Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Nate
I drive to Danny’s because he called me, and the whole way over I’m quietly coming apart.
I missed our Monday. First one in two seasons.
I had the guys at my place watching Buffalo instead, and I told myself that’s all it was, scheduling, but the truth has worse posture: I had Callie Carter’s laugh stuck in my head, and I could not sit on that couch and look Danny in the eyes while it was in there.
So I skipped. And now he’s calling me to come over midweek, which he never does, and I’m running the catastrophe projections.
Whatever it is, some part of me is already convinced it’s my fault.
I park, knock. Danny opens the door, eyes clear, thank God, beer in hand. Not the version of this I braced for.
“You okay?” I ask, stepping in. He hands me a beer and I take it.
“Yeah. Sorry, man. Crap day. Needed to talk to somebody.”
We head for the couch and I run my quiet inventory on the way, the door checklist, extended edition.
Dishes: done. Curtains: open. Prescription bottles on the kitchen counter: two, orange, labels turned away.
I want to ask whether there’s an actual prescription attached to them.
I say nothing. There’s a treaty line in this friendship and I know exactly where it is.
“So what’s up?” I take a sip.
“Had an appointment today. For the knee.”
I exhale a breath I didn’t clock myself holding. Appointments mean doctors. Doctors mean the bottles might be legitimate. “They think another surgery might actually do it this time.”
Danny’s had three surgeries on that knee.
Three, and none of them fixed it, ligaments shredded, cartilage ground down to rumor.
It’s the reason he’s the only one from the purge who never caught on anywhere else.
The others got traded, stashed, quietly rehomed around the league.
Danny didn’t, not because his sins were worse, but because by the end no medical staff in football would sign off on that knee.
The scandal took his team; the knee took his league.
“Okay,” I say slowly, waiting for it. “So where’s the bad news?”
“It’s expensive.” He pulls from the beer with the steadiness of a man reading his own weather report. “Can’t do it.”
“Danny. I’ll pay for it.”
It’s out before he finishes the sentence, because this is not the first time I’ve offered and it will not be the last time he refuses, I know the choreography by heart; I’d bet Grant has danced it with him too.
I don’t care what a knee costs. I will sell the house.
The house means nothing; the watches mean nothing; I’ll auction the whole catalog.
“No.” Flat. Categorical. No surprise. “But I wanted to tell you how I am paying for it. To your face. Because if you found out on your own, you’d lose your mind.”
I already don’t like it.
“I’m going to sell my ring. There’s an auction house that —”
“Absolutely not.”
“— handles sports memorabilia, and a Super Bowl ring from a player with a story attached —”
“Danny.” I put the beer down. “We bled for that ring. Literal blood. That is not a memento with a resale value. That’s the —” that’s the last piece of proof you own, is what I don’t say. The last object on earth that says football player instead of cautionary tale.
“I knew you’d say that.” The smile he gives me is the sad one, the one I’d pay any amount of money to never see again. “It doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, Nate.”
Lying bastard. It means everything to him. And I register, with some self-loathing, the hypocrisy of my outrage, I’ve spent two weeks lying to everyone I love, and here I am furious that he’d lie to me once.
“Then I’ll buy it.” Immediately. “Name the number. Whatever the auction estimate is, I’ll beat it.”
“For fuck’s sake.” He sets his beer down hard enough to talk with.
“I didn’t call you here to hit you up for money, Nate.
I called you out of respect. Because yeah, we were a great team.
You guys still are. But you’re the glue, man.
You were always the glue. Without your arm there is no ring for me to sell.
We all worked for it, fine, everybody worked, but a team with elite defense and elite receivers and a garbage quarterback wins nothing.
You dragged us there. Kicking and screaming, you dragged us.
So you get told to your face. That’s all this is. ”
I’m furious. It’s very simple: all he has to do is take my money.
That’s it. That’s the entire transaction standing between him and a working leg, and the only thing blocking it is pride, and I can’t even hate the pride, because flip the jerseys and I’d refuse too, all day, every time.
But what I would do and what he should do are not the same thing, and knowing that changes nothing, and the anger has nowhere to go, and anger makes me stupid.
So I say the thing. The one thing guaranteed to drive a wedge between us, and I say it on purpose, which is the part I’ll be living with.
“There are pictures of you and me. From the club, a few weeks back. With the drugs in frame.”
For a second I don’t know why I did it. Then I do, and it’s ugly: because Danny will offer to take the fall, and I’ll tell him to go to hell, and refusing his sacrifice will feel exactly like him refusing my money, and some petty bookkeeping department in my chest wants the ledger even.
That’s it. That’s the strategy. I am deploying my best friend’s guilt as leverage to make him accept help. Grade-A asshole, certified.
“Who has them?” The panic is instant and total, and it isn’t for himself.
“Morrison.” I shrug like it costs nothing. “Probably an outlet or two by now, or there will be. Who knows.” As if I’m not lying awake praying they never reach the one desk in Texas that matters. As if I haven’t stopped wanting Callie Carter to be my enemy at all.
“If it blows up, you tell them the drugs are mine.” No hesitation. Not one beat of it. The exact equivalent of here, take the money.
“No.” I stand, and I down the rest of the beer.
“I’ll take the fall. That’s already decided.
” I set the empty beer on his counter, next to the bottles with their labels turned away.
“Or, here’s the alternate play. You take the money for the knee, and when the pictures surface, you handle it however you want and I keep my mouth shut. Your call. One or the other.”
Danny doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and I look at him, and the whole eleven hundred square feet fills up with what we both already know: he will never take the money, and I will go down swinging before I let him bleed for me.
Unstoppable force, immovable object. I genuinely couldn’t tell you which of us is which.
“That’s what I thought,” I say, and I walk out of his place into the evening not knowing if my best friend is ever going to want to see me again.
#
Callie
I have a draft.
It’s not good, and it is definitely not what Marty ordered, but it exists, and it’s the story I’ve decided I actually want to tell.
It’s about Danny Alvarez: a man who lost his place on a team and then his place entirely, taken apart by a series of circumstances, the league’s machinery, the medical era, and yes, his own worst judgment, and what the fall looks like from the inside.
The photos appear in it only as what they are: the latest frame in a long film nobody’s been watching.
The draft needs one thing, and the thing is Danny Alvarez.
Or at least real information about him. Is he partying because he’s a party boy burning money on a good time, or is he coping?
Did the knee ever heal once recovery time stopped mattering, or does it still own him?
Is he living the retired-athlete dream, or servicing a debt to his own body?
I can’t ask Danny. Danny would sooner set my notebook on fire, and me with it, while he is at it.
But I can ask Nate.
And I am the worst kind of person, because I don’t just have the thought, I have a plan.
Stay after practice. Help with the cones.
Ask casually, mom-to-coach, how’s your friend doing these days.
There are several problems with the plan, and they’re all located in me.
One: it feels like betrayal, mining a conversation for an article while wearing my mom face.
Two, and worse: I don’t think Nate Rivers is an asshole anymore, which corrupts the whole operation.
I can’t stop replaying the way he looked at me over that gauze, which, I suspect, is the way I was looking at him, and I can’t stop remembering what his face felt like under my hands.
The warmth of it. The stubble along his jaw, rough under my fingertips, and the entirely unhelpful thought that the Sharp people would be devastated to learn their poster boy had skipped a morning.
So here I am after Thursday practice, helping Nate collect cones and scrimmage vests because Johnson had to leave early, under a sky going the color of a bruise.
Rain’s coming; you can smell it. And Nate Rivers is not himself.
I’ve catalogued his smiles by now, the media one, the real one, the other one, and today there were none.
He barely called encouragement during drills, and the man is usually louder than the parents.
“How’s the nose?” I ask. Safe territory. Also deeply unsafe territory, since it routes directly through the memory of touching him.
“It’s fine.” He stacks cones like it’s a full-time position with benefits.
I’m assembling a follow-up when the sky simply opens. No preamble, a wall of Texas rain, and then the whole world goes white, lightning close enough to taste, with a crack of thunder that hits like a tackle.
“Equipment shed!” Nate points, already grabbing Finn’s hand, and the four of us run for it, because lightning in Texas is nobody’s joke.