Fools

Since Michelle had to get to the football field early Friday evening to work the concession stand for homecoming, I got to play the major role in the Lauren First Date story. It was my job to take her to fetch Martin, and then to chauffeur them around town, which wasn’t so bad, really, even if it was a preview of plenty of late-night worrying to come, because Lauren did look beautiful, even without the excess makeup Michelle had ordered her to take off. “You look like a twenty-dollar hooker,” she said, chanting the time-honored refrain of parents of young women throughout the ages.

Maybe the reason we use the same tired accusations as our parents is because our kids make the same tired excuses. I knew “Everyone else is wearing their makeup like this,” would be Lauren’s reply before it came out. I left the room to avoid being caught in the loop.

Lauren had mostly gotten over her sulk by the time I got her into the truck.

“Don’t embarrass me,” she said as she checked her lips and hair in the dusty visor mirror.

“Do I ever?”

“Don’t tell any jokes,” she said. “Talk about sports. Or school.”

“You look great,” I told her. “Martin is lucky to be seen with you tonight. I think maybe we should talk about how lucky he is.”

“God help me,” she muttered and put the visor up as we bounced to the end of our driveway.

“Let’s see. What else could we talk about? Is Martin a vegetarian?”

“God help me,” she repeated. She rolled her eyes and looked across at me with tolerant affection.

“I’ll be good,” I promised, and I was. I shook Martin’s hand firmly but without bone-crunching malice when he got in, drove quietly from the Amos place at the corner of Seventh and Laing, across from the fairgrounds, to the football stadium. Lauren’s jacket sleeve rustled against mine—she, of course, had scooted into the middle to make room for Martin. Beneath it she wore one of those satiny Mo Betta Western shirts with a wild geometric design and a pair of tight-fitting Lee jeans. I figured if her mother had let her leave the house in this outfit it wasn’t my place to send her back, but I did indeed have that thought.

As we passed my hideous gymnasium—bluish and greenish metal siding with a brick front—we saw that the stadium to the north was already filling up with people decked out in red and black. I could see Bobby Ray up on top of the red press box with the video camera he used to film the games for the coaches—perks of school board membership—and if I’d been able to stop and look closely I could have located Michelle dishing out coffee and cokes in paper cups from the concession stand in the northwest corner of the stadium, just off the west end zone.

When we stopped and Martin opened his door, I quickly outlined the ground rules: “Fifteen minutes after the game ends, you will be at this truck. We’ll take you to Pizza Hut. You may sit with your friends. After we’ve eaten, you’ve played video games, Michelle and I have had a last cup of coffee, we will head for our respective homes. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Martin said.

“Got it,” Lauren said, sliding toward Martin and freedom. They disappeared toward the stadium at a dead run before I could say something like, “Synchronize your watches,” as Lauren knew I probably would.

After I bought my ticket, I sauntered over to the concession stand, stopped almost every step of the way by people asking after the basketball team. Maybe with the football team a miserable failure, people would turn to basketball. Maybe basketball would become everyone’s sport of choice. Maybe God would plant in the heavens a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide these record crowds toward the gymnasium.

In any case, I tried to sound hopeful about my kids, and when people asked enthusiastically about the benefit game at Christmas, I smiled and said we’d work hard to put on a good show. That seemed to satisfy them.

After tossing such mendacity about like chicken feed, it was pleasant to spend a short truthful moment with Michelle as she poured coffee into the big insulated mug I’d brought.

“Kids okay?”

“They were polite,” I said, pulling out my wallet to replant the change she gave me. “To expect more would be pointless.”

“True enough,” she said. “Come back later?”

“Of course.” I raised my mug after securing the lid. “I’ll be back when it’s time for a refill.”

The size of the crowd surprised me, as homecoming crowds always do. It’s like Easter Sunday services—people you haven’t seen all year apparently decide it’s a good thing to show up and demonstrate where their loyalties lie. I pushed up toward the spot in the home bleachers where Oz and Michael Graywolf and a few others normally sit and couldn’t even see them. The stands were full of strange people—strange in a familiar way, admittedly—but still people who normally weren’t sitting in my seat.

I climbed up to the press box, thinking I might presume on school connections for a seat up there. Reporters from the Watonga Republican and the Geary paper shared the booth proper with the PA announcer, George Hoberecht. George looked up and waggled his triple chins at me. “Try the roof,” he said. “Bobby Ray’d likely welcome the company.”

I went up the ladder, one hand holding my coffee, rapped on the trapdoor to announce myself, pushed it open, and pulled myself up onto the roof. “You got room for an old friend?” I asked, aware that we had not acted much like old friends the last time we’d seen each other.

“If you don’t mind sharing the roof with an idiot,” he said, and gave me a rueful smile. Then he extended a hand and pulled me to my feet.

The roof of the press box was about twelve by fifteen, and there was a railing around it. Up here, you could feel the wind blowing in from Kansas. On the flagpole above us flapped the flags of the United States of America, the state of Oklahoma, and the Watonga Eagles.

The video camera pointed to the fifty-yard line from its tripod, and Bobby Ray was sitting on a folding chair sipping his own cup of coffee. “Good idea,” he said as I took the lid off my mug, both of us sending mist into the air. “I always spill half of mine on the way up.”

“I have my moments,” I said, sipping and feeling the warm welcome bitterness spread out from my stomach.

“That you do,” he said. There was a moment when he studied his shoe, then he inhaled deeply and looked up at me. “We still have practice this weekend?”

I exhaled fog. “How’s Sunday afternoon for you?”

“Sunday afternoon is good for me. Any chance we’ll get Bill up here for a practice?”

“Probably, now that the Texas elections are over,” I said. “I should have asked him—” I stopped. I really hadn’t had a chance to ask anything the last time he called.

Bobby Ray broke off mid-sip and leaned forward confidentially. “Bill better have supported good folks this time,” he said. “’Cos I’d guess his chances of getting himself elected dogcatcher now are about as good as my chances of getting a big loan from First Watonga. Not that I care, mind you.”

“Why do you say that?”

He eyed me curiously. “I’ve never cared for Bill. You know that.”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Not why don’t you care. Why couldn’t he get elected dogcatcher?”

Bobby Ray looked through the viewfinder and adjusted the focus. “He’s lost the wholesome family man thing now. Grave political liability.”

I set my mug down on the ground and straightened up to look Bobby Ray in the eyes. “Lost what?”

“When Samantha left him,” Bobby Ray said, as though he were explaining something to an infant. The band was coming out onto the field, and I could hear the smart slap of their feet as they marched past on the asphalt track.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Who left who?” I remembered Samantha’s breathy “We need to talk,” Bill’s bizarre phone manners, and suddenly I felt a sledgehammer blow to the solar plexus.

“Whoa, partner,” he said. He reached a tentative hand out as if to steady me, and I must have needed it, because I found myself leaning heavily against the railing. “I thought you knew. Marcie told me she ran into Michelle in the frozen food aisle at Homeland and told her all about it.” Marcie was Bobby Ray’s third and most recent wife, a more recent former head cheerleader, former secretary for Bobby Ray. He hadn’t found another secretary as good, and he was still mad at her for quitting when he married her.

“Michelle didn’t tell you that Samantha and Bill split up?”

“Must have slipped her mind,” I said. At the edge of my hearing, I heard the crowd roar its approval at the conclusion of the national anthem. It sounded like the ocean in a big conch shell my dad brought home from Guam after the war.

“Why?” I finally said, and it must have been some time later, because Watonga had already kicked off and Bobby Ray was bent over the viewfinder of his camera.

“Get the wind at the end of each half, I guess.”

“No.” This was why I never liked talking to Bobby Ray. “Not why didn’t we elect to receive, if that’s what you’re telling me. What happened to Bill and Sam?”

“I hear she had an affair.” He shrugged without looking up. “I hear he had an affair. Who knows? Their parents aren’t talking about it, and they aren’t talking to each other, either.”

The sledgehammer was gone, and in its place my stomach now felt as empty as if I were coming off a five-day fast. I took a gulp of coffee to try and counteract it, but this was one of the few things coffee couldn’t make better. “So what’s going on? Are they getting divorced? Where are the kids? Is she coming back here?”

Bobby Ray lifted his eye from the camera to look across at me. “You better hope not, old son.”

And dimwitted as he could sometimes be, about this Bobby Ray was right. It was a strange feeling to hear that my first love had left her husband, and stranger still to think about running into her in the flesh.

“I hear Samantha’s moved to Fort Worth with the kids,” Bobby Ray said a few plays later, after Canton had punted and Watonga took over on their own thirty. “She’s still selling real estate. Making good money, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.” Through the crowd milling in front of the stands I saw Michael Graywolf, and next to him, someone else I knew. “Look. There’s Phillip.”

“Really?” Bobby Ray couldn’t take his eyes off a pass play, but the surprise was evident in his voice.

“Down below and to the right,” I said, and he took a look as the referees conferred about what to do on the play they’d just whistled dead.

“That was interference, plain and simple,” Bobby Ray said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “They’re looking up this way.”

“Well, I guess you better wave,” Bobby Ray said. “Wouldn’t want ’em to think we’re unfriendly.”

“No, we wouldn’t,” I said. I waved. Michael waved back and nudged Phillip, who looked up hesitantly. He nodded. Beside me, Bobby Ray nodded back.

“He’s had a tough old row to hoe,” Bobby Ray said, as close to an apology as he was ever going to get.

“That he has,” I said, and took another sip. “I think I’ll pop down and tell him howdy.”

“You’re welcome to come back up here if you like,” Bobby Ray said, followed closely by a curse as a Canton Tiger blocked our punt and chased it toward our goal line. “We are just god-awful.”

I understood his frustration. It’s hard to be a fan for a team that loses, unless they do so in lovable fashion—like the Chicago Cubs. Our Watonga boys that year didn’t make endearingly horrendous mistakes like running the wrong way for touchdowns. They just got beat by better teams week after week, and there’s not much fun in that.

After climbing down and through the press box, I made my way into the bleachers to Michael and Phillip, and managed to get a few words in to both before we were swept apart by the tide of fans. I took a step in the direction of Michelle, then remembered that what I most wanted to talk to her about was not suitable for a public conversation. So I went back up on the roof after answering another round of questions about the varsity team, about the basketball fund-raiser, about my hopes for the season.

“God save us,” I said when I got back up on the roof of the press box. “The worse the score gets, the more people want to know about basketball.”

“You may have to sneak out the back before it’s all over,” Bobby Ray said. We had gone down two touchdowns in the short time I had been gone.

“What happened?”

“Converted on the blocked punt, then ran in an interception. Our guys would be better off just falling on the ball for the next three quarters.”

And he was right. It might have made the score more respectable. After the final gun went off and we had lost by thirty-eight, I patted Bobby Ray on the back, told him I’d see him Sunday, and started out toward the truck.

Carla caught me on the sleeve as I passed the gate. “Run for your life,” she told me. “These people are desperate for a winner.”

“They’ve probably been asking my kids about our chances,” I said. “I hope they lied.”

“You hang in there,” she said. “Looks like some more folks are waiting on you.” She smiled and took off toward her Jeep, and I turned, ready to put on a false smile and give a big Chamber of Commerce handshake.

“Hurry up, Dad,” Lauren called, for indeed it was my lovely daughter and her beau leaning against the truck. “Pizza Hut will be full.”

Which it was. Had there been chandeliers, kids would have been swinging from them. Every booth was full to overflowing, angular adolescent knees were jutting out into public space, and the waiting line seemed to contain as many folks as were already stuffed into booths. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “McBee’s? Hi-De-Ho?”

Lauren rolled her eyes. As if. “We’ll stay here, Dad. You’re welcome to go if you want.”

Michelle arrived then, having parked her car down the highway in front of the Dodge dealership and walked over. “What a madhouse,” she said, and smiled admiringly.

“We’re staying,” Lauren said.

Michelle looked across at me and saw my grimace, then checked her watch. “Okay. We’ll be back for you at eleven thirty. And woe be unto you if we have to go looking for you.” Then she hooked her arm through mine and led me out into the chilly air of the parking lot.

I looked across at her. “‘Woe be unto you?’”

“That’s right, cowboy.” She gave my arm a tug. “Buy me a cup of coffee?”

I grunted assent. “How about McBee’s?”

“I guess so. Who’s driving?”

I shrugged, and she looked up at me and blinked. “Bad night? Did the kids act up?”

“Not now,” I said. “When we’re in the car.”

We walked in silence, our footsteps crunching on gravel as we approached the car. I didn’t open her door for her. The stars were dancing wildly in the cold night air, and I stood for a moment at the passenger door looking up and out into the inky darkness splashed with light. How peaceful it all looked up there.

“You’re angry,” she said after I got in and she started the car and I still didn’t speak.

I held myself still and let my voice stay calm. “Why didn’t you tell me about Bill and Sam?”

“Ah,” she said. “That.” She pulled onto the two-lane highway headed back into town. “Well,” she said as she stopped at the four-way stop, “it’s like this.” Then she eased straight ahead instead of making the right turn toward McBee’s. “Let’s say that there’s a convicted killer who escapes from prison, and you know he’s coming back to get you. No. Hang on. That’s not a good analogy. Strike that.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove. She turned right, then right again, through the middle of town. When the silence seemed like it would never be broken, she tried again. “Okay. Let’s say that your husband is an alcoholic, and you know a liquor store the size of a Super Wal-Mart is about to open up the next town over.” She grimaced, wrinkling her nose, chanced a look at me. “No, that makes you sound like—well—not good. I don’t mean that.”

She took a deep breath, took another look across at me, and said quietly, “Okay. Let’s suppose that you’re a wife whose husband still misses the woman he lost when they were kids, a woman who has just split up with her husband and is headed back to town. She’s rich and beautiful and smart and funny, and why wouldn’t he still love her?” She took a deep breath. “But why should the wife have to be the one to break the news to him? Why should she be the one to watch his reaction?”

She turned right again, drove for a bit, stopped at the four-way stop again, this time headed west out of town. Finally she asked, “How did you react?”

“I was—surprised.”

“I’ll bet,” she said. “I just didn’t want to see that. Can you understand?”

“Better,” I said. “Although you should know by now that you’ve got nothing to worry about. You could have told me.”

“I don’t know that,” she said, and her voice was no longer calm and pleasant. “I don’t know that at all.” Her head jerked, and the car eased over slowly to the side of the road, stopping on the shoulder. She covered her eyes with her hands.

I leaned across toward her and tried to take her in my arms, but she pushed me away. “J. J., if you’re going to leave me,” she sobbed, “I don’t want you to be nice about it. Don’t lie to me and disappear. Just tell me. We’ll get along fine. I won’t make things hard for you. Just tell me, that’s all.”

“I’m not going to leave you, Shell,” I said, and at that moment, I certainly didn’t want to. “Get that out of your head.” This time when I tried to gather her up she consented. I held her while she sobbed, her frame shuddering as she tried to hold it back, all the time telling her, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not going to leave you.”

And as I said it I was praying, Please, please, let that be true.

After awhile, my arm went numb, and I looked over her shoulder at the steamed-up windows, wondering if she believed me, wondering if I believed myself, wondering why I was wondering.

And at last, I realized that I was wondering because we had been sitting there for a very long time. I didn’t want to say anything—there wasn’t anything I could say to make things better—but I cleared my throat and asked, “Shell, what time is it?”

And since Michelle was a parent as well as a frightened human being, she instantly caught my meaning and checked her watch. “Well, that’s not good,” she said. “It’s eleven thirty.” She fumbled for the ignition, started the car, and pulled a highly illegal U-turn.

“Set the car clock back ten minutes,” she said. “As long as we’re still the parents in this family, time is what we say it is.”

Lauren and Martin stood shivering outside the Pizza Hut when we pulled up. Michelle had blown her nose just before we turned into the parking lot, and I had brushed some wisps of hair off her flushed face and back behind her ears. When we pulled up, I opened my door while Michelle sat, motor running, and got out.

“You’re late,” Lauren said. “We’ve been standing out here for hours.”

“She says we’re late,” I said.

“Not by my watch,” Michelle said. “You hurry home.”

“We will,” I said. I smiled at her, but all I got in return before I shut the door was a pursing of the lips.

I gave Michelle a complete postdate debriefing in our truth-telling period as I got ready for bed: how Lauren had not held Martin’s hand in the truck, how Lauren had not walked Martin up to the front porch, how their good-byes had been truck-borne and brief—“See ya.”

By common consent we did not speak of our earlier conversation in the car, although naturally it filled the bedroom like air, invisible yet tangible whenever one of us moved.

I noticed that I was the only one making preparations for bed. “Are you staying up?” I asked around a mouthful of toothbrush.

“Of course I’m standing up,” she said, so I spit and asked again.

“Oh,” she said. “For awhile.” She poked her head into the bathroom. “I’m not mad. Okay? I’m not mad.”

“I’m not mad either,” I said. I shivered as I slid between the cold sheets. “Don’t stay up too late.”

When she did come in, it was after two, and it was to whisper in my ear: “J. J., do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” I must have muttered, and rolled over, but she had more to say.

“You know, J. J.,” she whispered, “it hurt me the first time you went back to her, and I didn’t really have a claim on you. And I was younger and more resilient then.”

I grunted, because there was little I could say that I hadn’t already said, and because I was really tired.

She nestled in next to me like a bird nudging a nest toward comfort. At last, she settled down, and as I dropped off, I heard her murmur, “Don’t leave me, J. J.”

“I won’t leave you,” I tried to say, but my eyes were heavy, my lips didn’t seem to move, and the next thing I knew, it was morning.

I got up in the dim light, spent several hours taking care of my calves, filling troughs with feed for the older ones and moving unweaned babies onto the waiting udders of the milk cows standing around for that very purpose.

When I came in, the house was warm and smelled of sourdough biscuits, and I smiled, took off my boots and coveralls, and went into the kitchen. Lauren and Michelle were sitting cross-legged and facing each other in adjacent chairs at the table, and they were giggling like schoolgirls sharing secrets.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll just back out of here before I hear something I shouldn’t. You never saw me.”

“Oh, get in here,” Lauren said. “I made biscuits.”

I sat, split open several steaming biscuits, spread them with butter and blackberry jam, and ate slowly, savoring the mingling of hot and creamy and sour and chewy in each bite.

Meanwhile, decorum had returned to the table, and the girls sat primly, straight-faced, although their eyes occasionally darted to meet the other’s. “I’m being left out of something,” I said between biscuits, and Lauren simply said, “Yup,” and they both donned identical wry grins. That was all I got.

Our senior citizen practice the next day began on a similarly lighthearted note, although for very different reasons. It is true that Bobby Ray was, for Bobby Ray, positively kind to Phillip, which was a good development, and since I’d invited a bunch of the varsity up to shoot while the gym was open I was able to orchestrate a scrimmage between old and young teams, a predress rehearsal of sorts. And Jimmy Bad Heart Bull was there in tennis shoes instead of the football cleats he’d occupied all fall, which was pleasant. I was starting to think that I’d only imagined him. I invited him to play with us old folks, since the first team I’d been running in practice all fall was present and had gotten used to playing with one another. B. W. led their offense and I led ours, such as it was—my team was so bad that really all you could do was laugh about it.

We hadn’t been up and down the court a half-dozen times before Bobby Ray and Phillip were gasping, and when B. W. took an outlet pass from Micheal Wilkes at half-court and dashed past Jimmy, I knew we were in trouble. They had scored four times in a row—five, after B. W.’s layup—and we hadn’t done anything. We were staring embarrassment in the face.

I tried to be patient, to find one of my guys when he was open, but my guys—except for Oz—stood around waiting for me to do something. Oz spent most of his time setting picks for me, which meant my chances of hitting him for an open shot were almost nil unless he rolled off and got open after setting his pick, which he had apparently forgotten how to do. No, when he set a pick he became a semipermanent organic wall; he was standing around like everyone else but was at least preserving the illusion that he was doing something useful.

Several times I passed to Bobby Ray, who had taken up occupancy to the right of the basket outside the three-point line, and every time he put up a shot. One was blocked spectacularly by Martel Sparks into the fourth row of the bleachers; one caromed back off the rim for a long rebound and another easy layup for B. W.; another missed the rim and the backboard, and I was a little surprised that it managed to hit the floor.

On defense we weren’t much better. I had put us in a zone defense because I didn’t think we could keep up with them man-to-man—a pretty easy prediction to make, since Phillip and I were our most fleet footed, and that wasn’t saying much—but my kids were moving, cutting along the baseline, setting screens for each other like I’d taught them, and even in a zone we old men looked like stumblebums.

So we must have been down about 12-0 when I finally decided that, even though my role since childhood had always been assist man and not scorer, maybe I should take things in hand and see if I could fare any better than my cohorts, which is to say, not well at all.

At the time, it seemed to happen in a flash of motion and momentum, but when I related it to folks later I realized I could slow it down and run it back to see what I did wrong, what I might have done differently. I have had other such moments in life: on a sweltering summer day when I was fifteen, turning a tractor over on a steep side hill and jumping for my life into the hot sandy soil; on a Friday night, with the tangible scent of sweat seeping in from outside of the coach’s office and of ersatz orange on our breaths from drinking Gatorade and Everclear, kissing Michelle Hooks just before we made Michael; on a muddy Sunday morning, stepping into the house with my boots thick with manure while down the hall I knew my sons were trying to hurt each other.

On this occasion, what happened was this: I thought I saw a passageway between B. W., who wasn’t guarding me that closely, and Martel Sparks, who was hovering close to Bobby Ray. I was dribbling slowly with my left hand, my head up, seemingly scanning the floor for a pass, and not watching the opening I thought I could drive through.

I gave a slight head and shoulder fake left, shifted my dribble to the other hand, and tried to dart to the right around B. W. and up the center of the three-second lane. My strategy was textbook; since we weren’t doing anything from the perimeter, we needed to penetrate, and I could either dish off when the defense collapsed or take the easy layup if it presented itself. My execution was not, however, textbook.

You see, I didn’t exactly dart around B. W. He was too quick for me, had sidestepped to cut off the path to the basket, and I saw this almost as soon as I pushed off. So I went up for what I hoped would be a floating jump shot from inside the foul line. It was, and I had the pleasure of seeing the ball bank off the backboard and into the bucket before the not-so-pleasurable realization that B. W.’s new position was directly in my flight path.

I twisted my body to try to keep from running into him, bringing my left shoulder down and in. I was not so conscious of anything else after my left foot came down on the side of B. W.’s shoe and my ankle bent sideways at an angle it is not meant to assume, and I collapsed to the floor with a nest full of hornets buzzing about my foot and up my shin.

I gasped, felt my face contort.

“Are you okay, Dad?” B. W. asked, on one knee next to me. “Can you get up?”

I flexed my foot once experimentally, and let out another gasp of pain. “Help me up,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think that was a blocking foul.” He held out a strong arm, and I pulled myself up, hopping on my right foot.

“I think it would have been a charge,” I said, and I gingerly put my left foot lightly to the ground. Hornets. I hopped over to the sideline, letting my left foot touch ground as briefly as possible. I figured I had better not let it stiffen up on me, so I told everyone to take a short break, and I walked slowly up and down the sideline until the pain subsided to a throbbing.

“Somebody should take a look at that,” Oz said when I walked back onto the court and we huddled briefly. “You could have a real bad sprain.”

I waved him off through gritted teeth. “It’s nothing. Remember what Coach Von used to say whenever one of us went down in practice?”

“Walk it off,” came the simultaneous reply from Phillip, Bobby Ray, and Oz, and they raised their heads and looked at one another with happy recognition.

“Let’s see some more movement,” I said. “We need to screen Bobby Ray for some open shots.” I looked meaningfully over at him and gave him a wry smile. “I know he’s going to find the range eventually. We may have to double-screen Martel. He’s tenacious today, for some reason. Phillip, you and Jimmy need to crash the boards on both ends. Work for position. You remember how.”

“It’s been a long time, Coach,” Jimmy said.

“No kidding,” Phillip said. “But we’ll do our best.”

And we made a game of it. Not if you were keeping score, of course; we were so far behind that all we really could have claimed was a moral victory, whatever that is. But we stayed roughly even with the varsity from that point on, and it felt good. Even without Bill in the middle, we hit some shots from outside, put some offensive rebounds in, and closed the sieve that had been our defense.

I myself didn’t do much besides limp, and B. W. could have driven on me at any time, but he was generous, or maybe still feeling guilty; he was prone to that. When we decided to call a halt after an hour or so, I was grateful. I could see the swelling coming up and out of my high-topped Nikes and knew that when I took off that shoe I was not going to like what I saw.

“Dad, I really think you need to get that ankle looked at,” B. W. said. “It looks like trouble.”

“If I ice it down when we get home, it’ll be fine,” I lied. I didn’t want to go to the emergency room; too much money, even with Michelle’s insurance. “Could you run Phillip out to his place?”

“I’ll walk,” Phillip said. “Y’all shouldn’t have to cart me around.”

“Hey, it’s freezing out there,” B. W. said. “I don’t mind.”

“One of these days I’ll get my old truck running,” Phillip said, and B. W. was asking him what was wrong with it as I limped for the exit door.

“You sure you can get home okay?” Bobby Ray asked as we pushed out into the cold.

“Just need one foot to drive this truck,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks for asking. And good shooting.”

“I did all right,” he said. “Maybe we won’t make fools of ourselves after all.”

“Maybe,” I said, hopping off like an idiot. I still had more than a few doubts on that score, at least where I was concerned.