Nolan
The empty house is strange. I guess it isn’t completely empty. Buck and Rose are here, and Peyton’s locked away in her room swearing off boys forever. I’m okay with that. Maybe she’ll be one of those people who swears off intimacy of the romantic kind. It will be so much easier to guide her through that.
It’s a pipe dream. I know it is, because my girl is a dreamer. Whether she’ll admit it to me now or not, she’s just like me. She used to want to be just like me. It made her proud. We’d make up fairytales, and while our girls were always strong and independent, they also liked to fall in love. Love was real.
Love is real.
It just isn’t easy.
I tap on her door on my way back downstairs, one last attempt to bring her out of her misery. The one thing she’s missing is a core of friends. I don’t know how I would have gotten through half of the shit that comes along with being a teenager without the girls and Sean. The thought brings Sarah racing to the forefront of my mind as Peyton groans on the other side of the doorway. I know I promised not to say anything, but that was just about the ring. I think the rest is fair game. It’s not like Peyton didn’t see their naked bodies flailing around the hallway either.
“Hey, I have news on Uncle Jason and Sarah.”
She perks up.
“Come in!” I smile behind the door and start to giggle.
She loves gossip.
She hasn’t gotten out of bed today, and she’s wearing the same T-shirt she had on when I said good night yesterday.
I move to sit on the end of her bed, and she pulls her comforter in over her folded up legs and quirks a brow at me.
“Well?” She’s hedging a little, expecting this to be a trick to get me in the room so I can talk to her more about Bryce. She’s done talking about Bryce though, and I get it. I wouldn’t do that to her. I just need to talk to her and feel her out, make sure she’s okay. And when I have actual gossip to share, she’s going to be glad.
“Six months,” I say. Her eyes squint. “That’s how long they’ve been together,” I fill in. Her eyes widen.
“Six months?” Her mouth pauses open, and I can see her mentally ticking back through every time we’ve been with Sarah and when Jason’s been here to visit. How did we miss this? I can’t stop doing the exact same thing.
“Sarah can keep a secret after all, it seems,” I say, pursing my lips.
“I guess so,” she says, bunching hers then laughing.
“Uncle Jason told Daddy,” I explain. “Apparently, they’re in love.”
I say it like a joke, but only because it will make Peyton laugh, which it does. Having heard the details from Reed, and judging from the fact that Sarah is still avoiding me, I know better. My best friend is going to be my sister…I think. I’m not sure how that works, when friends marry brothers, but I’m sure, legally, we’ll be connected somehow.
“Your dad’s game is on soon. Grandma Rose is making snacks. Come on down,” I say, tugging at the corner of her blanket. She lets one leg slide out, begrudgingly. I reach for her hand and she gives it to me, letting her body slump backward as if moving out of this bed is impossible. “Come on…you can do it,” I tease.
“It’s not like Dad’s going to play,” she says.
I puff out a small laugh, but an itch tickles in the back of my mind because for the first time in weeks, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it is…possible.
“You know he likes to give us little signs on camera. Let’s see if we can see him holding up fingers and scratching his nose.”
My daughter finally gives in and brings both feet to the floor, standing on her own.
“Last time it looked like he was picking his nose. My friends saw that. It was so embarrassing.”
I snort laugh, a little proud of my husband for embarrassing our teen. It’s a rite of passage, and it’s the one benefit from dealing with the drama.
Peyton and I make it downstairs just as Rose is settling Buck into the comfortable chair closest to the TV.
“Dah dah dah dah,” he cries out, his pathetic attempt at singing. He’s playing the football music with his mouth, and it isn’t his stroke that made it sound so awful. His musical skills are genetic, and his son got the same exact ones.
“I made caramel bars,” Rose announces, slipping around the counter in the kitchen and pulling a tray from the fridge that I have no idea how I missed. I bet she had those hidden in the garage to keep them away from my friends—from Sarah.
“Where’s my girlfriend?” Buck is asking about my friend. He and Sarah are close, and she’s usually here for the evening games—especially for Reed’s.
“She’s tied up. Hopefully, she’ll come a little later,” I say, glancing at Peyton and widening my eyes in warning. She understands and nods. We won’t ruin this for Jason. It’s his to tell his dad, and I think Buck is going to be both thrilled and sad that he’s losing a pretend girlfriend and gaining a daughter.
Peyton nestles into the corner of the couch closest to Buck, and I watch from the back of the room, near the kitchen, as he struggles to reach for her hand. I can barely hear them, but I get just enough to know he’s consoling her. He’s always been good at making heartache hurt less.
“You want me to…let one of those…Tucson coaches know his weak side?” Buck jokes, and Peyton smiles.
“Maybe,” she says, taking his hand in both of hers. She leans against the sofa’s arm and hugs her grandfather’s arm completely, leaving her head to rest on his bicep. It’s sweet, even if it’s to comfort her broken heart.
She thinks Buck’s kidding about calling the coaches, but if she asked, I know that he would or he’d have one of us send an email to a friend he has. He has friends everywhere when it comes to high school football in the Southwest. There isn’t a team he can’t help or hinder. Even now, as a senior citizen. I heard once he found out about a team that was stealing plays from their rival and he got involved by cancelling their uniform order. That team had a hard time finding anyone in Arizona or California willing to print their jerseys.
I got Buck up to speed on Reed, so he isn’t surprised to hear his son talking with the sideline reporter for our local broadcast of the game. We get special highlights of Reed, and Buck counts on them, hopping around the channels with deft. He can’t drive a car any longer, and walking is hard to manage, but he can run the Sunday ticket with no trouble at all.
“He looks good,” Peyton calls over her shoulder after we listen to her dad talk about how much he appreciates the team putting the work in for him and helping him get healthy again.
“He always looks good,” I smile.
I stay in the back of the room, wanting to have a little privacy while I stare at my husband through the screen. He gives me a few hints, like the way he brushes the end of his nose with his knuckle and pulls his beanie from his head and scratches at his mussy hair. Those gestures translate to a lot of love for me. They still tickle my heart and make my entire chest warm, even after all these years.
Buck switches over to the game’s station when Reed’s interview is done, and the first quarter is already in progress. It’s only been a minute, but Duke Miller’s already thrown one touchdown. I scan the sidelines as the camera rushes to follow him back to the bench as he celebrates, and I sit up higher and smile when I see Reed clasp hands with Duke.
When the camera view cuts Reed’s face in half, though, I fall back and grab the underside of my seat. It’s such a foreign tightness in my chest. I’m too far to really hear anything clearly, especially with Buck and Peyton talking over the announcer. I know that the announcers are probably talking about Duke, rattling off stats and expectations for today—this season. Suddenly, seeing the frame centered around this young quarterback, working to remove Reed from the view completely…it stings. And it’s not my own need to be married to the superstar stud athlete. It’s the way Reed is being cut in half, no longer the most important piece of the team—no longer the heart.
I get it. This has to be killing him.
The defense takes over, and the focus is back on the game. I listen close, waiting to hear a mention of Reed’s name. Anything. A comparison, or a mention of his mentorship. They probably talked about his leg being better before we switched the channel over, but even if that’s the case, it was a small mention. It wasn’t what was important. Duke is what’s important now.
Reed is what was important.
The first quarter passes without a lot of excitement, and by the time halftime rolls around, I realize I’ve been plastered to this stool with ears intently listening with hope. I just wanted him to be safe. I didn’t want him to be forgotten.
I find myself drawn closer to my family, slipping between Rose and Peyton on the couch as I kick my shoes off and curl my legs into my body. Rose is working on her latest knitting project, and my daughter is playing some game on her phone where a little man falls from cliffs over and over again, dying when he lands on cactus. Buck is tuned in, though. We’ve all given up on really paying attention to every little thing, but not Buck. He knows where his son is at all times. He catches every camera pass, rattles off the stats that the announcers don’t know or miss that relate to his son. When Duke Miller is suddenly flattened about fifteen yards behind the line of scrimmage in a way that tells my gut he isn’t getting up, Buck…he stands.
My eyes are wide, and things outside of my head begin moving in slow motion. The feeling makes me sick because everything in my head is on overdrive, speeding through thoughts and conclusions, coming up with frightening results.
My father-in-law just lifted himself from his chair onto his own two feet. He’s holding fists clenched in front of his body and his lips are parted, waiting to either exhale his nerves or inhale in preparation for what just might come next.
My eyes blink to the screen.
Reed is shedding his jacket.
He’s throwing.
The camera leaves my husband and moves back to the field, where Duke is sitting up. I have hope—I have guilt. The cart is coming out, but he’s waving it off. He doesn’t want it, but it’s coming for him anyhow.
“He’s okay,” I whisper, just loud enough that Peyton hears me.
“That didn’t look good,” she says, worried for all of the right reasons. She doesn’t like that a young athlete in his prime just possibly took a season-ending hit that bent his leg in two different directions.
I’m praying for all of the selfish reasons. If Duke is out, Reed is in. That next hit could happen to him. One more hit…in the wrong place. One break or snap, or one more concussion might change him forever.
Not ever playing this game again, though…he’s already changed.
“I’ll be right back,” I announce, leaping from the sofa and grabbing my keys from the counter, marching through the side door to my Tahoe. I climb in and twist the radio up as loud as it will go after I crank the engine. I whip around in a half circle, heading around the curved driveway forward, leaving a trail of dust in my wake as I fly through the line of trees, branches beginning to bare as golden leaves fall to the ground. I have no direction in mind, so I turn left onto the main highway road and press the pedal to the floor, hitting ninety-five to an old Pat Benatar song.
Brush thrashes as I drive down by the two-lane road. Nobody is on the road with me, so I push the gas to go faster, feeling it rattle the boxiness of my SUV. I travel more than ten miles into the desert, beyond the lines of housing projects graded out in the dirt and sand. I pass only a single car—a minivan that forces me to slow down when the woman driving glares at me as I pass. Maybe she didn’t glare. We flew by each other so quickly, it’s impossible for me to really have seen her features. What I probably saw was my own warning to myself, the risk and the fear all at once, forcing me to ease back my pressure on the pedal until I’m finally driving at a crawl and pulling off to the side of the road.
My breath is hard, and my knuckles are white from my grip on the steering wheel. The biker bar ahead is filled with football fans. Sundays are the one day you can’t get a seat, because every landowner, prison worker, biker, and old-timer in Coolidge has come out to drink away their reality and live vicariously through these boys living the dream on one-hundred yards of turf.
Boys.
Reed isn’t a boy anymore. He’s a veteran. This game is for rookies and fools, and he’s no longer prepared to be on the battlefield.
I drive forward slowly, gently making my way back onto the road for the few yards I need to travel to pull into the last open space in the dirt lot. It’s me and a row of Harleys, and I’m sure when I leave the confines of my car and enter the Old Route Draft House, I will be incredibly out of place, yet my legs carry me forward. It’s dark inside, and the buzz of mounted televisions and rowdy customers fills my ears like cotton, almost cutting out the stream of my own worries.
Almost.
I feel them too heavily in my chest, like a shiv digging into the soft center between my middle ribs. The feeling cuts my breath, but somehow, I’m able to say “beer” to the bartender as I take the last stool on the very end of an extremely crowded bar. The entire place smells of motor oil and sweat and a faint hint of whiskey. Every television is showing the same thing—the two announcers from the Sunday night game—except for the one in front of me that’s showing soccer. It makes me chuckle to myself, because if I could just pay attention to this instead, then I’d be all right.
That’s not going to happen though, and I know it. I tried to run and still I found myself in a place where I had to watch. I have to watch because…because it’s him. I have to watch because I’m scared, and because I also believe.
I take my beer and point my finger to the TV, knowing I won’t have to mention it out loud. The bartender laughs and grabs a remote, bringing this screen in sync with all of the others.
“Some guy sitting here earlier wanted soccer. I wonder why he left,” he laughs out, pointing around the room behind me with the remote.
“Yeah, right?” I say, taking my beer with two hands.
“Wanna start a tab?”
I sip the foamy top and consider his offer for a second. A tab…
“Just the one,” I answer. He runs off my receipt and folds it in half, sitting it upside down next to my mug.
I’m not the only woman in the joint, but I’m close. I’m the only one not wearing leather or a shirt with fringe. I’m also the only person not smoking.
What I’m not is the only person who realizes who that quarterback is—the one running from the sidelines into an offense that isn’t the one he molded. This entire room knows what’s happening as drunken celebrations turn into rehashed stories about “that one time he threw for four-hundred yards.”
Our golden boy is giving it one last shot. The town hero is back, even if it’s in someone else’s town. He’s still ours.
He’s still mine.
And there is still nobody better to watch with the ball under the lights.
“Goddamn,” I hum, half in awe and half terrified.
I swallow the bitterness of my beer and feel the frost of the glass on my fingertips as number thirteen steps into the huddle and does what he does best.
He claps a few times, his hand grabbing the shoulder of his receiver then his running back. It’s all for show—meaningless. It’s a stupid trick that works, one he got from his brother of all people. The other team is always watching. They evaluate everything. And if they think you’re comfortable with one guy more than the other, then that’s where they’re going to focus.
Nobody is looking at the tight end. But Reed is.
The first play happens so fast, I nearly miss it by blinking. A ten-yard pass turns into twenty-two thanks to a tight end that Reed has played with before. The same play gets them four more yards, and then Reed scrambles for the first down on the next.
My mouth is sour. I sip at my beer again, sloshing it between my teeth in an attempt to taste anything other than my fear.
My family is watching this without me. Buck is standing—or he was. Peyton is getting to see her father do something he wasn’t supposed to be able to do again. And I ran away to watch this with strangers who have no idea what any of this means to me.
My phone buzzes, and I know it’s Jason. I wonder how many times he’s texted, how many times he tried to call. This is our arrangement, and even getting caught having sex with my best friend wouldn’t keep him from following through. I can’t look now, though. I can’t take my eyes off Reed.
Ten yards after ten yards repeat until he’s carried the team to the fifteen-yard line. A lead of fourteen to seven is set to become twenty-one to seven. All he has to do is show them all that he can do it. But Atlanta is ready. They’ve seen enough to know his weaknesses now, and his first two attempts end up with him running out of bounds for no gain at all. No loss either, and I guess that’s something.
The crowd around me has gotten quiet, rooting for Reed even though his success means nothing for our own team. Reed comes first. The man before the business. He’s one of them—one of us. The called time-out feels like it stretches on for minutes, and I finally set my beer down, too nervous to drink anymore.
I pull my phone into my palm and see four missed calls and a string of texts from Jason. Peyton is asking where I am. I tell her that I have the game on and I’ll be right back. I open Jason’s texts, and they’re nothing but the same thing over and over again.
Are you all right?
I’ll answer him in a few more seconds because by then…I should know. I’m living and dying by every move Reed makes on that field.
They go in without a huddle, wanting to rush the play and get Atlanta off balance. The snap is fast, and Reed takes five or six steps back. I hold my breath and let the smoke burn my eyes rather than blink. His calf is holding steady. His body is shifting just as it’s supposed to. He ducks and jerks right, breaking a tackle and running to his strong side with the impossible touchdown in his sights.
The crowd around me has started to give up. They’re expecting the fail—a last-minute scramble from a man who doesn’t want to get hit.
They don’t know where to look.
He’ll be there. He’ll be there just like Trig would have been there. If he does his job, then Reed will make impossible happen, and everyone in this bar will feel like assholes having doubted him.
I dig my fingers into my thighs, his window closing, the tackle rushing forward. The hit is coming, and I’m glad that the camera moves with the ball rather than forcing me to watch it happen.
His target is a rookie too, just like Duke. His name is Waken, and his number is eighty-one. I know nothing about him, or where he came from—other than those few details I tucked away from earlier and the ones I see on the screen now as his fingers spread wide and bring the ball in. His toes drag across the corner of the turf, leaving no questions for the replay booth.
Touchdown.
The bar has erupted, and the man next to me punches my shoulder and holds a palm open for me to slap. I do it and plaster on a smile that can’t possibly look real. It won’t be real until they flash back to Reed, until I see him get up.
He’s running toward Waken and my heart kicks back to life. My lips puff out. I suck in a hot breath laced with nicotine. Reed’s chest collides with Waken’s, and he slaps his receiver’s helmet as they both run in for what is the beginning of a long relationship. I’ve seen this before, too. One catch has made him Reed’s go-to. If Miller is out for more than today, Waken is going to see a lot of those passes, and he’s going to be pushed to his limit. Reed won’t expect anything less, because that’s what he gives.
That’s what he crosses.
His limit.
He doesn’t set any.
My phone buzzes and I pick it up on the first ring, pressing it hard to my right ear and shoving my finger in my left.
“I’m okay,” I pant out.
Jason shouts on the other line, asking if I saw that pass.
“Of course I did,” I shout back. “I gotta go, though. I’m at the biker bar.”
Someone shoves into my back, pushing me hard into the bar and spilling a good portion of my beer. The rowdiness of the crowd is growing because this is the kind of place that lives vicariously through the success of one of their own.
“You’re in the Draft House. Ha! I’d like to see that.” Jason says.
“Maybe we can have your wedding here,” I throw back, not thinking hard enough before I speak. “I’m sorry…”
“Nah, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re all right. And we were going to tell you, it’s just…”
“I know,” I cut in, not wanting to have this conversation with my brother-in-law while I huddle for protection in the middle of a biker fight.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asks again.
I slip out a ten from my purse and leave it for my beer that I abandon to head back out to the mix of coolness and heat in the desert. Everything quiets the moment I push through the doors and head back to my car.
“I got out of there…sorry.” I haven’t really answered him again. I don’t want to, but he asks one more time anyway.
“Nolan…do you need me to stay on the line?”
I breathe out a laugh. This is probably the only time I really do need that. Jason isn’t my favorite person to talk to, just because we don’t really gel. I do love him, though, and he was there for me when I was scared beyond anything that I would lose Reed.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks, Jase.” I sink into the seat of my car and turn the engine on, jumping at the blaring stereo I left behind. I push the power button fast, deciding silence for a dozen miles might do me some good.
“Of course. I’ll have my phone. I’m in the booth, so call or text. I’ll never leave it out of my sight.”
I smile at his offer.
“I’ll be okay,” I say.
“Even still…” he interrupts.
I nod and sit in the silence, hearing the chatter in the background of the phone for a few seconds. In a matter of minutes, that ownership suite went from thinking their season was lost to thinking they won the Cinderella-story lottery.
They did.
Instead of glass slippers, though, their princess wears New Balance with orthopedic inserts for some serious bone spurs.
“It was a really pretty fucking pass,” I sigh out.
Jason chuckles quietly, just for me.
“It was,” he says. “You drive safe, okay?”
“Mmmm, yeah,” I acknowledge, feeling stupid for the way I got here.
I hang up with Jason and toss my phone into the center console, and I start to back out from the parking lot before I stop and stare at my powered-off stereo. Like an addict, I punch the power button again and hit the scan button until I find the sounds of cheering crowds and testosterone-fueled announcers. I find the OKC game on the fourth try, and I stay in that parking lot just like this until Reed throws two more touchdowns and the clock is counting down the final seconds of the fourth quarter.