Epilogue
Callie
I open the door to find Priya on the porch holding a box of cupcakes and a gift bag, already talking.
“This house is AMAZING,” she says, instead of hi. “Please allow me to write an exclusive about it. I can see the headline — ‘The New Digs of the Outlaws’ Star Quarterback and His Fiancée: Inside the Dream House.'”
“Absolutely not.” I relieve her of the cupcakes, because in this family you secure the assets first and negotiate second.
“Also, you realize I currently have about thirty football players in my backyard, plus staff, wives, girlfriends, and children. Your twenty-four cupcakes are not going to make it, Priya. They’re not even going to slow the front line down. ”
“Wow. I’m sorry I was trying to be nice.
” Nobody does mock offense like this woman; it’s genuinely Olympic.
“Okay. If not the house, the ring.” She captures my left hand mid-air like a hawk taking a dove and stares at the engagement ring.
“Callie. Think of your self-employed friend. ‘The Story of Nate Rivers’s Proposal', the most romantic thing the internet has ever seen. Okay, fine, it isn’t, but we’re allowed some editorial freeway. ”
Priya left the Ledger a couple of months after I did.
Somebody showed her the math on what her audience was worth without a masthead skimming it, and now she owns her own platform, does exactly what she did before, answers to no one, and makes, by her own delighted, unverified accounting, ten times the revenue.
Marty lost both of us inside one quarter.
He sent her a congratulations email when she launched.
He’s mellowed. Or he’s tired. With Marty it can be hard to tell.
And regarding Nate’s romantic proposal: she’s right. Romantic is a generous term. I was there.
Here’s what actually happened. After the season ended, Nate and I bought this house, new construction for a new configuration of people; his old showroom went on the market with all five bedrooms staged and soulless, and neither of us looked back.
The renovation meant a few weeks of homelessness, so “we” decided a family vacation was in order, and one night over dinner, “we” announced that “we” had four tickets to Alaska.
The part of “we” that had neither purchased tickets nor participated in the decision was confused.
But he won me over, as per usual, with an argument of genuinely irritating quality: Alaska is one of the states where he plays no games, no team, no fans ambushing dinner, no jumbotrons.
Plus it’s beautiful, and it was already a hundred degrees in Texas, and two small boys could be launched at the outdoors daily until they achieved sleep. Sold.
It was wonderful. The boys loved every minute, minus one genuine crying episode from Finn upon learning he could not pet a wild grizzly bear, a policy he took as a personal betrayal by the state of Alaska.
And on the last night, boys down, the two of us in front of the fireplace — Nate, out of absolutely nowhere, and sounding frustrated about it, announced that he doesn’t like that I still carry my ex’s name.
It landed almost passive-aggressive, which isn’t Nate at all, and I confess my first internal response was the old reflex: things have been going so well, here it is, there’s the other shoe.
So I explained, with some heat, that changing your name is a bureaucratic nightmare, it’s not just Social Security, it’s the driver’s license, the insurance, the bank, the mortgage, the career, every account I’ve opened since I was twenty, who has the time, while another part of me privately conceded the point, because I hadn’t been married to Travis for almost three years and the name was less a choice than a leftover.
So I softened, and allowed that fine, someday, I’d probably revert to my maiden name.
And Nate said, “I don’t want you to revert it.
I want you to change it to Rivers,” and produced a ring from somewhere with the smooth mechanics of a play-action fake, and that, by a fireplace in Alaska, mid-argument about paperwork, is the proposal story.
He’d been carrying the ring for a month, waiting for what he called ‘the right moment,’ and when the right moment refused to schedule itself he simply faked an argument to create at least some level of heat.
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
Romantic is a generous term. It was perfect.
“Okay, but this TABLE is beautiful —” Priya has migrated to my dining room and is now visibly composing content about my furniture.
The table. Watching Nate Rivers, a man who at thirty-two had never once purchased furniture, whose every previous room was chosen by an invoice, buy furniture was an experience I wouldn’t sell for any of Priya’s revenue.
This furniture was another ‘we’ decision, but this time I ran the offense: he and I pick everything together, and the boys pick their own rooms under supervision, supervision existing mostly for Finn, who lobbied hard for a bed shaped like a shark.
We agreed to only buy things we both liked, and it turns out our taste overlaps about sixty percent, so at every impasse we settled it the adult way: rock, paper, scissors, best of three, in the middle of the showroom.
Yes. The franchise quarterback of the San Antonio Outlaws was witnessed by sales staff throwing scissors against his fiancée’s rock over a walnut dining table.
He lost. He’s a known gambler in the pocket; he should have scouted my tendencies.
Priya is not getting that story either.
“Priya, you’re not writing about my dining table.” I usher her toward the back door, which turns out to be a different mistake entirely.
“Oh. My. God.” She has sighted the backyard. “I don’t need your permission for THAT.”
Because my new backyard contains a swimming pool, and the pool and its adjacent territory are currently occupied by roughly half the Outlaws roster in swim shorts, a scene that, in fairness to Priya, probably does constitute a natural resource.
“You know what? Go for it, girl. In fact, start with Darius.” I point at the man himself, stretched on one of my new loungers with cucumber water and zero self-consciousness.
I have a personal vendetta to service: within ninety seconds of entering my home, Darius was filming a walkthrough, and I had to threaten to flush his phone if a single frame of my children’s bedrooms ever posts.
He agreed with the wounded dignity of an artist being censored.
Priya does not require a second invitation. The last thing I hear as she descends on him is two content creators simultaneously deciding to interview each other, which I believe is how you get a singularity.
I do a slow lap of my own party, cupcake box under my arm like a football.
Deacon’s wife has organized the shallow end into some kind of game with rules only she and six children understand; Deacon stands waist-deep in the middle of it being climbed like playground equipment.
This is also a warm-up for his retirement party; the man could keep playing, but he’s hanging it up for an assistant-coaching role with the Outlaws.
Holden is at the far edge of the yard in dark sunglasses, radiating leave-me-alone, with a paper plate balanced on his knee, and Finn, immune to radiation, planted directly in front of him, explaining something at length; to the eternal credit of the league’s most unbothered man, he is visibly listening.
Cash is retelling some story to two of the linemen with full choreography.
And on the back lawn, past the pool, Danny Alvarez is running routes with my son.
Jogging them, anyway, easy, clean, planting and cutting on a rebuilt knee that held through surgery and five months of doing rehab right this time, calling out coaching points while Eli runs the patterns with his whole serious heart.
Every so often Danny demonstrates a release move, some slippery little half-step from a former life, and Eli attempts it with the solemnity of a scholar copying scripture.
Nate keeps glancing over from the grill.
He thinks nobody’s caught him at it. I’ve caught him eleven times.
For three years I kept a folder of hate mail as a monument to everything I thought I’d broken. It’s summer now, and the man I was most afraid I’d destroyed is in my backyard, sober and upright and laughing, teaching my eight-year-old how to get open.
I will not admit that to Nate or anyone but I still don’t think my debt to Danny is repaid. I’m working on it. Between the article and today doors have opened for me, I wrote other pieces, all freelance and I got an offer to teach a class at UT during their summer semesters.
Danny calls a water break on his own coaching, he is still recovering, after all, and jogs over to where I’m standing with the cupcake box.
Eli drops to the grass to retire his cleats with tournament seriousness, and for a moment it’s just the two of us, the ex-receiver and the journalist, three years of history and one article between us.
“You never printed my name,” he says. Not a question. He’s looking at Eli, not at me. “Back then. You had it. You had everything, and you never printed it.”
“You noticed.”
“Took me three years to let myself.” He takes a water bottle off the table, turns it in his hands, and finally looks at me, and there’s the ghost of the grin from the framed college photo, the Longhorn kid, before all of it. “Thank you, Callie. For the mercy. Both times.”
Then he taps the bottle against the cupcake box like we’re toasting, and jogs back to my son, and starts teaching him a release move, and doesn’t look back, because some conversations are complete at exactly three sentences, and the man was always quick out of his breaks.
I stand there for a second, blinking at nothing in particular, doing the thing where you don’t cry at your own housewarming party.
“We have cupcakes,” I announce, arriving at the grill, where Nate is flipping burgers with Grant stationed at his elbow in a supervisory capacity. “Only twenty-four. So.”
“So I’ll have all of them,” Grant says, with a grin.
“Let me cut them into quarters.” The calm voice comes from behind me: Quinn, the young trainer from the Outlaws’ medical staff, materializing the way she apparently does, already reaching for the box.
I’ve only met her twice, but I know two things about her: she’s the one who patched Nate up after the Houston disaster without asking him a single question he couldn’t afford to answer, and she is, at this moment, the only person at this party doing portion math for thirty athletes.
“Ninety-six quarters. That works.” She disappears inside with the box, and I decide I like her enormously.
“I should… go help with that,” Grant announces, to no one, abandoning his grill post with the tactical urgency of a man who has just remembered something important, and follows her in.
“That looks delicious,” I tell him, wrapping my arms around his waist from behind, hooking my chin on his shoulder blade, which is as high as I reach.
“It’s burgers, sugar.” He laughs, and I feel it in my sternum. “It’s not rocket science.”
“I didn’t mean the burgers.”
“You two are so happy it’s disgusting,” Grant calls from the doorway, purely on principle, before vanishing after Quinn.
Nate sets down the spatula, turns inside my arms, and looks down at me, and there it is, the smile that isn’t the media smile and isn’t the real smile. The third one. The one with a conversion rate. The one that’s mine.
“Happy, huh?” he says. “Disgustingly?”
I look around my backyard, at the roster and the wives and the kids and at Danny cutting on a good knee; at Eli getting open; at Finn lecturing Holden; at the drawers upstairs full of small socks and the walnut table I won fair and square, at this loud, improbable, hard-won everything, built by a scandal, six photographs, and one PR stunt that backfired into a family.
“Disgustingly,” I confirm.
The wedding is at the end of the upcoming season. Soon-to-be Callie Rivers has a deadline, a byline she can’t wait to update, and forty years of paperwork ahead of her, and for the first time in her chronically late life, she plans on being early.