Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Callie
Being late is not a habit for me. It’s a state of existence, and it has been since the day Eli was born.
That was also the day I discovered what it means to be a single parent while legally married.
Travis was there, physically. In the room, on the couch, in every photo.
But Travis never did a single thing unless asked.
Change a diaper? Sure, if I asked. Hold the baby so I could take my first shower in three days?
Absolutely, if I asked. Eight years, and it never once occurred to him to take initiative, as if fatherhood were a restaurant where somebody would eventually come take his order.
By the time Finn was born and I was doing the whole thing twice over, I did the math: if I was going to be a single parent anyway, I could at least be one legally.
It took me a while longer to file than to decide, you keep hoping the man will surprise you, but he never surprised me once, and that, in the end, was the whole marriage.
Now at least I have the excuse. Single mom, what can you do?
Today was one of the days I actually asked Travis to show up.
Not for himself, for logistics. Drop Finn at his after-school class, or grab Eli from practice.
Either. Anything. He couldn’t; he’d made plans with colleagues after work, and you can’t cancel on colleagues.
That’s the other important thing to know about Travis: in his vocabulary, can’t and won’t are the same word, and he has never once noticed the difference.
So the afternoon went the way my afternoons go.
Left the office, late. Picked up both boys, late.
Dropped Finn at his class, late. Dropped Eli at football, late, and didn’t even get out of the car.
Went to pick up Finn but Finn’s teacher was running behind.
Which means Finn’s class was late now making me late.
That one, for the record, was not on me.
I collect these small absolutions like coupons.
And now I’m pulling into the youth league parking lot at ten past seven, which is to say: late picking Eli up. Again.
I rush through the lot after Finn, who launched out of the car the second I put it in park because he cannot bear to miss one minute of his brother’s football-adjacent life.
Ahead, out on the field, a man I don’t recognize is throwing a ball with Eli.
For half a heartbeat every mother-alarm I own starts ringing, and then I spot Jake ten feet away stacking cones, calm as Sunday, so the stranger must be one of his volunteers, and my heart climbs down off the ladder.
Then the man turns, and I stop dead in the middle of the parking lot.
I actually consider pulling out my phone and Googling Nate Rivers.
Not because I don’t know what the man looks like, I’ve spent all morning memorizing what he looks like under club lighting, but because my brain refuses to accept the input.
Nate Rivers. Franchise quarterback. On the east-side youth field.
Throwing a football to my eight-year-old. Today.
And I resent, professionally and personally and at the cellular level, that the first stray thought to make it through the static is that the cameras undersell him.
On television he’s an arm with a jawline.
In person, at thirty yards, in the ugly light of a Tuesday evening, there’s a kind of voltage coming off the man that I am confident he has never once had to earn.
He’s in jeans and a plain gray T-shirt, which should be a mercy and is instead a public safety issue.
The jeans fit the way jeans fit when the body underneath was built by professionals, and the T-shirt has given up all pretense of hanging loose anywhere that matters, stretched across shoulders wide enough to have their own weather and clinging to the kind of back you only get from a decade of workout routines that would break most men.
And the arms. The famous throwing arm and its underrated colleague, bare to the ugly parking-lot light, forearms corded and veined in a way that ought to require a permit, moving with that loose, economical ease of a man whose body has never once told him no.
He throws to my son, a soft nothing toss, and the whole machine rolls through it anyway, casual as breathing, and I understand in one irritated instant why every camera in Texas is in love with him.
I file the observation under evidence of nothing, slam the drawer, and lock it.
“Eli, let’s go.”
It comes out sharper than I mean it to, and I watch my son’s shoulders drop like I pulled a plug. He thinks he’s in trouble. He isn’t, he’s the only person on this field who’s done nothing wrong, and I hate myself a little, which is at least a familiar feeling.
“Jake, thank you,” I say, warm, to the coach, and give the other man nothing at all.
“Mom, can we stay a little longer?” Finn has planted himself, staring up at Rivers with his entire soul out on his face.
And there it is, exactly what Marty said, exactly what Priya said.
They’re starstruck now, at five and eight, when all they can see is the arm and the highlights.
In a few years they’ll be old enough to see the rest of it, and the rest of it will look cool to them, because their idol is the one doing it.
“No, Finn. You have homework. So does Eli.”
A groan of persecution from Finn. Eli, silent, sets the ball in the equipment basket like it’s made of glass and comes toward me.
“Oh, don’t thank me.” Jake waves a hand, ambling over. “Coach Nate here kept an eye on him while I broke everything down. He’s helping us out with practices now.”
“Really.” Despite every intention I walked in with, curiosity wins. “And how exactly did you talk the starting quarterback of the San Antonio Outlaws into coaching a bunch of eight-year-olds?”
“I love youth sports.”
Rivers finally opens his mouth, and the sarcasm underneath is fine-grained, sanded smooth, invisible to Jake, who beams, and unmissable to me. Of course he loves youth sports. Right after his other enthusiasms. I’ve seen the full portfolio in six photographs.
“Must be a new hobby for you.”
It’s out before I can stop it, and I want to bite my tongue in half.
Technically, I have no reason to dislike this man, none that he knows about.
He has no idea what’s sitting in my phone.
I’m supposed to be neutral; neutral is the entire job.
But something about him standing on my son’s field with that press-conference face has me up on a wire, and the worst part is that he has every reason to dislike me, and I can’t even blame him for it.
“It is.” His eyes come to me, flat green and cold. “Still better than your hobby. Whose life are you after these days?”
The temptation to tell him exactly whose is so strong I can taste it. I keep it cool. Mostly.
“One, it’s not a hobby, it’s my job. Two, I have never ruined anyone’s life on purpose.
You want somebody to be angry at? Talk to your management and your medical staff about what they were doing to your own teammates.
Or look in the mirror. Turning a blind eye is compliance.
” The anger arrives fast and hot, three years of it, because I am so tired of carrying this like it’s mine alone.
All I did was write the truth. A man died.
A twenty-two-year-old died, a mother is never going to see her son again and somehow I’m the villain of the story for saying so out loud.
“Or what, you’re proud of how it works? Being run like a racehorse and left in a ditch the day they’re done with you? ”
“You think you did us a favor?” His voice doesn’t rise. It drops, lower, tighter, jaw clenched. “You think you did Danny a favor?”
“Who’s Danny?” Finn asks.
And just like that I remember we have an audience, and the audience is five.
“Nobody, buddy. Let’s go.” I put a hand on each boy and steer them toward the car, and that’s when Rivers bites off one more, low, behind me.
“Oh, that’s rich. Nobody. He’s nobody all right, thanks to you, sugar.”
Sugar. I stop walking for exactly one second.
In that second I think about how I should turn around and slap him so hard his next endorsement is for ice packs.
I can see the image vividly, thoroughly, and it stays in the privacy of my own skull.
I keep walking, because I have self-control and two witnesses, both of whom are now looking up at me like I personally kicked a puppy on live television, which somehow makes everything worse.
“Mr. Rivers?” Finn stops dead. “Can I have your autograph?”
I grind my teeth to powder. But I can’t say no. Whatever is sitting in my phone, whatever this man is when the cameras are off, he is still someone my sons look up to, and my feud is not their inheritance.
“Sure, buddy.” Rivers doesn’t skip a beat, and when I turn around, the cold is gone; he’s all polished smile, the one from the cereal aisle and the razor ads. The transformation is instant and complete and, honestly, a little chilling. That smile is a product.
Eli wordlessly produces a notebook from his bag, my serious boy, prepared for everything, and hands it to Finn, who presents it to Rivers with both hands, like tribute at a temple.
“What’s your name?”
“Finn Carter.” My son announces it with his chest out, bouncing in place, and it breaks my heart in the specific way only your own kids can manage.
Because here he is, lit up like the Fourth of July over something that will carry him for a week, and I’m standing three feet away knowing things that should put that man on the opposite end of anyone’s admiration.
Rivers signs, professional, and hands the notebook back.
“Let’s go, boys.”
I corral them to the car, where my check-engine light flicks on the moment I turn the key, glaring at me with what I can only describe as personal satisfaction.