Caryn hadn’t cared. She had so much confidence, it didn’t matter what Cindy thought. Her daughter-in-law. Mitch’s nine-month pregnant wife and hair twin, married in a hasty, family-only ceremony at Christmas, with talk of a real wedding to come. She’d taken a leave of absence from Miami and they were home now because of her, because her doctors had advised her not to travel at this stage and because Mitch had refused to go to New York without her. He would’ve gone without Cindy—she was pretty sure of that—but this was not the time to make comparisons. It was different with the wife, the mother of your child. It ought to be anyway. In the end, they’d all go wherever they were going together. The only question was where that would be.
Washington, Houston, Green Bay. Niners, Steelers, Rams. The last few months it was like some kind of hundred-year pollen had spread through town, making everyone sneeze out the names of cities and teams. Mitch was their first pro since Scooter Hartless had gotten the call from the Saints in ’82, the first ever who stood a fair chance of being a star. People were just obsessed, and the itch intensified, was practically hives, whenever Cindy was around. They crowded her pew in church and carried grocery bags to her car just for a clipping of the latest news. How was his forty, how was his bench, had he heard from the Cowboys, the Redskins, the Cowboys? “April 25,” she kept telling everyone. “That’s the draft. That’s when we’ll know.” She’d never repeated a date so many times in her life.
By the time she flipped the kitchen calendar to April, the date had taken on a personality of its own. Circled in red, it bloomed with all the exhibitionism of spring, the first of their many football Sundays—football Fridays and football Saturdays now consigned to Hall of Fames past. She could feel it pulsing at her when she turned her back to wash dishes in the sink, felt her eyes drawn to it every time she talked to him on the phone. It even appeared in her dreams, that red-circled date, whirling its arms the way Mitch would do when he managed to turn an interception into an end zone dance.
The intensity had grown and grown—at a certain point she would’ve taken a coma if it meant the day would get there sooner—and now it had reached its limit on the afternoon of the draft. The party was her way of appeasing the masses, and of distracting herself from all the disaster scenarios that were too painful to contemplate. From Sam’s Club, she’d ordered fifteen gourmet hoagie platters with an assortment of roast beef, turkey and ham; ten party-sized chicken Caesar salads with dressing on the side; five party-sized seven-layer dips with accompanying Tostitos; five plastic gallons each of pretzels, Goldfish, Cheez Doodles, and Mitch’s favorite, Peanut M&Ms; two full-sized sheet cakes in the style of football fields; twenty-five two-liter soft drinks ranging from Coke and Dr. Pepper to A&W Root Beer and Sprite; and two full kegs of Bud Light for the yard. She’d puzzled over the cakes, thinking it might be nice to customize them the moment they learned where he would go, but that would involve ordering plastic decals for all twenty-eight teams, and more frighteningly, invited Disaster Scenario #1: No One Picks Him At All. In the end, she decided it was safer to stick with a generic green frosting field sectioned off with fine white piping, and in the end zones, his good, proud name MITCH, stenciled in his high school colors on one cake and in his college colors on the other. Whatever happened today, he’d played football all his life.
People came. Oh, they came. They brought jumbo pots of mac and cheese and bonus-sized bottles of champagne and Hennessy, cigars they tucked into the inside pockets of their windbreakers and kept flashing expectantly throughout the day. They brought Betty Crocker fudge brownies and confetti cakes they’d baked from boxes, plus extra Styrofoam cups and the stray bag of ice, in case she happened to run out. They helped her spread tablecloths and fan cocktail napkins, reach bowls and unfold chairs—even more solicitous than when her father had died, and two years later, her mother—but mostly they just took up space in her living room. Mitch’s coach and teammates from Monacan, Donna from the hospital, people from church and the newspaper, even Pastor Ron dropped by, not to mention Caryn’s parents and sister and two of her big-haired friends. And Tim and Tracy, of course, with their daughter Megan. All of them hooting and slapping Mitch on the back, crowding onto couches, hunkering down on the floor by the coffee table, filling doorways and laps and lounging beachily on the stairs. As the day went on, they proliferated and concentrated, hugging together before the television in an ever tighter and ever more desperate mass, a drink in every hand, all other needs for the moment met, until the draft officially began.
Some thoughtful person had saved her a seat on the central couch next to Mitch, which was only right, but she was grateful anyway. As the clock ticked down to the first pick, she wiggled her fingers up against his leg. His thigh was swampy. Poor boy, he was sweating already in his big khaki shorts, and he all but knew he wouldn’t go first.
“The first selection will be made by the New England Patriots,” the commissioner was saying, a fatherly man who did his best to hide his obscene wealth beneath the front of a bland black suit. Camera flashes quick-silvered his face and the beige wall behind him, and the moment seemed to accelerate as the television sucked them all in.
Drew Bledsoe, quarterback, Washington State University.
There was a collective sigh as everyone flexed their knuckles and relaxed their shoulders and generally settled in. It was real, it was happening, and it wasn’t over yet. Though no one would’ve begrudged Mitch if he’d somehow gone first—on the contrary, that meant more money, which they probably hoped to share—she knew they’d been waiting for this moment too long. The speculation, and the sense of power and significance that came with it, had sustained them for so many months in their otherwise, let’s face it, slow and fallow lives, that it almost would’ve killed them to see it whiz by so soon.
“They been saying it’d be a QB first,” Ricky Franklin said above the murmur. Ricky was another ex-Warrior—a wiry corner—and current shift man at Frito Lay.
“Yeah.” Mitch was massaging his jaw with his hand. “I knew it’d be Drew.”
“Friend of yours?” someone hooted.
“He’ll know me soon enough.”
This drew a chorus of familiar hollers—“Yeah, Wilk!” “Look out, Drew!” “Gonna get a Wilking!”—which Mitch just ducked and accepted. She wasn’t sure he even heard his own cheers anymore, not from these folks, whom he’d known his entire life. He was hungry for the unheard; she could sense the desire warming there in his muggy leg. He’d been on the biggest college stage in Miami. Where else to go but up? He wanted the cheers of New York, Chicago, San Diego. The nation really, in all its countless anonymity. The people who knew you were no longer quite enough.
“What, no suit?”
“Can’t the boy dress?” The room exploded into guffaws at Bledsoe’s plain red work shirt and jeans, as though he’d taken a break from chopping wood to accept his millions.
Cindy moved her hand to Mitch’s knee and gave it a squeeze. His left knee. The only part of him that had ever been seriously injured. When he was first becoming great at football, some long-ago time in high school now impossible to locate, she had feared all kinds of damage, yet found it ecstatic to watch him play. She’d been a volleyball captain herself, but had never cared much for his sport. Football boys were unreliable. That had been her experience anyway. But then came her son and he was a natural, even better than his dad. He flexed his shoulders, he butterflied his arms, he seemed to grow an inch each game. She would stand in her lucky middle-aisle spot in the third row of the home-side bleachers and she would hold herself across the waist, wondering how on earth he could do these things with his body, things she herself had never done.
On the other side of Mitch, Caryn flexed her toes. Cindy saw why he liked her. She was tiny, and well-made, like a very special doll. She could almost fit in his pocket, where he kept his wallet and keys and everything else he cared about most. Yet she had the bearing of a much larger person. When she made any kind of declaration, eve
n something as harmless as “I want a milkshake,” Cindy often found herself feeling shrimpy—Cindy, who was six feet tall!—and truthfully, she didn’t like feeling that way around another woman. Truthfully, she didn’t like Caryn much at all. There was something about her shiny dark hair and her stacked little shoes that reminded Cindy of a China cabinet, as though she’d only allow herself to be set out for the finest occasions. Compared to Donald Trump, her accountant father wasn’t rich, but compared to Cindy, he was, and Cindy was quickly discovering that the money of the person just a few steps above you was the only money that had any value.
Of course now all their fortunes would rise: Mitch’s and Caryn’s and Cindy’s together. She had to hand it to her; Caryn had played her cards exactly right. Nine months pregnant on draft day.
Bledsoe was done shaking hands with the commissioner and stiffly brandishing his new jersey and now the Seattle Seahawks were making their pick. Rick Mirer, Notre Dame, another quarterback.
“Standard,” Mitch said, taking Caryn’s hand. “This is all standard.”
“How’re you feeling, Mitch?” Gary, the reporter from the local paper, shouted from the corner by the standing lamp. He wore a yellow paisley tie, even in summer, and a shirtfront pocket full of pens. Cindy had known him since high school; his kids were several years younger than Mitch.
“Like a million bucks,” Mitch said. “Maybe more than a million.” He gave a media-savvy wink as Caryn kissed his cheek.
The next few picks sped by slowly, like trains in dreams she couldn’t run fast enough to catch. Cardinals, Jets, Bengals, Bucs. One massive son after another, putting on a brand-new hat. The Jets had taken a linebacker; she’d talked to the coach of the Bucs herself. Now she was starting to worry.
“Y’all! It’s Jimmy Johnson!” Caleb cried, cupping the receiver of the phone.
“Man, shut up, Caleb,” Mitch said.
“Mitch,” she couldn’t help herself. “You don’t think they’ve forgotten about you?”
That was a mistake.
He shot his eyes at her. “How’s that?”
“Cause you’re not there? In New York.”
He gave a grunt. “They know where I am.”
“Yeah!” came the ever-ready choir. She’d forgotten everyone could hear. “They know him!” “Forget Mitch?” “Don’t you worry about it, Ms. Wilkins. Don’t you worry.” But their brio was escaping with every breath, and by the time the last voice died down the room was unmistakably deflated, their collective confidence hanging back like a kid who can’t swim without his wings.
Cindy wanted to wring every one of their necks.
Whoever was sitting on her left had gotten up, but it wasn’t long before Pastor Ron had come to take the empty place. He was pale with wire-rimmed glasses and a chin as pillowy as any pastor’s, a mild, well-meaning man who relished his small-town authority.
“This must be hard on you,” he said.
“I’ll be glad when it’s over, that’s for sure.”
He nodded and gave a little moan of empathy. “What you have to remember is that this isn’t like kids picking teams. If all they wanted was the best, Mitch would be gone already. These are businessmen, and it’s about more than talent at this level. They’ve got budgets they have to consider, growth plans. Not to mention regulations.”
At one time, she thought he was the smartest man she’d ever meet. He’d gone to seminary at Duke and repaired cars as a hobby. He played the stock market, subscribed to the Wall Street Journal. He was too smart and probably too earthly for the ministry; their church had really lucked out. But now she was beginning to sense the limits of his knowledge, how far he’d gotten reading the newspaper in a town where everyone else watched TV. She was doing her own reading now, privately, and she’d spoken to all kinds of people she’d never had an opportunity to speak with before—agents, reporters, endless NFL representatives. She was starting to get a handle on the wider world: who had power, who didn’t. Very often it was the people who explained things who had the least influence—the lackies and doormen and cheerful tour guides who had the time to talk. The people you spoke to the least, the ones who grinned and clasped your hand and said a flattering thing or two—those were the people who were actually in charge. People like Mitch’s agent, Phil Holtzman, whose liquidy suits looked almost supernatural. People like Al Thorndike, the general manager of the Redskins, and Bill Braden of the 49ers, and Orin Phelps (Seahawks), and Bruce Walper (Patriots), and Greg Romeika (Buccaneers), each of whom she’d spoken to for a brief, buttery moment on the phone before he, the important man, was urgently called away. Pastor Ron, on the other hand, had never not had time for her. He proffered advice eagerly, often before she asked. He held it up with boyish pride, like an A on a grade school exam. She pitied him that he’d already shrunk so much in her estimation.
The draft lurched on. More players were taken, every one of them clomping up on stage in person, just about all of them black.
At the commercial break the phone was ringing; she heard it this time for sure. Caleb backed away with his hands up. The Cowboys, went her brain. Let him be right, letimbe right, lettimbeeright.
“Uh-huh,” Mitch was saying. “Yeah.” She could hear the cheerful munching of Phil Holtzman on the line.
“Well?”
“Come on, what’d he say?”
Ricky was leaning in theatrically, his torso bent in a freeze-frame of a factory man at his machine.
“Lotta teams still interested,” Mitch told the room when he sat down. “Washington, Niners, Bucs. He said Green Bay this time, too.”
Washington, a short move.
“I’m still rooting for Washington,” Caryn said, as though reading her mind. “I have always wanted to live there.”
Cindy got up from the couch and motioned for people to pass her their trash. She took the stack of plates and napkins to the plus-sized garbage bag she’d tied to the handle of her louvered pantry door, then stepped out back for a moment to get some air. She stood on the concrete step and watched the blue-green world recline under moving clouds and settle into its clothes, the fields and trees zipping up to the low distant mountains, ringed at the base by their collar of trees. The insect orchestra was tuning a high drone. You couldn’t live in Virginia without smelling bugs and dirt. She was a Southern woman, used to Southern light and Southern smells. She did not want to live in Wisconsin.
The draft was back and they were calling her inside where the house reeked of salt—from the bodies, from the food. She fanned her nose, feeling a little salty herself, and squeezed into her spot on the couch, this time next to Donna from the NICU. The murky glow of Caryn’s engagement ring wafted from her hand like cigarette smoke.
“Cindy,” Caryn said, but Cindy just turned to Donna to remark about a patient, an adorable little caterpillar named Keyshawn who’d been admitted earlier that week.
“He’s just so beautiful,” she said.
“That’s how you know he’ll be fine,” Donna agreed. “They’re never that cute at twenty-eight weeks. But Keyshawn’s mom—have you seen her? Well, she could be a model, her skin’s so smooth and everything. You see where he gets it from.” Donna was a big-bodied woman who loved holding babies; she liked to joke that she was the backup generator, there to warm the preemies if the unit ever lost power. Cindy felt hot sitting beside her now, but grateful for the excuse to ignore Caryn. Donna had worked the NICU forever and for some reason liked Cindy even more than Cindy liked herself. “You know she’s from North Carolina originally,” Donna went on. “Mountain town not far from Danville if I could only remember the name. But then she went to Charlotte when she finished high school, got a job at USAir, which has got to be one of the best jobs in Charlotte. Every flight out of Lynchburg goes to Charlotte. She was in for kangaroo care this morning, and she said it really was an exciting place. I asked her why she was here then, and she said the opportunities. Which of course made me laugh, but she said nonono she was serious. When
they opened the new airport here, there were jobs. That was a promotion for her.” Cindy hummed in response and nodded, picturing Keyshawn’s mom holding the boy to her chest as all around them the isolettes glowed like airplanes idling on the new Lynchburg tarmac. Cindy guessed she’d fly out of there soon enough, via Charlotte, to wherever they were told.
“And how about you?” Donna was saying. “You keeping calm?”
“I’m surviving,” Cindy managed as another team selected another player.
“What round’re they on?” someone asked.
“Still the first!” people shouted, disdainfully, to which Pastor Ron, standing against the back wall like a sentry, added serenely: “That was only number thirteen.”
“Poor sucker!”
“Dodged a bullet there, Mitch!”
“Fourteen, though,” Ricky said. “That’s lucky.” He tugged his shirt with pride.
Mitch expectorated a laugh. “I’d rather go last than be picked by your sorry-ass number.” High-fives were exchanged over the back of the couch.
“Hey, there’s always ‘American Gladiators,’” Ricky said, grinning toothily. “Juice it up and off you go.”
Fourteen came and went.
So did fifteen, the Green Bay Packers, who took a linebacker.
“Wayne who? I never even heard of that guy!” This was Mitch’s buddy and Caryn’s cousin Jeff, who’d kept his cool until now. Veins pulsed in his forehead below the box-top cut of his hair. “Where’d he play? Clemson? Never heard of him!” He punched himself on the thigh.
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