Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Nate
Monday I go see Danny. It’s our tradition, the Monday after a weekend game, if there’s no Monday-night matchup, I’m at his place. Beer, film talk, the same couch. It’s the one appointment on my calendar Morrison doesn’t know about and never will.
I pull into the spot in front of his townhouse and, as per usual, I need a minute before I get out. Just a minute. Every week, the same minute.
Danny lives in eleven hundred square feet with a shared wall.
He drives the same car he drove three years ago.
He works the morning shift as a trainer at a local gym, coaching accountants through their first deadlifts.
A man who was a starting slot receiver on an NFL franchise now lives like a grad student with good taste in beer.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about getting rich at twenty-two: you have no idea what to do with it.
When I signed my first contract, I burned through an obscene amount in a month.
I bought three cars. Three. I am not, for the record, a car guy; I couldn’t tell you today why the third one happened.
I bought watches, clothes, trinkets, gadgets, more of everything than any human needs, because I grew up dirt poor outside Odessa and suddenly the dam was open.
Danny’s story is the same story; we grew up together, two broke kids from the same cracked streets, and when the money came he did his own tour of unreasonable purchasing.
In time we both leveled out. But the thing about becoming a millionaire at twenty-two is that nobody explains money doesn’t breed on its own.
It only multiplies if you put it to work, and neither of us knew that, because the people who teach you that are the fathers we didn’t have.
When they cut Danny, he had a five-thousand-square-foot house with the largest private pool in San Antonio, a car collection, expensive taste in women, and an addiction.
When the checks stopped and there were no investments behind them, the math worked fast. The cars went first. Then the house.
Then the taste. Medical bills and the pills split what was left between them, efficient as vultures.
Now: eleven hundred square feet and a gym schedule.
Thank you, Callie Carter.
I get my face in order and knock. Danny opens the door in sweatpants and nothing else, and I run the checklist I run every Monday without letting it show: eyes clear.
Good week, then. His dark hair’s a disaster and he’s lost some mass over the three years, but the frame’s still there; the gym job keeps him honest. On a good Monday you can squint and see the guy who ran a 4. 4 at the combine.
“Man, that was a hell of a game yesterday.” He grabs my hand, pulls me into the back-pat. “Dallas never knew what hit ‘em. That seam ball in the third? Filthy.”
“Right?” I grin like a teenager, because football is my whole bloodstream and praise from the people I actually respect is a drug with no known safe dosage.
“Beer?” He’s already headed for the kitchen. His place is standard bachelor, functional furniture, zero personality. Which, to be fair, also describes my place. The difference is mine cost forty times more and a designer was paid to make it impersonal professionally.
“Beer’s good.” I drop onto his couch and stretch out.
“We’re doing a get-together here Friday.” He hands me the bottle and sprawls into the other corner. “Few of the old guys, some gym people. You should come.”
“Can’t. Coach is running me into the ground, and I’ve got the Little League thing now. Twice a week.”
Is it a lie if it’s just not the whole truth?
Because the whole truth is: I’ve decided Danny doesn’t hear about the pictures.
I know exactly what he’d say, he’d say tell them the drugs are mine, because they are, and because that’s who Danny is at his lowest, still trying to eat the blame so I don’t have to.
And I’m not letting him feed what’s left of his name to the machine a second time.
If it ever comes to it, I’ll take the hit myself.
I’ve got, what, four or five good years left in this arm if I stay healthy?
Ending my career early wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Except it would. Because if I don’t get up at five, and I don’t grind my body into game shape, and there are no Sundays, there is nothing else in my life. That’s not self-pity; it’s inventory. Coach did the audit in his office two weeks ago and the books balanced at empty.
“Little League. You.” Danny squints at me over his bottle. “Has hell frozen? Did you lose a bet?”
“One of Morrison’s genius ideas. You know how he gets about polishing the franchise’s image.”
Another lie, smooth as the last one. The franchise’s image got fixed the day the purge ended; by the next season the world had moved on to fresher scandals. This isn’t about the franchise. But that road leads to the photos, so.
“Oh, you have to tell me where.” He’s already delighted. “I’ll call Grant, we’ll come sit in the bleachers with those giant foam fingers. I will heckle you like a Philly fan.”
“Terrible idea, and you’ll love this — Callie Carter’s kid plays on the team.”
I say it because it’s the one guaranteed fence that keeps Danny away from that field, and because I could not physically manage a third lie inside fifteen minutes.
There were easier options, closed practices, league rules, anything, and I reached past all of them and picked the guard-dog truth instead of lying. I’m so proud of myself.
It works instantly. His whole face changes.
“Shocking that woman managed to have a child.” The bitterness comes off him in one flat wave. “I mean, fine, she’s an attractive woman. And a harpy. You know what I wonder sometimes? Whether any of it haunts her. What she did.” He picks at the label on his bottle. “Frankly, I hope it does.”
I don’t say anything. I’m on Danny’s side, that’s constitutional, that’s foundation, that’s not up for review.
But something’s been sitting in my chest since Tuesday, since she went off on me in that parking lot with her voice shaking: a twenty-two-year-old died.
Died, on a practice field, because the people paid to protect him were running a pharmacy off the books.
It could have been Danny. Run the tape back with one different variable and it’s Danny’s heart, or mine, or any of us.
I hate what happened to my best friend. I hate what happened to the trainers who did nothing wrong.
And she’s still right about the thing underneath: somebody died, and if nobody blows the whistle, somebody else does too.
I just wish to God she’d blown it more… quietly. Aimed it. Something.
And there it is, the actual size of my grievance with Callie Carter, measured honestly for the first time: not that she fired, but where the shrapnel went. It’s a smaller grievance than the one I walked in here with. I don’t love that.
“Enough about that.” I pull from my beer. “Grant says hi, by the way.”
“You should come by together sometime. I keep saying it. Grant was here two weekends ago, we watched the Houston game.”
“Our schedules never line up.”
And here I am again. Lying. Grant visits Danny, he’s one of the few from the building who still does, and I love him for it.
What I cannot do is be in the room when it happens.
Alone with Danny, there’s a version of this that works: our history, our jokes, the Mondays.
Add a witness, even a witness as kind as Grant, and suddenly I’m not visiting my best friend anymore, I’m standing in eleven hundred square feet watching him be seen: the townhouse, the gym shifts, the Mondays when his eyes aren’t clear.
I can barely manage that through my own eyes.
I’m not doing it in widescreen through Grant Hale’s eyes.
I drive home doing the math on my week. In the last ten days I have: lied to my best friend four times in one sitting, enlisted in a con orchestrated by a PR director I despise, developed a counter-surveillance protocol for a sports journalist, and started stacking lies on top of lies with paranoia for seasoning.
Franchise quarterback. Living the dream.
#
Callie
Tuesday, I’m at the field with the boys, and technically, I want this in the record, I am not late.
I planned to be fifteen minutes early; I am five minutes early.
Which makes me ten minutes late for my own imaginary schedule and a full ten minutes ahead of my usual programming.
In this family we celebrate wins of any size.
“Mom.” Eli pauses, halfway into his shoulder pads. “Isn’t it your week for snacks?”
Snacks. The parent rotation. Bars and drinks for the kids and coaches, every practice, a sacred wheel of suburban obligation.
I pull out my phone, open the calendar, and there it is, in my own calendar, next to deadlines, interviews and everything else I’m late for in my life, with a bell I apparently dismissed: SNACKS — YOUR TURN.
“Shit.”
“Language, Mom.” He’s laughing as he says it, my serious boy, and then he’s gone, jogging to the field, to Johnson, to the other kids, to Rivers, leaving me alone in my folding chair to marinate in failure.
There’s no time to hit a store and get back.
I just sit there watching the field: Eli talking to Johnson.
Eli talking to two teammates. Eli talking to Rivers, pointing, oh no, pointing at me.
Rivers looks over. Then he jogs off the field, out the gate, to a black Suburban at the curb, and comes back around the hood carrying, I squint, boxes. Cases of protein bars. A flat of Gatorade, stacked and balanced.
Every mother in the bleachers is now watching, because the man is in a T-shirt carrying heavy things, and physics is doing physics.
I’m watching too, not the forearms; I want that noted, not primarily the forearms, visually informative as they are, because Nate Rivers is currently saving my entire snack-week reputation. Probably out of spite. But saving it.