So the Wisconsin threat was over, but what did that leave? She tried to remember the selection order Phil had given them but the names of all those distant cities kept running together in her mind. She tried not to think about the money, how much they were losing with every pick. She was watching a fantasy, no different from “The Price Is Right.” Win a car on TV, play football on TV. The odds were probably about the same.
The next hour passed with crushing slowness. Gary wrote in his little notebook with one of his many retractable pens. Caryn’s mother yawned. Ricky tossed a fresh baseball to Caleb, and Caleb tossed it back, but the whole exchange was so limp and idle that Cindy didn’t even shout her usual, “Not in my house!” Time extended itself, unlooping hidden coils she hadn’t known she’d always skipped. The rest of the world was racing into the future while they in their little brick tract house sat suspended, blinking, examining their cuticles and scabby elbows, adjusting their butts in their seats.
Caryn had stopped trying to get Cindy’s attention. She sank deeper under the cask of her pregnant belly, which only now had begun to look huge. Her painted toes gripped the edge of the ottoman. A rectangle shone on her forehead like a bike reflector, and she had taken to depositing Cheez Doodles one by one down the tubing of her mouth, a ring of atomic flavor dust glittering on her lips.
“Why don’t you boys go outside?” Cindy offered. “Shoot some hoops.”
Mitch’s friends looked at each other, reluctant to take the suggestion. “The minute we walk out that door’ll be the minute Mitch gets the call,” Caleb said. “You know how it is.”
The phone rang and again it was Phil. Mitch’s conference with him consisted largely of Phil talking while Mitch nodded and offered the occasional “Okay.”
When he sat down, they had to pry it out of him. “He says sit tight. He says it’s almost over.” But she could tell he had his doubts.
Time had been rough enough with her already—the wiry grays, the baby seals swimming permanently on the undersides of her arms—but this was an utter clobbering. The excitement and glamour of being chosen had eroded to a state of captivity. All around the living room, people wore the surly, arrogant expressions of kids in detention after school.
“Lighten up, y’all,” Tim said. He coached JV now, and had grown into a classic coach: hoarse, yet loud, face pocked like pigskin from years of afternoon practice. “It’s not contagious.”
“He’s getting drafted,” Caryn snapped.
“I know he is,” Tim said.
“It’s still the first round.”
“That’s what I’m saying, people need to have some faith.”
“You said ‘contagious,’ like maybe he wasn’t getting picked.” No one ever spoke to Tim this way. He was the testy one, the one who talked. Everyone else was supposed to listen and then go out and embody his words.
Cindy looked at Caryn’s parents, who just sat there like figurines. Her own mother was like that by the end, but she actually had an excuse: doped up on speech-slurring pain medications, her mind abandoned, her smile was her best social tool. Cindy missed her, would’ve preferred her demented company to the non-company of Caryn’s folks.
“Look I hate waiting as much as the next guy,” Tim was saying. “I hate it more. Tracy does everything involving lines. I don’t have the patience. But this is the NFL. You do it their way. You don’t question.”
“I’m not questioning,” Caryn said.
Cindy evacuated to her room, where she lay on the bed watching the broad brown planks of the ceiling fan as they made their fragile rounds. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a machine move so slowly without finally coming to a stop. The window shades were up and if she tilted her head she could see Gary taking a cigarette break in the yard. He single-handedly ran a weekly paper that rarely had much news. She wondered if he was disappointed he never got to leave; he’d been valedictorian, talked of excitedly, a scholarship to UVA. If only he were a Methodist and not a Baptist, he might’ve befriended Pastor Ron. He stooped to see inside and gave her a tentative wave, which she ignored, pretending she was resting her eyes. In the living room she could hear Tim booming hoarsely about the 3-4 defense, which teams had it, which teams should.
The answer was all of them, if you asked her. The 3-4 used more linebackers, and she wanted the best for her boy. The most chances. Over on the nightstand the old rotary telephone sat like a prop in a play. She’d last used it to talk to Phil Holtzman, on a day she was home sick from work. She rarely got sick, and before this year, she’d rarely used the bedroom phone, preferring to conduct her business in the kitchen on the push button. But the draft had made her more private, and maybe it had also made her sick. She recalled his glossy voice on the line. “It’s an exceptional market,” he’d said. “He really picked the right year to do it.” He’d phoned her, as he always did. Whenever she called, he wasn’t there.
She didn’t know what to do. She called him. She couldn’t believe it when he picked up the phone. “Cindy Wilkins. What a day, huh?”
She collected herself. “You said it would be exceptional.”
“And it will be,” he said. “It will.” She heard the murmurs of nearby rooms and pictured him in a corridor somewhere, outside a wild party of agents, coaches, and journalists, tonguing cigars, playing dice with people’s lives. “We’ve been talking to people all day and I think we’re zeroing in on a good opportunity. A couple, actually. But one I think you’ll really like.”
“I thought he was supposed to go top ten. This is killing him, Phil. I can tell it’s just killing him.”
Phil sighed. “I said top ten was a possibility. But by no means guaranteed. Hell, nothing’s guaranteed. What I’ve always thought was really reasonable was sometime in the mid-to-late first round. And—off-the-record here—I think we’ll get that yet.”
“First round’s almost over.”
“Like I said, mid-to-late.”
She was feeling emboldened. “Do you think it’s because he’s not there? I told him he should go but he wouldn’t listen. Had to stay down here with her.”
“Wouldn’tve made a difference,” Phil said. “If you want to know the truth—and I just told this to Mitch myself—it’s mostly about his knee.”
“His knee?” She couldn’t believe her ears.
“Left knee, sophomore year?”
“But he was fine after that. He played his entire junior season. Big East sack leader. All-American, Phil! He could’ve played at Miami another year!” She was starting to wish he’d stayed in school. Caryn, too. How had she ever let them get so confident?
“I know, I know, but there’s still some scar tissue and these are big bucks. Teams figure they can get him for less. They still want him. You’d better believe whoever ends up with him will be weeping tears of joy. They’re just trying to hedge the best they can, maximize their draft.”
“You’re telling me this is all over some little scar tissue? He’s strong, Phil. You’ve seen him.”
“I know he is. You’ll be hearing from me soon.”
She sat holding the dead call in her hand and saw that Mitch and his friends had stepped outside. Gary was gone and the Warriors had taken his place, shoving each other in scattered arcs across the flossy grass. After a pop to the chest that sent Caleb to the ground, Mitch took off. She leaped to the grimy window to see him approach the fence line in a full sprint, then slalom back at a ferocious angle, as if he were riding skis. She rarely saw him run without his helmet and uniform, and she’d forgotten how miraculous he was as himself, just an exotic animal in shorts and a t-shirt, his calves bulging like sacks of flour, his rump an engine, his brown hair streaming behind him like a tail. Charging back towards the house, he seemed to have discarded his stigmatized scar tissue, ripped it out and transplanted it somewhere beyond the yard.
“Command central?”
She looked up to see Tim at the door, scratching his chest in his coachy way. He’d grown that coach’s belly, married
the music teacher from the elementary school, had a daughter they dressed in pink. It was hard to believe she’d ever been in love with him.
“It’ll be over soon,” Cindy told him, as though he were the one who needed reassurance.
“You know what’s nice about the second round?”
“What?”
“It still gets you to the NFL. I’m serious! Lots of greats came from the second round—or, Christ, later. I wouldn’t make too much of it.”
“Well, he wants to go in the first, and I want him to have what he wants.”
“Sure you do. But these people have their own agendas.”
She had no idea why he still condescended to her, even now, after all these years. Did he assume she was suffering because she didn’t have a man to tell her things? He knew the choices she’d made: Mitch above herself, Mitch above all. “You broke it off with me,” he’d always teased her, which wasn’t strictly true, but it was the lie that they’d agreed on. “No way was I ever gonna be good enough for you. Hell, I’m not good enough for Tracy, either, but God bless her, she doesn’t seem to know.”
“Sorry, Tim, but what do you know about their agendas?” she asked him now.
He gritted his teeth, seized up in the neck. She knew it stung him to have been excluded from the negotiations, but didn’t care. She’d wanted to make a point of doing this part herself.
She tilted her head back and shut her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being mean. It’s just that I’ve talked to these people and I know they have agendas and I hate them and I’m just so damn tired.” She peered at him over the ghost of her nose. “You hear me, Tim? I’m sorry.”
He settled back into his stolid body. He’d coach JV until he retired, and when he was finished, JV would probably be finished, too. The county was losing people every year. There was no sense in spiting a man who lived in so narrow a world. “I hear you,” he said. “I’m sorry, too. I was just trying to help.”
She could forgive Tim for trying to help, as she forgave him for everything else, but she couldn’t forgive him his timing. Before the sentence was even out of his mouth, the phone had rung again. Just once.
Cindy froze, straining to hear. First there was silence, then a murmur of movement, and then all the voices in the house came jouncing alive at once. These were happy noises, victory cheers, the kind she was used to hearing for Mitch. “New England!” Caryn squealed, and in that instant every one of them was free. The hours of waiting dispersed, the old uncertainty now unimaginable. Cindy pushed past Tim to the living room, where arms were alternately raised to the ceiling and clasping bodies together. The Warriors were jumping in a huddle. Even Caryn’s parents were exhibiting some emotion, her mother crying, her father securing her tight around the shoulder as they crouched in closer to the television.
In the center of it all Mitch stood with his hair down, having for some reason shaken out his ponytail. He was holding one hand to the sky, in a fist, and offering Caryn his other. Grinning madly, she gripped him like a branch across white water, and hauled herself to her feet. It was the first time Cindy had seen her upright since the telecast began, and she was almost as wide across as she was tall, a beach ball on balsa wood stakes. Still Mitch devoured her. He lifted her onto the couch, her knees lightly bouncing like a child’s, and kissed her, two shaggy brown-haired trees meshing into a single creature in the forest canopy.
“New England,” Caryn’s dad repeated, approvingly, and Cindy looked at the television where Mitch’s name, face, and measurements were emblazoned on the screen. They had footage of him clawing for a tackle for Miami, dragging down running backs as if they were meat. Then back to his face, neck wide as his jaw, fox eyes smiling though his mouth was not. His mouth meant business. She didn’t know when she’d started to cry.
“I just love this pick for the Patriots,” the jumpy commentator was saying, barely able to stay in his chair. “First and last picks of the first round, offense and defense, both of them All-Americans. You can’t do much better than that.”
The first round was over. He had made it just under the wire.
She stood watching as everyone had someone to hold, aware of Tim and Tracy and little Megan behind her, Tim who she definitely didn’t want to hug. A minute sooner and she might’ve been by Mitch’s side. She couldn’t have stopped them from kissing, a big man and his little wife celebrating their future, but she might’ve at least received a kiss of her own. She picked her way around the coffee table, tears streaming, and still they went on necking, fully curtained by their hair. She stood by. She waited, and when she could stand and wait no more, she lurched into them, wrapping an arm around each of their shoulders, making a huddle of their hug.
“Come here,” Mitch laughed, adjusting his arm to include her.
The phone was ringing and she felt someone answer it, felt a buzzing in Caryn’s belly, and fronds of hair—she didn’t know whose—swishing at her eye.
“I’m so proud of you,” she cried into her son’s concrete neck.
“Hey, Mitch!” shouted Gary. “Jimmy Johnson’s on the phone!”
“Tell him, fuck him!” Mitch said.
“Yeah, FUCK HIM!” Caryn echoed with the venom of victory.
“Language!” Cindy said, reflexively.
It wasn’t Jimmy Johnson, of course. That was the thing: it never was. But it was Phil and he was ecstatic. “Best,” she heard him say through the phone. Mitch smiled with every muscle, and Cindy stood there and watched.
“Contract…. result… deal…” Phil went on, longer than anyone expected, and the strangest thing happened: the moment became difficult to hold. People’s arms drooped off each other’s shoulders. Their eyes began to wander around the room. Cindy listened to Mitch listen to his value, and on subsequent calls, thank his general manager, his owner, his coach. He was still Mitch standing there before them, still dressed in his own casual clothes. But he was doing business now, which was vaguely embarrassing. For the first time it seemed possible to intrude.
Cindy brought out the first cake and cut it in mismatched blocks, her hand unregulated with nerves, her motions light and loose. The cake itself was airy and yellow, the green color from the frosting faintly seeping into its pores. Soon everyone had green lips, reviving the festive mood.
“FUCK JIMMY JOHNSON!” Caryn shouted again, semi-deranged.
More people came by to offer their congratulations, and before Cindy knew it, the house was packed. Tracy took over the food service, so Cindy could try to enjoy the moment, which was her moment, too, everyone insisted. Champagne was uncorked, the phone rang and rang. Other Miami teammates were getting drafted. Plans were forming for a massive convergence. The talk in every room was of money. How good it felt, how much it could do for them.
At some point, Joe called, and she watched Mitch talk to him, unfazed. “Thank you, sir, that means a lot,” he said. They talked from time to time, she knew, but not, exactly, how often.
Around six o’clock, after everyone had gone home—Tim and Tracy and Megan back to the old recovered house, Caryn’s parents back to Charlottesville, Mitch and Caryn off to a party somewhere without adults—she stood in her living room amid all the evidence of feeding and felt that her life had changed. She was living in a redundant moment, the first of her lameduck days. Her current surroundings, so unremarkable and inevitable to her now, would soon be memory, or not even memory. Forgotten.
She went back into the bedroom and this time, she dialed Joe.
“What a day,” he said. “What a pleasure.”
These days, she only talked to him a couple of times a year, and she knew, vaguely, that the habit would only fade. Mitch was grown; she’d seen him off. It seemed less important to keep Joe in the loop.
“How’d he sound to you?” she asked him now.
“Relieved,” he said, from his house in Montana she’d never seen. “Content. But don’t ask me. You know him best.”
In one of life’s cruel ironies, Joe seemed
to have gotten better with age. He was reasonable. Better yet, he was thoughtful; he actually seemed to enjoy thinking about the world. She half-admired him, though she hadn’t seen his face in years. She wouldn’t allow herself that. But every now and then, she had these calls, and in a way they were better. People were always at arm’s length in the flesh. On the phone, she had his voice in her head.
“You ready for Boston?” he asked her. “You’ll have to buy a better coat.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m scared. He’s got his little woman now. What’s he need me for?”
“Help with the baby, for starters. From everything you’ve told me about Caryn, she’s not up to the task.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine. Women always are.”
“You were. That’s not the same thing.”
It was true. On the day he’d basically proposed, which was how she’d come to think of that day—the basic proposal, the pretty-much promise, since he then immediately left town—she’d told him she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to tell him. She hadn’t wanted the baby to be the reason he did anything; she wanted it to be her. But she was an honest person, and she couldn’t help but confess. She felt he deserved to have all the information, even if it chased him away. Now twenty years had passed and he was living a meaningful life, not too different from the life they might have had. He was married. Her name was Tammy. He was a landscaper at Montana State.
Joe and Tammy. Tim and Tracy, who ended up with their mother’s ring. But no one had married her. It felt so unfair sometimes when she thought about it.
“You know you don’t have to go with him,” he said, when she failed to respond. “You can live your own life now.”
She didn’t have to go with him. She’d thought of that. There were plenty of things to hate about moving for the NFL. But with her parents gone, the truth was that there was nothing left for her here. Just the things she’d been biding her time with. And wherever Mitch was, there was excitement: a baby, tickets to every home game, a better place to live. She looked around at her shabby little bedroom, so much cleaner now that Mitch was grown, but still with the water damaged ceiling, the old phone receiver in her hand, and she knew she wouldn’t miss it. The keys to her rusted Ford, which she drove ticking to work each day, sat on the dresser—a car she’d no longer have to keep for a job she’d no longer need. She would miss the dim hum of the NICU, all those separate transparent cylinders jump-starting precious lives. But she wouldn’t miss her own isolation; that, she could leave behind.
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