Chapter Six
Payton
I stumbled slightly as I walked down the dark hallway toward the training room. Around me, the walls were covered with photos and memorabilia that featured my grandfather and the Bears players and coaches. It was a sobering reminder of the fact that my mother had been at least partially right when she’d pointed out that I was part of the Halas legacy. Mixed with the alcohol, the weight of expectation came crashing down around me and I picked up my pace in an attempt to outrun it.
My heels clicked on the tiles just outside of the locker room and announced my presence.
“Sweetness?” Gus called from inside the training room. “Is that you, darlin’?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Gus,” I replied as I quickly crossed the carpeted part of the room where the players’ lockers lined the walls. This was the room where they did all of their preparation for the games. It was where the coaches shouted at the players, pumped them up, and then knelt with them to say a prayer before the game. It was where they cheered them on when they were winning at halftime or voiced their deep disappointment when they were trailing. It was where the press did the after-game interviews as players walked around bruised, bloodied, and half dressed as they tried to celebrate or forget what had happened on the field.
Growing up, I’d spent an enormous amount of time in this locker room, and I’d learned almost everything I knew about football from the men who’d inhabited this world. They’d treated me with respect, but also as one of their own.
As a girl in the boys’ world, I’d learned a lot of things that other girls had not, but that hadn’t seemed to have been a reason for the players to change their behavior — much. Sure, they’d watched their language and kept their clothes on around me, but mostly they talked to me in a way that other adults did not. They talked to me like I was a real person, not just a spoiled, owner’s kid who had nothing better to do than hang out in the locker room with famous players. They were my big brothers, and they all had my back. Granted, I’d learned swear words and insults that would have peeled the paint off of the fancy living rooms that my mother spent most of her time in, but I’d also learned when and where to use what I’d learned and, for the most part, had kept the worlds separate.
Gus Washington was the team trainer, and in many ways, I was closer to him than I’d been to my own father. Gus had earned his nickname, Gogo, when I was a small child and couldn’t pronounce his name properly. When I’d outgrown my inability to say his name, I’d addressed him as Mr. Washington until, one afternoon after a particularly brutal game against the Broncos, I’d been helping him clean out the whirlpools and mop the blood off of the floors in the training room and he’d suggested that I’d earned the privilege of calling him Gus, and I hadn’t called him anything else since then.
He was a compact man, smaller than most all of the players, but incredibly powerful for his size. Despite the fact that he was a few years over seventy, he had maintained his strength and fitness through martial arts training, daily runs through the South Side neighborhoods he’d grown up in, and the occasional open water swim in Ohio Beach’s play pen. He’d never had a problem with any of the players; I’d overheard them talking in hushed tones about how they’d never want to get on the wrong side of Wash. Rumors floated around about where he came from, but Gus was a man of few words and extreme privacy, so he let the rumors that he’d been a hired hitman for the Russian mob do the job of keeping the players in line for him.
“What are you doing, Gus?” I laughed as I rounded the corner and found him bent over one of the silver whirlpool tubs scrubbing the inside with a large sponge. “You’ve got a staff to do that for you!”
“Yeah, but I don’t like the way they do it,” he grumbled as he vigorously scrubbed a spot just under the jets. “Never do it right.”
“Gus, you have got to ease up,” I scolded him gently. “You’re not one of the youngsters anymore.”
“I love you, Sweetness,” he said looking up at me a grim smile forming under his bushy mustache. “But even I have my limits, and talking about my age is one of them.”
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly bowing my head as he returned to his task. “I’m just saying that there are other things you could be doing.”
“Like what, child?” he asked as he moved down the tub to another spot. His bald head shone in the fluorescent light as sweat dripped down into the tub and mingled with the suds. Suddenly he looked up and said, “What on earth are you doing here this late at night, Payton Gale?”
“I needed to talk to you,” I said, moving over to one of the tape tables and hopping up on it so that I could sit and swing my feet freely. “I’ve got a problem, Gus.”
“What else is new, child?” he laughed as he bent back down and resumed scrubbing. “What is it now? Boy troubles?”
“C’mon, you know me better than that,” I said, swinging my feet hard enough to kick off one of my pumps and send it sailing across the room. It hit the whirlpool tub next to the one Gus was working on, and without looking up, he sighed.
“You been drinking, Sweetness?”
“A little,” I admitted as I slipped the other shoe off and let it drop to the floor. “But I’ve got a good reason.”
“Lay it on me,” he said as he turned on the hot water and prepared to hose down the tub. Playfully, he waved the hose in my direction and said, “But if I don’t like what I hear, you’re going to pay the price for your bad behavior.”
“Gus! It’s not my fault!” I shouted as he faked shooting a stream of water at me.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” he smiled as he turned the hose on the tub and began rinsing it.
“My mother is a bitch,” I blurted out.
“PAYTON GALE HALAS LASKY!” Gus roared as he threw the rag he was using down with such force that the metal rang from the impact. “I’ll have none of that kind of language in this training room! You’ll not speak so disrespectfully of your mother. Girl, you are lucky I don’t haul you over my knee and tan your hide!”
“But Gus, you don’t know what she did!” I cried in protest.
“I don’t care what she did; she’s your mother,” he said in an ominous tone that let me know I was dangerously close to crossing a line. I took a deep breath and mentally backed up.
“Gus, she gave me a month to find a man and get to work on getting married,” I said in a tone that was only slightly whiney. “She said that if I don’t do what she wants, she’s going to take away my money, my apartment, and disinherit me.”
“I see,” he said calmly.
“It’s absolutely unreasonable!” I shouted. “Anyone can see that! She has no right to do this! We aren’t living in the seventeenth century, for God’s sake! This is America and I have rights!”
“Is that so?” he smiled as he listened intently for a moment before turning the sprayer in the whirlpool on and giving the tub one more rinse.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he shrugged as he shut off the water and put the nozzle back in its holder, ready for the next person who used the pool. He stood up, ran a hand over his brown, bald head, and then drew a deep breath.
“What?” I repeated impatiently kicking my legs back and forth feeling a bit childish. “You cannot possibly agree with her!”
“Well, Sweetness, I’m thinking about this from all angles,” Gus said as he grabbed a clean towel from a stack next to the whirlpools and dried his hands. “You’re young, and you’ve been raised with all the advantages of someone whose parents love and cherish her. Right now, you’re mad because you’re being expected to do something that you don’t want to do and that interferes with your plans; am I right?”
“But, Gus, she’s telling me I have to get married!” I shouted. “This isn’t some third-world country where people sell their children off into marriages in exchange for property or something!”
“Oh, child, please stop with the dramatics,” he said shooting me a side eye that quickly silenced me. “What your mother is doing is trying to impart the seriousness of the situation and force you to make a choice.”
“But she’s left me with no choices!”
“Oh, yes she has,” he said smiling knowingly. “You just don’t like the outcome of the choice you want to make. You want it all, Sweetness, and you’re mad because, after a lifetime of having it all, now you have to put your money where your mouth is.”
“How is this a choice?” I pouted. “If I do what I want to do, I lose everything.”
Gus dried his hands and picked up my shoe before dropping the towel into a laundry basket at the edge of the room. He slowly walked toward me, holding my pump and smiling. When he was standing a half a foot away, he reached out and put a weathered hand under my chin and tipped my face up so he could look me in the eye as he said, “Child, that’s where you’re sorely mistaken. It was never yours to lose.”
My eyes widened as I listened to him speak.
“But—” I protested.
“No buts about it, Sweetness,” he said, shaking his head as he handed me my shoe. “You have to make a choice about what you truly value. I don’t envy you, and I have no idea what choice I’d make if I were in your shoes, but what I do know is that this choice will shape your life for years to come, so you’d better spend some time really thinking about what it is that you want.”
He let go of my chin and I dropped my head as I cradled my shoe and thought about what he’d said.
“Gus, what if I make the wrong decision?” I whispered without looking up.
“Sweetness, that’s the risk in any decision we make,” he said as he grabbed a rag from the shelf behind me and began wiping down the training tables. “There’s no right choice. Every decision has consequences and outcomes both intended and unintended. The question is which ones can you see yourself living with and which ones are absolutely unbearable?”
“I don’t want to let my family down,” I said as the tears welled up. “I want to do what’s right, and I want to make sure everyone is happy, but…”
“Child, you can’t make other people happy,” he said as he sprayed something on the cloth and began to wipe the stainless-steel legs of one of the tables. “It’s not your job to make others happy. You need to make yourself happy and let the others take care of themselves, but you also have a duty to fulfill.”
“But I want to do what’s right and make myself happy, too!” I cried as a few tears ran down my cheeks. “I want to try and rise in the ranks of sports managers and get a job as a general manager one day. I don’t see how I can do that if I’m getting married and having children.”
“Yep, that’s a tough order,” he nodded as he stooped down and rubbed a spot at the base of the table. “I don’t envy you, Sweetness. It’s not easy being a woman in this game. Not at all.”
“But why doesn’t my mother understand that?” I asked as I swiped away the tears with one hand. “She’s running the Bears, for God’s sake, but she can’t afford her daughter the opportunity to build a career? I don’t get it!”
“I have no idea what your mother’s thinking,” he said standing up and putting his hands on his hips. He looked like a small, brown superhero in a yellow polo shirt and black track pants, and I chuckled a little at the sight. He smiled and said, “I do know that your grandfather was mighty tough on her, though. Have you asked why she’s forcing this decision right now?”
“I tried, but she wouldn’t explain herself,” I grumbled. “She just kept saying something about family loyalty and that I needed to do my part.”
“I can’t help you with that,” he shrugged before dropping his hands to his sides. “And I can’t tell you which choice is the right one. I can only tell you that, given the choices you have, you’re not going to get everything you want, and that’s a shame.”
“But what if I want it all, Gus?” I asked.
“Then you’re going to have to draw up one hell of a playbook for that, Sweetness!” he laughed as he tossed the rag back up on the shelf and said, “What have you been doing? You look pretty fancy, but you smell like a cheap dive bar!”
“How do you know these things?” I laughed loudly as leaned down and slipped my pump on my foot before pulling the other one toward me with my big toe.
“Child, I’ve been around young men — and old ones, too — for most of my adult life,” he said dryly. “And I know more than I ever wanted to know.”
“I was over at Black Jack blowing off steam after my meeting with my mother,” I admitted as I stood up. I still felt a little wobbly on my feet, but better than I had coming into the training room. “I met someone of interest, too.”
“Oh, who’s that?”
“Dax Connor,” I said and watched Gus’s eyebrows raise so high on his forehead that they looked like they were ready to take off in flight.
“Oooh, you’d better watch yourself with that one,” he said shaking his head and tsking as he moved back toward his office. “I’ve heard he’s wild and dangerous, and that he doesn’t play by the rules.”
“So what if he is? And what if he doesn’t?” I said.
“Sometimes wild and dangerous is exciting and sometimes it is just what it says it is,” he said as I followed him to the office and watched as he gathered his paperwork and shut down his computer. “You’d be wise to know which type of wild and dangerous you’re dealing with before you join the rodeo.”
“He seems nice enough,” I said a little too defensively.
“Mmm hmm,” Gus nodded without saying anything more. I bristled because I knew he was holding back what he was really thinking, but I quickly decided that I didn’t want to know.
Gus offered me a ride home, and when I told him I’d call a cab, he simply smiled and kissed the top of my head before saying, “Pride goeth before a fall, Sweetness. Remember that.”
“I will,” I said as I hugged him tightly and then sauntered back down the hallway to catch my ride.