2. Rhett #2
What none of them know is the inside of it.
That I have a list, an actual list I keep in my head the way other men keep batting averages, of the things I wasn’t there for.
That the list is long and specific and does not get shorter.
That standing up here being charming for a roomful of cameras is the single easiest thing I will do today, and the hard thing is forty feet away in a glass box pretending to watch the monitors, my son, who hired me and won’t quite look at me, and what I would trade every name in those rafters to fix.
“Caden’s the best young executive in this league,” I say, and I mean it, and that’s the part that costs. “He hired the coach he thought gave the Crowns the best chance. If that man happens to be his father, that’s the franchise’s good luck and my second one.”
It’s a good answer. It’s a true answer. It is also a door I keep shut, and the room can hear the door, and they let it go because she’s already stepping back to the podium, reading the energy, calling it before it can turn.
“We’ve got time for two more,” she says, and takes the wheel back so smoothly half the room doesn’t notice it changed hands.
She picks the two softest hands left. She lands the plane.
She thanks everyone for coming in a way that makes them feel like they did something nice by showing up.
The whole time her shoulders are squared at me like a held breath.
We walk off into the tunnel together because the choreography says the new coach and the comms lead exit through the same door, and the second the curtain’s behind us she rounds on me.
“You don’t get to do that,” she says, low and furious, no cameras now, just the cinderblock and the hum of the lights. “You don’t get to take a reveal I built and turn it into improv because you think you’re charming.”
“It worked.”
“That’s not,” She stops. Recalibrates. I can see her deciding not to give me the satisfaction of yes it worked, and I respect it.
“I don’t care if it worked. Working isn’t the job.
The job is doing it the same way every time, so that when it actually matters, a playoff loss, a hot mic, a kid’s career in the balance, you’ve got a habit to fall back on instead of a coin flip and a prayer.
You don’t get to be charming on a Tuesday and cost me the season in May because you decided the rules were for everybody but you. ”
She’s something when she’s furious
, the color high on her cheeks, the paint-stripping stare, and under it the specific outrage of a person who is good at her job and just watched someone treat it like a toy.
“You’re right,” I say.
It stops her cold. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Agree with me to end the conversation. I’ve been managed by professionals. You’re good. I’m better. I’ll know.”
And that’s the thing that gets me, standing in a cinderblock tunnel with a woman half my age who just dressed me down cleaner than any coach I ever played for.
Not the fury. The fact that she assumed I was managing her, because everyone in this building manages everyone, and she’s already three moves into a game I didn’t know we’d started.
“I’m not managing you,” I say. “I think you’re right and I’m going to do it my way anyway. Both true. You’ll get used to it.”
“I won’t, actually, because after today I hand you off to —”
“Maren.” Caden’s voice, coming up the tunnel with his GM face on, the one I taught him by accident from a thousand miles away.
He stops between us, and he looks at the two of us standing a little too close in a hallway, and he doesn’t have the room in his day to wonder about it.
“Good presser. Dad —” the word still costs him; you can hear the toll it takes on the way out, “ownership wants to shake your hand, upstairs, ten minutes.” He turns to her.
“Maren, you’re lead on the coaching account. All season. He’s yours.”
I watch it land on her. I watch the woman who just told me she was about to be rid of me realize, in real time, that she’s instead chained to me until June.
Her face does something extraordinary, a flash of pure horror, fully suppressed inside a single second, paved over with a smile so smooth her own boss buys it.
“Great,” she says. “Looking forward to it, Coach.”
“Likewise, Ms. —” and I realize I still don’t have her last name, this woman I argued with at midnight and again at noon, the one I’m apparently spending my whole comeback standing beside.
“Hale,” she says, through the smile, every consonant a small blade. “Maren Hale.”
I should feel cornered. A man my age, one foot out the door of his own life, does not need a complication with a sharp-mouthed woman thirty years and one impossible org chart away from him.
I know all of it. I knew it last night in the press room, when the floor tilted four degrees and I had to widen my stance like a rookie.
What I feel instead is the first thing in five years that isn’t the cold. I follow my son up the tunnel toward the men who own me now, and I think: this is a terrible idea, and I have not looked forward to a season this much since I was a kid who still thought the game would love him back.
She’s mine all year. God help us both.