CHAPTER FIVE #3
Chip stepped off the stonework and into the grass, squinting against the setting sun. Carver followed them, putting the requisite distance between them and giving his right shoulder a few subtle rolls in the socket to test its mettle.
He had torn his rotator cuff his junior year, during the only high school football game he played in.
He’d been a third-string quarterback and only got play time because the first-string quarterback Jeff was out with mono, and the second-string QB tired himself out in the first half of the game.
Chip, in his day, was a first-string quarterback who helped take his team to the state championship — a great point of pride for him, even though they didn’t win.
But that was Chip. As a teenager he was a little over six feet tall, light on his feet and fearless.
As a teenager Carver was 5’9, even lighter on his feet and never dumb enough to lack fear.
Knowing Jeff would be out for that game, Carver practiced throwing so much in the days beforehand that his arm was already fatigued as he lifted the ball after receiving the snap.
Then he had to contend with the fact that this was a real game, not a scrimmage, and there was actually a difference.
He could only catch split-second glimpses of open receivers before they were swallowed again in the widening gyre of players, while the other team’s defense began to bust through his O-line to come tackle him.
Carver danced backward in terror while his receivers grew smaller and more obscured and the defensive linemen got bigger and bigger.
Finally he was put out of his misery, all the wind knocked from him, as he got tackled and thrown violently into the turf for a total loss of fourteen yards.
Dimly he registered that it felt like his right arm had been torn off at the shoulder.
He knew it hadn’t, though, because he could still feel both hands cradling the ball to his stomach as linemen piled on him and elbowed and kicked him.
His one saving grace was that somehow, miraculously, he’d managed not to fumble.
The torn rotator cuff was in a way a relief, because he was carried to the sidelines and examined by a medic instead of dealing with Coach Fietz, who wasn’t enough of a hardass to scream at an injured guy.
Then, instead of enduring a silent ride home with his parents and Chip — who was home from college for the weekend just to see Carver play — he got to go to the hospital in an ambulance.
The tear was exactly four centimeters, severe enough to require surgery, and he never played football again.
He’d eventually made his way back to full function, pain aside, but as a triathlete he lived with a terrible fear of blowing the shoulder out again in the middle of the Hudson River.
Chip drew his arm back like a bow and tossed the ball at him in a nice spiral.
Carver returned it with an equal amount of power but less showiness.
This went on for a while, and it was actually nice; it was a beautiful day, and having a catch was pleasant in its open-ended simplicity.
Lillian sat on the patio, half watching them and half looking at her phone.
Chip’s kids Bailey and Aaron, plus Priscilla’s daughter Kimmy, eventually wandered over from wherever they’d been playing in the backyard and sat in the manicured grass nearby, rolling around and tearing it from the ground in fistfuls.
“Dad, I want to play catch,” Bailey eventually whined.
“No you don’t,” Chip said without hesitating, delivering another perfect bomb into Carver’s chest. “You said no to me earlier.”
“But I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes you did.”
Bailey pretended to cry; Chip didn’t look interested. Her younger brother Aaron piped up, “Did you play football too, Uncle Carver?”
“Yeah,” Carver said in a distracted voice, concentrating on his throw.
“Yeah, Uncle Carver played football,” Chip said, effortlessly tossing the ball back with one hand while doing air quotes with the other, which was infuriating.
“I did fucking play football, Preston.”
The patio door scraped open, and Maggie shouted, “Kids, come get ready for dinner.” The kids did not move.
Chip’s face was developing a sneer. That was Chip: a nice guy until all of a sudden something went haywire in his brain and caused the bullying bastard to come out. Carver delivered the football very hard into his hands in an attempt to ward this off.
“You and I did not play football in the same sense,” Chip said. “You played for about ten seconds and it ended with you looking for your jock strap in the stands.”
“What’s a jock strap?” Kimmy said, to an audience of no one.
“That was a tough play and a dirty sack, and you know it,” Carver snapped.
“Sorry, did I miss a flag being thrown? Or were you dancing in the pocket, psyching yourself out and holding onto the ball ‘til your boys couldn’t protect you anymore? You know you could have thrown it away.”
“I couldn’t see my receivers, it would have been a grounding call! My boys were gone!”
“They were running their routes, Carver!”
“The other team didn’t need to sack me for fourteen fucking yards,” Carver said, growing increasingly infuriated. Their passes were getting a lot harder and faster.
“Guys,” Maggie called, but her voice fell on deaf ears.
“Twelve of those yards were all you, happy feet!”
“I know math isn’t your strong suit, Chip, but that means they still threw me two yards, or six fucking feet!”
“Fine, Jesus, you think I never got knocked around as a quarterback? You think my shoulders are in good shape? You act like the whole world is against you, meanwhile you get handed shit on a platter! You were no quarterback and you know it! I’m not even talking arm, I’m talking heart!
Fietz only put you on the roster out of respect for me and Dad, and you let us down! ”
Carver’s aforementioned heart spasmed with anguish.
“I never asked for any of that,” he shouted, flinging the football at Chip, who barely caught the pass.
“I didn’t want it. You knew I wanted to run cross country again, but you both fucking bullied me into trying out for football, bullied me into going out for quarterback even though I would have made a better receiver, just so I could spend my whole fall riding the bench and then spend months rehabbing a stupid pointless injury!
Why?” The ball came back, and he fired it away again.
“You two weren’t good enough to play D1, so I had to give it a shot? ”
“Oh, yeah, me and Dad are the worst for wanting to share something with you,” Chip said with another eyeroll, and flung the ball back at him.
“And it’s our fault you choked. You know, those linemen could tell you shouldn’t be out there, and that’s exactly why they sacked you so hard, to teach you a lesson!
You went out there and asked for it, and they gave it to you! ”
Carver went momentarily blind with rage and fired a very hard pass directly at Chip’s smug face. The next thing he saw was Chip dropping to his knees in the grass with an exclamation of “Son of a bitch!”
The football bounced merrily away. Maggie shouted and ran to her husband.
Carver stood there, queasy with the knowledge that he’d just fucked up, while Chip tried to staunch his bleeding nose with his hand.
Bailey and Aaron also ran to their father, shouting, “Daddy!” but Chip only looked irritated by all this attention.
“Stop,” he said, swatting Maggie’s hand away and getting to his feet by himself.
“Daddy,” Aaron said tearfully.
“Daddy’s fine! Jesus H!” Chip took his hand from his face, looked at his blood-smeared palm and said “son of a bitch” again.
“Chip, I’m sorry,” Carver said.
“Shut the hell up,” Chip replied.
From the patio, Nora shouted, “Carver Jacob Novack, what did you just do?”
The tone in her voice was chilling. Carver turned to her with a wince. “The ball got away from me, Mom, sorry.”
“Oh, please! I came to the door because you two were screaming at each other, and the next thing I see is you breaking his nose!”
Maggie sucked in air through her teeth. “Is it actually broken?” she said to Chip, who shrugged.
“This isn’t funny, Carver,” Nora hollered at him, fiddling anxiously with the collar of her pristine white button-up. “We have a family wedding tomorrow, with a photo-graph-er who is being paid out the ying-yang, and your brother’s going to have a swollen nose and a couple of black eyes! My God!”
“Mom, we were getting heated and I lost control of the ball, I’m sorry. It was an accident, I apologized, what else do you want me to do?”
Nora shook her head. “Chip, are you alright?”
“I’m fine, leave me alone,” Chip shouted back.
Nora made a sound of exasperation and went back inside the house.
Lillian, who could only ever hide her curiosity about a bloody injury for so long, sidled up to Chip and began examining him.
She took his face in her hands, which caught her a pointed look from Maggie, to whom she said, “Can I take a look?”
“Fine,” Maggie said, and went to round up the agitated children. “Though you’re not exactly a doctor, are you?”
“I’ve seen a few broken noses,” Lillian said, palpating Chip’s face and making him wince. “When I do this, do you feel a crunchy, grating sensation?”
“No,” Chip said, sniffing.
Lillian manipulated his nose some more, while Chip stood there pretending this wasn’t painful for him. Maggie gave another pointed look as she took the kids inside — this one aimed at Carver. He just shrugged at her.
Lillian bent to peer up Chip’s nostrils, then said, “I don’t think it’s broken, but I don’t really know. In an hour if it’s still bleeding, and you feel like you can’t breathe out of it, then it probably is.”
“Alright, thanks, I guess,” Chip said. “I’m gonna go put ice on it.”
Lillian nodded. Chip glanced up at Carver, then walked over to him. Carver tensed in anticipation, but Chip gripped him fraternally by the shoulder.
“Hell of a throw,” he said with a wry smile that resembled Doug’s. Blood was still trickling out of his nostrils, flowing down his upper lip. “Where was that in high school?”
Carver laughed in surprise as Chip walked away. Lillian turned to him and grinned.
“It was a good throw,” she said. “Shut him up, didn’t it?”
“Hon.”
“What, he can say it but I can’t?”
“He can say it ‘cause he’s the one who got hit in the face.”
Lillian rolled her eyes. “Says who?”
“Says the human social contract.” Carver noticed there was blood on her hands, then glanced at his shoulder and realized Chip had smeared some on his shirt as well.
“Shit,” he said, unbuttoning it and looking at the white t-shirt underneath, which luckily remained pristine. “Now I have to do laundry.”
“By yourself?” Lillian said, as if appalled. “But there are so many knobs.”
“I remember how to use the knobs. Could you do me a favor and find me something to eat?” The adrenaline of smashing Chip’s face was dissipating, leaving him weak and wobbly.
“Yeah, sure. Like what?”
“I don’t know, there’s never any food in this house, but literally anything, please. I’m just realizing all I had to eat today was coffee and a fucking bell pepper slice.”
“Carver, you dumbshit,” Lillian said without animus. “I just told you to stop acting anorexic.”
Okay, so there was something his wife had banned him from: anorexia. He was one of the guys after all. “I’m admitting it, aren’t I?” he said through gritted teeth. “And trying to do something about it?”
“I’d prefer you realize it sooner and get your own food, on a normal timetable,” Lillian said. “But it was really funny that you hit Chip in the face, so I’m happy to help.”
She leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, then pranced away toward the house. Carver exhaled and followed her.