Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (42)

A million and a half people had watched the video. The comments were brutal. They said she should rot in jail for the rest of her life. Her kids should be taken away. She was a disgusting foulmouthed bitch who might as well kill herself. She was the whitest white woman in the world, an embodiment of everything that was wrong with America, and she had no business wearing those yoga pants, not with that fat ass of hers.

Vito watched the clip three times, and it didn’t make him hate her. It just made him wish he had her phone number so he could call and tell her it would be okay, that everybody made mistakes, that all you could do was apologize to the people you’d hurt and try to be a better person in the future. He also wanted to tell her that he liked the way she looked in her yoga clothes, and that he’d laughed out loud when she told those assholes to suck her dick.



* * *



It got serious pretty quickly. They went to the same meetings on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and he was always happy to give her a ride home—her license had been revoked—and happy to follow her upstairs, into that little one-bedroom apartment that was almost as depressing as his own, though it had been decorated with a lot more care. There were fresh flowers on the kitchen table—Vito always reminded himself to send her a bouquet, though he never followed through—and the pastel sheets on her bed were clean and cool. He slept better when she was next to him.

It wasn’t always fun, though. She cried a lot, missed her kids so much it was like a physical illness. For the time being, she was only allowed to see them once a week—just a few hours on Sunday afternoons, in the house she’d been banished from—and it always took her a few days to recover. Vito was patient with her—one thing he’d learned over the past few months was patience—and he discovered that comforting her eased his own pain, or at least kept him from dwelling on it so much.

Wesley told him it was a bad idea, throwing himself into a new relationship, especially with another person in the early stages of recovery. He advised Vito to concentrate on his own sobriety and let Paige do the same. Love affairs could be stressful, he explained, and often triggered relapses.

“Keep it simple,” he said. “Don’t get distracted.”

“I hear you,” Vito said. “But I think Paige and I can help each other.”

“A lot of people think like that,” Wesley told him. “And most of them are wrong.”



* * *



Vito didn’t speak up very often at the meetings, but he wanted Paige to hear his story. There were some things he hadn’t been able to tell her when they were alone, things she deserved to know. So he took the floor one night in February and made his confession.

He talked about his disappointing career in the NFL, his bad marriages, his headaches and memory problems, the fear that he’d damaged his brain and was drifting into oblivion. He talked about his fragile ego, and the way the bourbon had puffed it up, reminding him of who he used to be, the charming asshole with talent to burn, the guy who always got the girls, the adulation, the money, everything he wanted.

“But I’m not that guy,” he said. “Not anymore. I’m a drunk, a bad husband, a terrible father. I hit my wife in front of my kids and I can’t take that back. I’m scared that when I’m dead, that’s all they’re gonna remember about me. So that’s what I’m dealing with right now. It’s heavy, I’m not gonna lie. Coming to these meetings helps a lot, though. Knowing we’re all in the same boat, helping each other. That’s what keeps me going.”

Paige was quiet on the way home. He wondered if she was having second thoughts now that she knew the worst. He wouldn’t blame her if she did.

“You… still want me to come up?” he asked, when they got back to her place.

“Yeah,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

They didn’t have sex that night. Paige turned off the light and they lay there for a while, wide awake in the dark.

“Do you still get the headaches?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not so much lately. And my memory’s a little better now that I stopped drinking. But something’s not right. I can feel it.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor. A neurologist or…”

Vito wasn’t sure he wanted a diagnosis—in some ways, it was better not to know—and from what he’d heard, the doctors couldn’t always tell, not while you were still alive.

“I will,” he said. “If it starts getting bad again.”

She took his hand under the covers and gave it a squeeze.

“I wish I could’ve seen you play.”

He had some DVDs he could show her. High school scouting footage. College highlights. The four games he’d started as a Dolphin, before his fucking knee blew out. He watched them sometimes when he needed a boost, to remind himself of what that had felt like, though it didn’t always work.

“I meant to tell you,” he said. “I got invited back to my hometown. They’re putting me in the high school Hall of Fame. There’s a ceremony next month.”

“Really?” she said. “That’s so cool. Good for you.”

It was cool, in a small-time kind of way. At the same time, he had mixed feelings about returning to Green Meadow, a place he’d avoided for years. There were some good memories back there, but there were a lot of bad ones too.