaded the carrot on the rope and dangled it in front of her. “A new person with new hope and new dreams and no needles sticking out of your arm. The TV-viewing public will eat that up.”

“Lance Armstrong might be free. Or a baseball player, any baseball player.”

“But none of them ever graced the cover of People with the headline Meet America’s Darling.”

“You have me mistaken with someone who wants to return to their past. Find another redemption story. I’m not biting.”

The phone clicked and Micah stared into the silence of the receiver. What did she think running a race was if not an attempt to return to her past? When he set the phone back down in the cradle, he knew he had her. He simply needed the right bait.

* * *

“YOU CAN’T PLAY that trick a second time,” Ruby’s cousin Haley said, the exasperation in her voice loud and clear, even over an echoing cell connection. “You know Aunt Julie called my mom, right?”

“There has to be something else you need to do for the wedding that your favorite cousin and best friend is essential for.”

“Aunt. Julie. Called. My. Mom.” Haley huffed. “Like I was a teenager sneaking out to a college party.”

“And the dress shop.”

“What! Really?”

“I should have foreseen that, honestly. Mom has always been thorough.” Only as Ruby realized that neither her brother nor her sister had managed to sneak out of the house as teenagers did she wonder if her mother had been as ignorant of the doping as she’d claimed.

“I can barely stand this sneaking around, and you live it every day, Ruby.”

“I rarely have to sneak.” Like the crazed wife in the attic, unless she threatened to make the papers, her parents simply pretended she wasn’t there.

“You really should move out.”

“I know.” Haley had been telling Ruby to get out on her own for years now, since that first sponsorship offer had come in. Ruby was more tempted now than she had ever been. She could make friends other than her cousin. Maybe even invite a man over, if she could find one who wasn’t constantly trying to one-up her, or one who didn’t lord her past over her.

Micah? No, he failed the second criteria. And he could probably fake liking her enough to interview her, but not beyond the cameras rolling. She wasn’t sure she’d trust him even if he were nice to her.

Who was she kidding? It wasn’t as though she could afford to move out on her own. Her only skill was winning middle-distance races. And all the money she had from sponsorship was frozen while the two lawsuits against her by a shoe company and a sports-drink company moved through courts at their glacial pace. She’d question the credentials of any school that wanted her for a coach, and any private athlete who hired her would be tested for drugs so often their veins would collapse. Her college major and the degree it was printed on would be worth money only if she put it on eBay and accepted bids.

None of which she would say out loud, even to her cousin, who already knew it all. “My parents were there for me when I needed them. And they still want me here.” A close-enough interpretation of the look of panic her mom got whenever Ruby mentioned looking for an apartment.

“Your dad went all lawyer-happy when you needed him. And your mom fell apart. And they want you at the house because they fear the gossip, not because they like your company.”

In this, her cousin was both right and wrong. Both her parents had been available and supportive—or at least available—when Ruby had needed them. But the last time their support had come in the form of a hug was five years ago. All of which only made Ruby more determined to run another race. No matter what her parents thought, running had always been for her.