A blur of purple-and-white jerseys surrounded the coach on the middle school football field. The Granger Lions. I sat in my car in the parking lot waiting for my twelve-year-old son, Joseph, to finish practice. It was his first year on the team, and I couldn’t have been more proud. Joseph was tall and confident, with wavy brown hair just like his father’s. He was going to be a linebacker. If only his father could see this, I thought.
Two years earlier, my husband, Kelly, had died suddenly. He’d been a linebacker himself on the high school football team. We hadn’t gone to the same school. He’d lived more than two hundred miles away, but we’d met on a camping trip the summer before our sophomore year, and soon those two hundred miles meant nothing.
I got to see him play only once, when I visited his town. I sat in the bleachers with his parents and cheered him on like crazy. Even after all these years, I could still picture how strong and handsome he looked when he took off that helmet, his jersey mud-streaked and grass-stained from sacking the quarterback or tackling a runner behind the line. It was so dirty you could barely read his number.
Kelly had taught Joseph how to throw and catch a football. He’d encouraged our son to go out for the team when he got old enough. Soon Joseph would play his first real game. Without Kelly. Without his dad. Without my husband. I could only pray that his young heart would feel a moment of relief from the deep pain.
Practice ended. The boys ran to the locker room to change out of their pads and into street clothes. Five minutes later, Joseph came out and hopped into the car.
“How was it?” I asked, forcing a smile. I pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward home.
“Good. We got our practice jerseys today,” Joseph said. “Coach gave me a number I really like. I hope I get it for my game jersey too.”
“What number is that?” I asked.
“Number seventy-five.”
I nearly stopped the car. “Joseph, do you know whose number that was?”
My son had no idea. The coach hadn’t known either. But when Joseph ran onto the field for his first game as linebacker for the Lions, his official game jersey was blessed with his father’s number, seventy-five.