“You can’t know for sure it’s been taken away from you for good,” she says, and then she’s gulping in air, as if afraid she might start crying all over again.
But she doesn’t. I look across the table at her and imagine I’m watching a teammate shake off a big hit on the field.
“I’m sorry for blubbering like that,” she says.
“Don’t you ever feel as if you have to apologize to me about anything,” I say. And then add, “Ever.”
“Well then, that’s it,” she says, tossing the napkin back at me as ifusing it to put a period at the end of a sentence. “No more bellyaching, certainly notfromme andaboutyou. You know something else your daddy used to say? All bellyaching ever really does is make your belly ache for real.”
“He had a lot of sayings.”
“Didn’t he, though?”
She stands up from the table.
“Now it’s time for you to hit the hay,” she says. “You’ve got some ass-breaking work to do in the morning, fixing up our sorry excuse for a barn.”
The twinkle is back in her eyes, the brightness in them and the fun, as she walks over to me. Then she’s the one kissing me on the cheek.
“You know what they say about retirement.”
“What’s that?”
“You can never take a day off,” my grandmother says.
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.
Thisismyself.
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 neverthought 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—leadingthem 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.
