Chapter 9 #2
The shed is the league’s storage barn, a long, deep room with metal shelving down both walls, racks of tackling dummies and blocking pads, a lawn mower asleep under a tarp at the far end.
Room enough to move around in; not room enough to feel like the storm isn’t right there on the other side of the tin roof, hammering like it wants in.
Nate hauls the door mostly shut and the day goes dim and loud all at once.
“Mom.” Finn, instantly, from somewhere near my hip. “Do you think there are spiders in here?”
“No,” I say.
“Oh, for sure, buddy,” Nate says, at the exact same moment. “Big ones. Probably a rattlesnake or two down at the dark end.”
I smack him in the chest, which turns out to be a serious tactical error, because the muscle under the wet T-shirt is poured concrete, and now I am the one not thinking about rattlesnakes.
“If there were a rattlesnake in here,” I announce, over both boys’ heads swiveling toward the shadows, “we would hear it. That’s the entire point of a rattlesnake.” I dig out my phone and hand it over with the flashlight on. “Here. Go conduct a sweep.”
Eli takes the phone with the gravity of a bomb-disposal officer, and the two of them set off down the length of the shed, beam swinging under the bottom shelves, Finn narrating the search parameters.
Which leaves the two of us by the door, in the drumming dark, with fifteen feet and a wall of rain-noise manufacturing something that feels dangerously like privacy.
“You know,” Nate says, low, watching the flashlight bob at the far end, “I disagree with what you do for a living. What it did to Danny. That hasn’t changed.” A pause. “But that”, he nods down the shed, at my boys — “I respect the hell out of that.”
Here it is. My opening, gift-wrapped: he brought up Danny himself, and all I have to do is lean in gently, how is Danny these days, and the draft on my laptop gets its missing organ. The plan, executing itself.
But Nate is still talking.
“I was raised by a single mom.” He says it to the middle distance, like it’s easier if it’s not aimed at anyone.
“She worked two jobs to keep us fed and housed and me in pads and cleats, you know what that gear costs, you live it. She made most of my high school games. Missed a few, when a shift wouldn’t move.
But she was always there when it mattered.
” The corner of his mouth lifts, soft, aimed at something twenty years away.
“And she was always late. Every time. I’d hear her before I saw her, parking lot, half-running. ”
I’m frozen. I don’t know what to say and I don’t know why he’s telling me, except that I do, and that’s the part that has me by the throat.
“Nobody says that, you know,” I manage, eventually. “People have opinions about my work, love it, hate it, sign their names to it either way. But nobody ever —” The sentence runs out of road. Nobody ever says they see the other job. The first one. The one I’m late from.
“I know.” That taxed smile again, the one with the limp. “People think the running late is your personality. It’s not. It’s a symptom of trying to do everything.”
The rain hammers. The flashlight beam sweeps a far corner. I recalibrate everything.
“I thought you were an asshole, you know,” I say, into the pause.
“Party boy. Probably complicit in what happened three years ago, not directly, but through the silence. The standing around.” I let him hear that I mean it, because I did mean it.
“And then you handed my son his confidence back on a bench in one conversation.”
“You were right about three years ago.” No flinch, no spin.
“We all turned a blind eye. Every man in that building.” He pauses, and I can watch him deciding to keep going.
“What you don’t have is the why. Danny, he’s like me.
Football isn’t the job; it’s the whole inventory.
Plenty of guys are in it for money and cameras, and fine.
If this game paid minimum wage, I’d still play it.
So run the math from inside that skin: if I’m hurt, I don’t play.
If I don’t play, Cash Turner plays. And what if my recovery runs long and Cash gets good, better?
What if the injury takes half a step and I never get back?
” His voice has dropped to almost nothing, pitched under the rain, just for me.
“I knew about Danny’s knee. Knew he was playing on it, knew he was managing it his own way.
And I understood why, because every man on that roster has his own Cash Turner standing behind him, and I love the little bastard, and I could lose everything to him.
We weren’t silent because we didn’t care.
We were silent because we were terrified, every one of us, of the kid on the bench. ”
He’s close. When did he get this close, or did I drift, my shoulder blades leaving the wall at some point without filing a motion.
“Coach told me something a few weeks back.” His eyes in the dark are mostly pupils, rain-light moving on them.
“Doesn’t matter the exact words. It’s a thing I’ve known for years and never once said out loud.
” A breath. “I have nothing besides football, Callie. Nothing. And it’s starting to kill me. ”
And he leans, slow, deliberate, telegraphing it like a man giving me every chance to call it off, and God help me, I realize I am not going to call it off, I am tilting my chin up to meet —
“A TARANTULA!”
Finn’s shriek hits the tin roof and rings it like a bell. I’m across the shed on pure maternal ballistics before my brain even engages, to discover, by phone-light, that the tarantula is a coiled bundle of extension cables.
“It’s cables, baby. Cables.” My heart is doing a number that has nothing to do with arachnids.
I look back down the length of the shed.
Nate has both hands laced on top of his head and his face tipped to the ceiling, the universal posture of a man either recovering from a near-miss or filing one under his greatest regrets, and in this light, with my pulse where it is, I honestly cannot tell which.
The rain, having accomplished everything it came for, begins to ease.