I told him I was sorry I didn’t get to his party last night. Oh, man. He lit up, naming names of who all was there. Generations of Generals. Father-and-son linebackers on the field. It was something, he kept saying, I should have been there. I didn’t tell him I would only have seen the missing teeth in that smile. QB1 Fast Forward. Cornerback Hammer Kelly. Big Bear, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. My predecessor Collins. Cush Polk, a cruelty to make you tear your hair. He had OD’d on what must have been his very first step off the narrow path. That good family, that preacher father, facing a coffin in wonder at God’s failed mercy. But Coach seemed content to dwell on another plane. He didn’t bring up the new coach or the losing season.
Nor did we talk about U-Haul. He’d faced embezzlement charges, but it got complicated and he wiggled out with fines and probation. I got this news from Annie and Mr. Armstrong, that had tolerated U-Haul and his skank mother sliming them on rinse-and-repeat for years on end. Nobody was sorry to see those two slither away through the grass with no forwarding address.
I helped Coach drink a pot of coffee and make small talk around all the bigger things I wanted to say. That I was thankful for what he’d seen in me, sorry for the parts I screwed up. His mistakes were no more than the common failing to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end. Farm field, battlefield, football field. I have no words for that mess. But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there’s a code. I’d showed up.
I pulled up to the mansion with knots in my gut. Which made no sense, it was just Angus. Hello goodbye. The sight of her Wrangler settled me some. Old four-wheel friend, the worse for wear. She’d mentioned putting over two hundred thousand on it, back and forth from Nashville.
I stuck my head in the door just as she walked into the living room carrying a box, which she almost dropped, doing a surprised little two-step. “Jee-sus on a Popsicle stick.”
“Back at you,” I said. It was freezing in there, they must have already cut off the utilities. She had on a red turtleneck and fleece type boots that looked like they’d come from the sheep to her feet with minimal processing. One of those overly colorful knitted hats with the earflaps and yarn braids hanging down. “Your pipes could freeze,” I said. “Want me to build you a fire?”
She set down the box and frowned at the castle-size fireplace. We’d tried roasting marshmallows in there as kids, and it never ended well. “Nah. Let’s not burn the place down till I’ve got the cash in hand.”
She stood there sizing me up, as people did now. I looked taller than I would ever feel.
“On the other hand,” she said, “I’d better get some free labor out of you. Before you sell your book and get too famous for me to talk to. How’s Annie, by the way?”
“Oh crap.” I’d learned from Mr. Armstrong that it was not a false alarm, and I should stay tuned. A call had come in while I was driving, that rolled over to messages. I read it now, aloud: Woodie Guthrie Amato Armstrong. Seven pounds, one ounce, twenty-two inches.
“Seriously.” Her mouth shifted completely to one side, my favorite of all her smirks. I’d borrowed it for my character Bernie. If Angus noticed, she never said. “Are they too old to know what that’s going to be like, a little boy going to school with the name Woodie?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “By age five he’ll be going by something else.”
“Like Hard-On.”
“Exactly.”
Another pause. We were a cold engine, not perfectly hitting.
“Nice hat.”
She pulled it off and looked at it. “Right? I bought it off a guy on the street in Nashville.” Set free, her hair sprang into action, somehow girlier than it used to be. We were standing in the exact places where we’d first met. I felt reckless, like setting something on fire for real.
“Remember the first day I came here? And thought you were a boy?”
The smirk shifted. “Angus, ‘like the cattle.’”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you let me go on like that, the whole day? You could have just said.”
She stopped smiling. “Late in the day to start asking now.”
I sensed myself picking a fight. The kind that helps you break up with somebody, evidently. “Right. I forget these things. How you always have to be queen of all the bees.”
The gray eyes went through several changes of weather before they settled. “Can you not think at all about how that was for me? I had no say in the matter. Some kid I’ve never met is moving in with us. Coach is finally getting his boy.”