His analyst’s mind ran the odds. Of all the residents of Bentley, how could the first person Joel met upon his arrival be the one woman he was truly afraid to see? The woman who had been just as unpopular in high school as he but ten times harder, the woman permanently outshone by her famous older brother, the woman who would always be Joel’s first and final girlfriend: Starsha Marilynn Clark, though God help the man dumb enough to call her by all three names.
Three thousand to one, he thought. He supposed his luck could only improve from here.
Joel went for a handshake, saw her hesitate. Nodding toward the dim line of trucks, where he’d just enjoyed the pleasure of watching an old bully’s arrest, Joel said, “You’re a professional.”
“And we have an audience.” She shook his hand quickly, lit her cigarette.
“Jason turned out about how I expected.”
“We’ve all gotten a little worse for wear around here.”
She held the cigarette with her teeth, adjusted a bun of muddy brown hair. She’d always been short and oddly proportioned: legs too long, arms too brief—“the velociraptor,” they’d called her in school—but there was a nervy strength to her limbs now. Her nose had been broken at some point. She still had her brother’s startling jade eyes, and Joel saw that she was running odds behind those eyes, just like him. She wasn’t happy.
In a way, Joel was grateful for Clark’s chilliness. After everything he had put her through ten years ago—and wasn’t that a polite way of putting it—he was relieved she hadn’t decided to knock a few bright teeth from his mouth.
The young deputy beside her, a cute guy covered in tattoos, smiled with a cordial scorn Joel remembered well from his time here. The man nodded at the convertible. “You think that little beauty can handle these roads here?”
“I’m sure Mr. Whitley will put on a good show if it can’t,” Clark said.
Whatever Joel might have said in response was lost to a little whoop of greeting from the crowd. “My goodness, Officers, y’all never catch a breath of peace.” At the sound of her voice, Joel felt a knot loosen in his chest. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so grateful to know his mother was nearby.
She strode toward them with a hot dog in either hand, a massive leather bag dangling from the crook of her arm and a goggle-eyed Bison cap perched on her head.
“My Lord,” she said, looking Joel up and down and turning to Clark. “Don’t he look expensive?”
“Good to see you, Mrs. Whitley,” Clark said.
Browder tapped the brim of an invisible cap. “Your son’s a hell of a boy, ma’am,” he said, and turned very seriously toward the field as if to leave no doubt which son he meant.
“You two are pure charity,” said Joel’s mother. “Let me get this instigator out of y’all’s hair, no? Tell your father I said hello, Clark.”
Before Clark could turn away, Joel produced a business card from his wallet. A soft breeze toyed with the card’s corner. Clark looked at Joel, at his mother. With a puff of smoke, she plucked the card from his fingers.
“My Lord Jesus, will the ladies ever have words about this,” Joel’s mother murmured when they had cleared the crowd of onlookers. The man at the little ticket booth waved them through with a surprised “Oh” of recognition. “And folks only just stopped talking about all that business between you and Starsha back in the day. Not to mention all that sadness with her brother—oh, shit fire—did I not send you a jersey this year?”
Joel shook his head.
“Dylan said I should bring you an old one. He thinks of everything.” She handed Joel a hot dog. “There. Now it looks like you’re trying.”
Joel nibbled at the hot dog and took in his mother as she shouted her hellos and thank-yous to the folks who greeted her on their way by. Paulette Whitley, his indomitable mother. Her hair looked incredible and her makeup heavy: highlights and lowlights and two thick tracks of eyeliner. She was slimmer than Joel had ever seen her before—somehow her forearms were tighter than his own—yet he couldn’t help but notice that when she turned her head the skin of her neck was finally beginning to crack. With a sudden lurch of guilt, Joel saw that in his absence his mother had begun to grow old, an indignity he thought had been reserved entirely for him.
“We’re celebrities now, you know,” Paulette said, turning to Joel with a laugh. “Your brother calls me the Real Housewife of Pettis County.”
Joel smiled vaguely at this, at the familiar faces milling behind the stands. Curiously, there was no sign of that strange stuffed bison he’d encountered on his way in. Already Joel had written off the whisper he thought he’d heard in his speakers as road noise, written off the way the animal had seemed to study him from the bed of that truck but, still—Joel was glad he didn’t have to write it all off again.
“It sounds like Dylan is the real deal,” Joel said.
Paulette snorted. “You should hear the phone calls that boy gets.”
“Phone calls for football?”
“All the big schools is circling like sharks.” She counted her bright green nails. “Baylor, Notre Dame, Provincetown—”
“Princeton?”
“Penn State—they’re getting ready to spend some money on their college football, they say. Rumor has it there’s a baker’s dozen recruiters here tonight, but my bet is they’re waiting for the Perlin game next week. That’s the match you should have come home to see. These Cougars ain’t got much fight in them this year.” Paulette stopped as Joel took another bite of his hot dog. A shrewd look came into her eye. “Dylan still ain’t said why you decided to come down so sudden.”
Joel chewed slowly, considered all the ways this conversation could work against him. “Where’s Darren?”
“Houston. Killed him to miss this. He says hello.”
“I should call him.”
“He can text now.” She fumbled in her bag for something. “When Darren moved into the house, Dylan taught him how to use the little yellow faces. Tulum looked lovely.”
“More like salty.”
Paulette made a little hmm he remembered well. Some of Joel’s friends had mothers who gossiped with them about men and their attendant escapades as gleefully as they would with a daughter. Not Joel. He knew that, like subway travel and foreign food and apartment living, his queerness was the sort of thing Paulette could understand conceptually, could even see the appeal of in certain lights, but would rather not imagine in practice.
Why, he wondered, had she even brought it up tonight?
“Oh my word, look who it is!”
Joel turned to see a slim lady with a perfect shell of blond hair staring at him like he’d been fished from the lake.
“I had to come see for myself,” the lady said to Paulette. When she shook her head not a single strand of that hair moved. “Has he been here long?”
“You remember Mrs. Malacek, Joel.”
He didn’t. “Of course.”
“Mayor Malacek’s wife,” Paulette said. She always knew when he was lying. “Three terms later.”
“Soon to be four. My son loves your brother.” Mrs. Malacek let out a cackle like a wineglass striking a pool deck. With the most bizarre combination of pleasure and reproof Joel had ever heard, the woman added, “It takes a real talent to outshine the mayor’s firstborn, you know.”
“Oh my goodness, it is him!” called another thin woman, hustling to prevent any hope of escape. A small terrier trembled at its station in the woman’s purse.
“I told my husband, I told him it was you. Sweet mercy Lord, don’t you look growed? We needed a chest like that when you was in school.”
“Mrs. Mason,” Joel said, giving her a curt nod. Her nephew had gone well out of his way to make Joel’s high school years unbearable. “A pleasure.”
“He just arrived,” Mrs. Malacek said knowingly. “All the way from San Francisco.”
“New York, actually.”
“Have you met Raul?” Mrs. Mason hoisted the bag to show him the dog. Joel saw it was wearing a miniature Bison jersey with a tiny number 7. “He’s your brother’s biggest fan.”
Joel opened his mouth to say something, hesitated. “I’m sure Dylan needs all the support he can get.”
“It just takes one state championship to turn a town around,” Mrs. Malacek whispered.
The dog in Mrs. Mason’s bag eyed the hot dog in the woman’s hand. “And Heaven knows we need it—these stands are liable to rust right out from under us.”
“Has Dylan told you which way the wind is blowing?” Mrs. Malacek asked Joel.
“Well, there’s a storm to the southeast.”
The women showed their teeth when they laughed. Mrs. Malacek said, “You always were too clever for me. His college, silly. We got us a pool going at the teachers’ lounge. I have my money down your brother’s going to pledge to Baylor University. I know he’s a good Baptist boy at heart, even if this mother of yours has started dragging him around with the Methodists.”
Mrs. Malacek and Mrs. Mason went very still. They fixed Joel with stares so fervid he felt a flush creep over his cheeks. He decided to test a theory. “What do you think would happen if Dylan decided he didn’t want to play football in college?”
His mother’s head snapped up from her phone. The two women raised their eyebrows.
“But we love Dylan too much for him to quit,” Mrs. Malacek said brightly.
Mrs. Mason laughed and set Raul the terrier trembling again. “I think this town would kill him if he tried.”
“Jesus,” Joel said as he and his mother made their way toward their seats, leaving Mrs. Malacek and Mason to make a run on the convenience stand. “Since when did you hang out with the skinny moms?”
“Since they started calling me. Are you saying I weren’t always skinny?”
Joel marveled at the people around him. Here was Mr. Lott, the cartoonish man in the overalls and bow tie who somehow still ran the county’s oldest hardware store, followed by his tall wife and her permanent scowl. Here was the girl who had dropped out of Joel’s class to raise the boy who now trailed behind her with a Nintendo in his face. Joel had thought more people would have left this town. He couldn’t imagine what kept them here.
“How can nothing change in ten years?”
“You mean you didn’t notice on the way in?” Paulette arched an eyebrow. “The old church burned down. It was the talk of the summer.”
A little chill prickled in the back of his scalp. Sure enough, when Joel turned to look down the highway he saw that the electric cross of the Bentley First Baptist Church’s steeple, the white cross that had once burned bright enough to be seen for miles, was gone.
“Then thank God summer’s over.”
His mother gave him a patient look. “I figured you’d see it as an improvement.”
A roll of thunder made the pilings of the metal stands rattle. Paulette pulled two green ponchos from her bag, a bottle of water, a sack of trail mix. They made their way to the front row, where two empty spaces awaited them, not fifteen feet from the sideline.
Joel checked his phone, swiped away emails, saw he’d received a message from his brother. It was a selfie from inside the locker room—Joel would recognize those green cinder blocks anywhere—with Dylan and two other boys grinning in their pads. KILLING IT, the caption read, and nothing more.
“I thought that was you,” said a voice to Joel’s right, and a moment later Joel let out a laugh of surprise. It was Wesley Mores, a man who had been a year older than Joel in school and one of the few football players who had always treated him decently.
The two men embraced. Wesley’s broad back was still stiff with muscle.
“I was wondering if you’d moved back to town,” Joel said.
“Back? I hardly left. I teach science at the junior high.”
In the years since Joel had seen him, Wesley had suffered only a gentle retreat at his hairline. He’d gotten his teeth fixed, but now seemed shy about showing them, touching his mouth when Joel’s eye ran over it. He wore a thick wooden cross around his neck.
“Science?” Joel said, his ass clenching when he took his seat on the cold bleacher. “For some reason I thought you majored in art.”
Wesley smiled. “My passion is with the church. I lead the youth ministry at First Baptist.”
Christ—Joel couldn’t escape that place. “I just heard about the fire.”
“There’s a blessing in it somewhere.” Wesley fixed Joel with a smile that seemed to add, If you know what I mean.
Joel didn’t, but before he could say more the marching band launched into the opening bars of “My Herd, My Glory” and the Bison poured out of the field house. Joel rose to his feet with the rest of the town, hardly aware he was moving, and cheered wildly at the sight of his brother jogging out ahead of the others. Even under his pads, Dylan seemed to float an inch above the turf.
The Cougars’ captain accepted the ball from the referee, watched his line assemble. Dylan thumped a pale Latino boy on the back and hustled to the sidelines.
“Tomas Hernandez,” Wesley murmured as the Latino boy headed for the end zone. “He knows how to kick a ball when he feels like it. Your brother caused some consternation when he won the coin toss at the top of the game but deferred the kick until the second half. The Bison’re an offense-heavy team. You’d think he’d want to use the o-line while they’re fresh.”
“Is it something to do with the weather?” Joel eyed the black sky.
“The weather?” Wesley said, and in response a strong wind kicked up from the south.
The whistle. Hernandez, the Bison’s kicker, struck the ball hard and the line sprinted after it. Rattichville’s offense fought a humid gust of storm wind. By the end of four quick downs, Bentley had pushed the visitors to within thirty yards of their own goal line.
Joel felt a novel twist of pride—Dylan had checked the forecast this evening. He smiled at the back of his brother’s helmet. Provided the thunderhead moving into town didn’t do anything erratic, Dylan had just arranged for the Bison to play the second half of the game with the wind at their backs.
Dylan made his way to the field with a chorus of cheers. A shouted play. Dylan clapped, caught the ball and lobbed it long. The wind took hold of the pass and carried it snugly into KT Staler’s bony arms. The boy trotted it into the end zone with a pompous little stomp as the stands let out a roar to rival the thunder.
Through the euphoria that followed, Joel caught sight of one player who seemed unimpressed. The Bison’s muscled running back accepted a squirt of water into his mouth and removed his helmet to wipe his face with the hem of his jersey. He had a stomach so grooved Joel could count his abs from yards away.
“Is that Luke Evers?” Joel asked. Luke and Dylan had once been inseparable.
“Don’t mention that name when your brother’s around,” said Paulette, still clapping. “Pity how Luke’s face turned out, no?”
Indeed. Luke had never been the cutest of boys but now his good looks started firmly below his neck. He only looked worse when Dylan finally reached the sidelines and Luke said something with a violent shake of the head like he was trying to beat an old argument back to life. Dylan waved Luke away but the muscled boy stepped forward, jabbed a finger at Dylan’s chest, scowled.
“The hell is eating him?” Joel said.
“There’s no telling.” Paulette chewed trail mix.
“They haven’t been the same since Dylan started dating Bethany Tanner,” Wesley said. He nodded at a tall blonde cheerleader who was iridescent with glitter. Joel recognized the girl from his brother’s Instagram but couldn’t place what Wesley meant. Unless Joel was much mistaken, Bethany and Dylan had been dating for years.
Joel regarded Luke and Dylan with a touch of concern: whatever they were fighting over it seemed far more dire than an old breakup.
In the end, he said nothing.
The wind held. The Cougars were beaten back again and again. After a few long plays, someone called a time-out from the sidelines and, a moment later, Beyoncé’s reliable hype belted from the speakers. Three black cheerleaders threw themselves into a hip-hop dance. Flanked by two girls, the boy in the center of the trio—the sole boy on the cheer squad, to Joel’s eye—threw his hips forward and back with a flair that made Joel smile.
Wesley itched his cheek. He said out of the side of his mouth, “We’ve had more of that the last few years.”
And just like that, all of Joel’s old anger at this place came flaming up again. His mother was wrong—things were exactly like they’d been in his day. When the cheerleaders’ routine was over, Joel realized he was the only person in the front row clapping.
Wesley flinched at the sound of Joel’s applause. People stared.
Joel clapped harder. It was going to be a long weekend.