Chapter Thirty
Cade
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My father called the night the draft died.
I knew he would. I'd done the math on the steps, in the rain, somewhere in the middle of saying I'm aware that standing here ends that—I'd known, even then, that the next call from the unknown number with his name on it would be the worst one, because I'd just taken the one thing he valued about me, the one asset, the generational payday, and I'd set it on fire on camera while explaining exactly why.
There is no version of my father that forgives that.
I'd known it and I'd said it anyway, and that, I think, is the difference between the man on the steps and the boy who used to answer that phone hoping for a different father each time.
He didn't yell, which was worse. He went cold, the way he did, the cold that had run my whole childhood.
"I saw it," he said. No hello. Never a hello.
"The whole state saw it. You stood up in front of God and every team's front office and told them you hid an injury, took drugs to play, can't control your temper, and you're in some thing with a reporter.
You torched yourself. On purpose. For a linebacker and a girl.
" A long, freezing pause. "I drove you to two-a-days for ten years.
I spent money we didn't have on camps so somebody would see you.
I built you. And you took the whole thing—everything I poured into you, the only valuable thing you ever were—and you lit it on fire to feel good about yourself for one afternoon.
You're not my son. My son had a future. You're just a kid who threw it away.
Don't call me when the money would've come in and didn't. Don't call me at all. "
And he hung up.
I stood in my kitchen holding the phone, waiting for it—the collapse, the cold flood, the wall coming up, twenty-two years of be useful or be nothing reaching up out of the floor to take my hand.
It didn't come.
I'd braced my whole life for that call and the version of me that would receive it, and the version that actually received it was a stranger I'd just become on a set of steps.
I stood there and I felt—grief, yes, real grief, the clean kind, for the father I'd spent twenty-two years trying to earn and was never going to get, because he didn't exist, he never had, there'd only ever been a man who loved an asset and called it a son.
But under the grief, for the first time, there was no flinch.
No scramble to fix it. No part of me lighting up to chase the warm that would never come.
Because Sloane was right, the way she was always right.
Boys like us don't get to have things was never a law.
It was his alibi. And I'd just spent it.
I'd stood up in front of the whole world and proven a boy like me could have things—the truth, the team, the girl, the daylight—and the proof was so total that my father's whole cold gospel had nothing left to stand on, and he could hear it, the way Voss had heard it, and so he did the only thing a man like that can do when his alibi runs out: he disowned the evidence.
"Okay, Dad," I said, to a dead line, to nobody, to the kitchen. And then, quieter, to myself, the truest thing: "Thank you for the rides to two-a-days. That part was real. The rest was a cage, and I'm out of it, and I'm not coming back to visit."
I put the phone down. I did not feel like a wall. I felt like a man who'd just buried something, sad and free, both, which it turns out is a thing you can be.
Then I drove to the hospital to see my brother, because the family you earn by being useful isn't family, and I had a real one to go sit with.
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Theo was sitting up when I got there, leg in its cage, a tray of bad hospital food in front of him, and his phone going off every thirty seconds.
"It won't stop," he said, holding it up, dazed, almost laughing.
"Guys I played pop warner with. A reporter from actual ESPN.
My mom called crying—good crying, she said she's proud, she said it like four times, I made her say it twice more because I wanted to make sure I heard it right.
" He set the phone down. "Cade. I went on the record from a hospital bed expecting to get blackballed and instead the whole world's calling to say I did the bravest thing they ever saw.
I don't— I spent four years being told the brave thing was to shut up and play hurt.
Turns out the brave thing was the opposite the whole time.
Why did nobody tell us that? Why'd it take a girl with a recorder? "
"Because the people who were supposed to tell us were the ones who needed us quiet," I said, and sat down in the ugly vinyl chair, and we were quiet a minute, the good kind, the kind we'd always had, except now the silence wasn't a thing we were swallowing. It was just two brothers in a room.
"You torched your draft," he said finally. Not a question. He'd seen the steps. "Day two. Real money."
"Yeah."
"For me. And the guys. And Sloane."
"For all of it." I leaned back. "Mostly for me, actually.
Turns out. I needed to find out I could set down the one thing they used to own me with.
I needed to be the guy who could." I looked at him, my best friend, the boy who'd held my head over a toilet the night my grandmother died and never once mentioned it after, the human cost of the whole rotten machine, sitting up in a bed with a rod in his leg and his phone full of people who were finally proud of him. "You good?"
"No," he said honestly. "My leg's full of titanium and my career's over and I'm gonna have to figure out a whole new life I never planned for.
" He almost smiled. "But it's mine now. The new life.
Nobody scheduled it for me in a closed office.
First thing in three years that's actually mine.
" He nudged the bad pudding toward me. "Eat my pudding.
I'm too happy to eat. Tell me about the rain thing.
I saw the rain thing. The whole hospital saw the rain thing.
A nurse cried. Tell me about the rain thing, you absolute disaster of a man, you stood in the rain and let a girl love you in public, I've waited four years to see you do one normal human thing—"
So I told him about the rain thing, and he heckled me the whole way through it, and it was the best hour I'd spent in a hospital in my life, which is a low bar, but still.
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I decided about the last game on the drive home from seeing him.
The surgery could wait two weeks; the doctors—the real ones, the ones who didn't work for Voss—said the disc wasn't going to get worse in one more game if I was smart, and that after, they'd fix it, not so I could keep playing, that door was closed and I'd closed it myself, but so I could walk right at forty, carry my own kids someday without my leg going numb on the stairs.
But there was one game left in the season. A home game, under the lights, the first one since the whole thing came down. And I found, somewhere on the drive home, that I wanted to play it.
Not for them. Not for the program, which barely existed anymore, which had lost its coach and its ops man and was about to lose a lot more.
Not for the scouts, who weren't coming. For me.
Because I'd played football my entire life like it was something being done to me—a thing I absorbed, a way to be useful, a stage to bleed on for men who loved the bleeding—and I'd never once, not one single down in eighteen years, played it like it was a thing I got to do.
A game. The thing it's supposed to be. I wanted that.
One time. Before I set it down forever, I wanted to find out what the thing I was best at felt like when it wasn't a cage.
And I wanted her in the stands. Not the press box. The stands, where I could find her, where I could play one game of football in my whole life with the girl I loved watching me do the thing I loved for no reason but love, in the daylight, on the record, with my shoulders down.
I told her that night, on her couch, with an ice pack under my back and her legs across my lap.
"Why?" she asked. "After everything. You don't owe them a down."
"I'm not playing it for them," I said. "I'm playing it for me.
I want to find out what it feels like to do the thing I'm good at without doing it angry.
One time." I laced my fingers through hers on my chest, in the daylight, in the open, a thing I'd never have let myself do two months ago.
"And I want you in the stands. I want to be able to find you. "
She kissed me, and didn't say anything for a while, and then she said, "I'll be in the stands. Second deck. Wear the gray hoodie so you can spot me."
"You stole my gray hoodie."
"I did," she agreed, unrepentant. "It's mine now. You alphabetize a spice rack once and you're family forever; you wear a girl's investigation like a second skin for two months, the hoodie's hers. Those are the rules."
"I don't know what that means," I said.
"It means I love you," she said. "Out loud. In the daylight. Now eat Theo's pudding, you brought home Theo's pudding, I watched you steal pudding from a man with a broken leg—"
I ate Theo's pudding. In the daylight. On her couch. Free.
Not the steps. Not the game. Not any of the loud brave things. This—the pudding, the couch, the ordinary unremarkable daylight nothing I'd been told my whole life I didn't get to have.
I had it.
The sky never fell.
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