Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Nate
I couldn’t make the Little League game this weekend, travel schedule, away at DC, and I am frustrated about it, which is a first. For the record: never once in my life has football been in the way of something bothered me.
Football is the thing other things get out of the way for.
That’s the org chart. Except this Saturday, football kept me from watching the little bastards win — Johnson texted me the score with nine exclamation points, and it kept me from Callie Carter.
Yes. That’s where we are. I wanted to see Callie Carter. I want to talk to her about the almost-kiss in that shed. I want to finish the almost-kiss in that shed, and I want several things well beyond it that I’m not committing to internal monologue.
I’m in trouble.
I also haven’t spoken to Danny since I walked out of his place, which sits in my chest like a swallowed stone.
On the flight to DC I low-key asked Grant if he’d seen him.
Grant said yeah, he’d stopped by, Danny’s doing fine.
Given my own recent output of compulsive lying, I found myself auditing his answer for quality, which is rich.
Just because I’ve become a fraud doesn’t mean Grant has.
So here we are, Tuesday night. Callie ran late again, so no chance to talk before practice, and I’m praying that’s her clock and not avoidance, because I cannot stop thinking about this woman and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise to myself.
After practice I make it exactly four steps toward the parking lot.
“Coach! Hey, big game Sunday.” The bench-coach dad materializes in my path, arms already crossed. “DC’s front seven. Were you worried?”
“We were ready for them.”
“See, because what I keep telling my wife is, y’all don’t attack the middle of the field enough.” He plants his feet, which I have learned is the stance of a man settling in. “Now, I drew something up. Just a concept. You got a second?”
I do not have a second. Forty yards away, Callie is packing two boys and a gear bag into her car, and I have a shed conversation and an almost-kiss sitting between us like an unsnapped ball, and this man is reaching into his back pocket for what turns out to be an actual folded piece of paper.
“It’s a play-action deal,” he says, unfolding it on his forearm. “Tight end drags underneath, see, and then — this is the part — the back leaks out late. Nobody covers the back.”
“Somebody always covers the back.”
“Not if you sell the fake.” He taps the paper, triumphant. “You gotta sell the fake, is the thing.”
I give him ninety seconds of civilized nothing and he converts them into six more minutes of coverage theory, and when I finally extract myself with the last polite muscle in my body and turn around, her spot is empty.
Six minutes. The man cost me six minutes I wanted more than he will ever know, and I can’t even hate him properly, because he was so sincerely delighted the whole time.
Except she isn’t.
I’m walking to my car with the equipment bag over my shoulder, because these days I don’t just dress for the job, I carry inventory: spare pads, tape, two sizes of cleats, juice boxes.
Yes. I’m that guy now; we’re past litigating it, when I hear, across the parking lot, the universal sound of a car trying its best and failing. Rrr-rrr-rrr. Click.
Lucky me. It’s Callie. This beautiful disaster of a woman, negotiating with the ignition like it owes her.
I knock on her window.
“That sounds like you’re walking home.” A beat. “Or I drive you three home, and the tow truck becomes tomorrow’s problem.”
“The check engine light’s been on for a while.” She says it with her chin up, green eyes daring me to comment, and God help me, I would listen to this woman talk about dashboard warning lights until sunrise. There is something clinically wrong with me.
“Seven months, Mom,” Eli reports from the back seat, with the merciless precision of a court stenographer.
The look on her face. I’d frame it.
“Come on.” I step back from the door.
Five minutes later her address is in my GPS, two car seats and two backpacks have migrated into my back seat, the car seats take me an embarrassing amount of engineering, and we’re rolling. Finn provides director’s commentary on my Sunday game the whole way home.
“And then you threw it SO far. Like a hundred yards.”
“Sixty-two,” I say, and then, because the rearview shows me a face unwilling to negotiate: “But it felt like a hundred.”
“And the guy caught it with ONE HAND.”
Two hands. Blake caught that ball with two extremely ordinary hands and then fell out of bounds. I make no move to correct the record.
“And THEN,” Finn continues, building to it, “you ran over the big guy. The really big one. And he cried.”
“I don’t think he cried, buddy.”
“He cried a little. Eli, didn’t he cry a little?”
“He was mad,” Eli rules from the far seat, judicious as ever. “Being mad looks like crying sometimes.”
“See,” Finn says, vindicated, and launches into the touchdown, the real one, his voice going up and up through the play-by-play, “and then you did the TOUCHDOWN, and everybody was screaming, and then, and then the replay showed —“
And that’s where he falls asleep. Mid-sentence, between one touchdown and its imaginary replay, head tipped against the car-seat wing, out cold in the sudden, total way small kids go, like somebody hit a switch.
Nobody in that car says anything for a second. The quiet where his voice was has a shape to it.
“He always does that,” Eli offers, softly, from the dark of the back seat.
“Best broadcast in Texas,” I say, and mean it, and drive the rest of the way with the radio off.
The silence holds for a mile or two, comfortable in a way silence in my car has never once been, Callie half-turned in the passenger seat to watch her sleeping son, and I decide someone should rescue her from whatever soft, complicated thing is happening on her face.
“Seven months is a long time, you know.” I keep it light, teasing, not judging, because teasing is apparently what I do now. I tease the woman I personally designated enemy number one of this organization three years ago. Growth, or brain damage. Jury’s out.
“I didn’t have time.” It comes back quick and defended, a door closing, and I don’t push the button again. I know a blitz look when I see one.
Her place is fifteen minutes from the field. Standard middle-class Texas, neat yards, basketball hoops over garages, trampolines surfacing behind fences, one-story houses in decorative red brick. Hers is exactly that: tidy, modest, a bike capsized on the lawn.
Eli’s out before I’ve parked, loading himself with gear and backpacks like a small sherpa.
“I’ve got Finn.” I extract the sleeping kid from the car seat, he weighs nothing and immediately molds onto my shoulder like it’s his job, and follow Eli inside.
I don’t get a tour. I don’t need one. What I see on the walk down that hallway guts me, and not for her, for me.
It’s not about square footage; my house wins that contest by a landslide and loses every other contest there is.
This house doesn’t look like a showroom.
There are photos on every surface, school pictures, a beach trip, a gap-toothed Eli holding a fish.
There’s kid art taped at kid height. There’s a couch that has clearly hosted ten thousand movie nights and a doorframe with pencil lines marking two boys getting taller.
The place is tidy, but it’s tidy the way a lived-in place is tidy, tidied, by a person, for people.
My house is a magazine nobody reads. This is a home. I’m carrying a sleeping five-year-old down the hallway of everything I don’t have, and the craving that opens up in me is so sudden and specific it nearly buckles a knee.
I lay Finn in his bed, rocket-ship sheets, before the existential event completes, and step out. Eli’s peeled off to his room across the hall. Callie’s coming through the front door with both car seats, one on each arm, because of course she didn’t wait for help.
Now or never, Rivers.
“How are they getting to school tomorrow?” I ask, as she sets the seats down by the door.
“I’ll probably call my ex.”
And there it is, the hesitation, a full half-second of it, from the woman whose ex couldn’t make an eleven a.m. Saturday game with a week’s notice. He’s going to show up at seven-thirty on a school day with less than twelve hours’ notice?
“How about I do it?” Not really a question. “I come by, take the boys to school, drop you at work, and you deal with the car without herding anyone.”
I can see the no assembling behind her eyes, some independent-woman counteroffer involving Ubers and inconvenience, so I get there first.
“Callie.” Quiet, because there are kids down the hall.
“Last week, in that shed, I told you something I’ve never told anyone.
Last week I almost kissed you. Do whatever you want with both of those facts.
But somebody should show up for you and those boys for once, and I’m volunteering, it’s not charity, it’s not pity, and it is not me thinking you can’t do it. ” A beat. “How far’s the school?”
“Ten minutes.” Still hesitating, but the hesitation’s losing. “School starts at eight.”
“I’ll be here at seven-thirty.” I say it with the confidence of a man who makes split-second decisions for a living, and then completely undermine the effect by continuing to stand there like furniture.
My exit was right there. I sailed past it.
“I need your phone number. You know, so I can text you when I’m close. ”
Smooth, Rivers. Devastating. Somewhere out there a college sophomore just ran that play better on the first try.
She types her number into my phone, and I immediately text her a single hi so she has mine, and then I still don’t move, because apparently my legs have joined the mutiny. What is wrong with me? I reach for the door handle. Stop.
“Callie.” Turn. “I really want to kiss you.”