Page 87 of The Challenger
He became obsessed with reuniting with me.
If only he had approached things differently.
I take a deep, wavering breath and move on to the task at hand—my freedom moment.
“Did she ever love me?” I ask.
Jerry blinks as if the question is beyond his comprehension. As if it mingles in his memories in another time and space. Then his eyes dim with sadness.
“She refused to love you,” he says. “You were part of a past she wanted to forget. And once Ava made up her mind, good luck in changing it. Although she never breathed a word, deep down, I know she regretted giving you up. She turned to the bottle for that very reason. Every day, I wish she had kept you, Flynn."
The guard chatting up one of the admin girls catches wind of his charge in my proximity and immediately steps in to restrain Jerry. No more than twenty-two years old, he needs another thirty pounds of muscle to be menacing, and he is no match for the solidly built Jerry who flips from Jekyll into Hyde in the blink of an eye.
“Get your hands off me!” he shouts and shoves the guard with enough force that all work stops in the surrounding cubicles. Phones ring without answering. Every wary face behind plexiglass protection has eyes on Jerry.
But he only has eyes for me.
“That brown boy will never love you like I can, Flynn. The browns are crazy. The browns fucked your mother up. You—”
The guard swiftly pins Jerry's arm behind his back with icy authority. “Get a move on,” he growls and shoves Jerry down the hall.
“I tried to save you, Flynn,” Jerry yells, resisting every step of the way. “I tried. I tried my best.”
They disappear through a set of doors, and in the awkward silence left by their departure, I must look like death warmed over because one of the clerks rushes up to me and asks if I am all right. For someone who probably sees this sort of thing regularly, she is far more skittish than me. But I am not unaffected, not by a long shot. Nausea courses through me. My rattled mind is in desperate need of fresh air. And the time has come to leave.
Forget about the hearing.
Jerry gave me what I needed.
Outside, the hot noon sun feels good on my face, but the chill in my bones persists. Before I leave the parking lot and Madras for good, I survey the town and surroundings as my mind skips from one thing to the next. There are years of residue to mop up, and emotional sludge will pour in daily as I sift and sort through the backlog of what I’ve learned in the past two months.
Truth be told, I feel a little sorry for Jerry. A mentally challenged man who spiraled into a crazy mission he believed would heal him. A man who bet on tennis matches in the hopes Chavez would lose, and he could win enough money to fly to Europe and rescue me. A man who knew nothing at all about tennis or how his actions would threaten Chavez’s career. Jerry has not revealed how he got my phone number, but I have a sneaking suspicion about who gave it to him.
And that is another chapter for another day.
For now, I say goodbye to Ava, the life I never had, and head home to my new life. The one I never thought could be this good.
* * *
I’m loungingin the cabana with a mug of chai tea when Chavez FaceTimes me at midnight. He flips out when I tell him about the day, and only after I explain what this has given me does he settle down. I am still dealing with Chavez, however, lest I forget.
“When you get to Paris, there might be some disciplinary action,” he warns.
“I am counting on that,” I say. “After five weeks…”
He laughs, a losing-it kind of laugh. “You have no idea. I am walking around with a permanent hard-on. People are starting to talk.”
He angles his screen downward, and sure enough, he is swollen, thick and ready. What a tease. I asked once before, but he is not into the phone sex thing, aside from flashing his massive erection like it’s no big deal.
“Maybe you should thrill the Italian ladies with that thing,” I say with a sly grin. “Stand in Trevi Fountain and pretend to be one of your pool cherubs.”
“I can hear them tinkling in the background.”
“They keep me company. Every night I come out here and think about you.”
“Flynn baby,” he whispers. “I miss you so much. I loved our road trip. Let’s do another one after Paris.”
In March, we drove up to Santa Cruz, and the joy on his face watching Cori and Edgar fuss over us is something I will never forget. We toured my childhood haunts, and a week later, we toured his in Fresno. I found it hard to place him in that city because Chavez today is a million experiences different from who he was there. We will never visit again because, like Madras and me, Chavez and Fresno are finished. But I can see him on those run-down courts, banging balls against the crumbling concrete wall with the tenacity and fearlessness that shaped him into the man I know.
