Thirteen
AS TIRED AS I know I should be, I can’t sleep.
Not tossing and turning, because it hurts too much to do that. I’ve taken to sleeping with pillows on both sides of me, more on my right side than left, so’s I don’t make the wrong move and end up on my bad shoulder.
I lie in my old bed in the dark, more wide awake than if I was standing in the middle of our fields in the midday sun. I interlock my fingers across my chest and hear myself saying the words over again.
This is myself.
I wasn’t just telling EJ the truth, I was telling it to myself, as plain as I could.
This is the life I’ve come limping back to, back here, back in Cross Rivers and at this farm and in this house.
This is next season for me.
All my football stuff—my trophies and awards from high school and college, framed Carolina jersey, framed jersey from Cross Rivers High—is downstairs in what used to be my father’s den.
EJ once nicknamed it my Ego Room, even though I would have never thought about it in those terms. EJ had arranged it all and then rearranged it every so often, adding after my senior season the ACC Player of the Year trophy, like a consolation prize for ending up runner-up in the voting for the Heisman Trophy.
There are only two trophies up here in my bedroom, both from my last season in the youth football league.
One for MVP. One for winning the championship.
We were 3–0 that year when my father was murdered.
But he had attended all three of those games.
I would never know for sure, but maybe he had seen enough in them, even when I was that young, to look down the road, see all the way down it to what I could become.
God, I loved being a football player.
Loved being a part of a team, loved the locker room and the feeling of waking up on game day in the fall. Loved running out onto the field with my teammates for home games—leading them out—and the sound the crowd would make when everybody first laid eyes on us.
Even loved the first time I’d take a good lick once the game had started.
All part of it.
And all gone.
My phone is on the bedside table. I reach over for it and look at the time. Just after one in the morning.
I finally get out of bed and throw on a T-shirt and put on my jeans and my Red Wing boots—then make my way carefully and slowly down the creaky old stairs, past the faint sound of Bumper’s snoring coming from the living room couch, and silently let myself out the front door and get into the truck and head for town.
I head for Scobee’s, which had been my father’s favorite joint, where he’d stopped to pick up his breakfast sandwich the morning he never made it to school.
Open all night, because it always has been.
It’s the only twenty-four-hour place around, even the bars having curfews, nobody ever thinking of calling Cross Rivers, North Carolina, the city that never sleeps.
But it’s not asleep tonight and neither am I.
Scobee’s is where Taylor McCarter Webb works part-time to supplement her salary driving a grade-school bus, all to help her pay for the teaching courses she’s still taking at Appalachian State, and to supplement Burt Webb’s salary as a small-town policeman.
I don’t call ahead to see if she’s there tonight.
If she is, I want to surprise her when I sit down at the counter and order up some homemade cherry pie.
But I know I’m not going there for the cherry pie. Another lie I don’t believe.
I’m going there because I need to talk to her in the worst way, the way we did in high school when she and I would sit in a booth on weekend nights and try to settle the world’s problems.
Or my problems, with the girl I might have been dating at the time or because I was struggling with a course or which scholarship I should accept, even though we both knew I was going to end up at Carolina the same as my father did.
It was one of his dreams for me even though he never came right out and said so when he was still around to share his dreams with me.
Taylor had warned me that day in the rehab, how I need to watch out because being alone isn’t good for me, and it sure isn’t healthy.
I’ve never felt more alone in my life than I do right now.
One more time, and despite all of my good intentions, I drive fast.