Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  “Right, fine,” I said, hands up, “no Lloydo. Anyway, shouldn’t we be talking about me?”

  “Yes” was Dad’s first word of the drive.

  “Yes,” Sandy said, matching his tone.

  Lloyd didn’t say anything. His silence said a lot.

  “I had no idea,” Dad said. “I mean, I knew when they put you on the junior varsity instead of the freshman team . . . and then when you said they made you a starter. But, I guess you have to see something like this in the flesh to fully appreciate the scale of it. You’re a very good player, son.”

  My dad was a very understated man. So this meant something.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and felt my head getting a little hot with embarrassment.

  Sandy squeezed my arm.

  Lloyd stared at the side of our father’s head.

  ”You weren’t bad, little brother. Not bad at all. Once you stopped sucking,” he added. Dad shifted in his seat like he was about to say something, but Lloyd barreled on. “You really sucked on those first two touchdowns. There was a loud sucking sound you made on those plays that was so loud people were talking about it in the stands. Sucked the hats right off a whole section of people sitting at the fifty-­yard line. That happened, didn’t it, Sandra?”

  “Sucked. Sucked the whole section of hats off. People scrambling around, climbing over each other to get the hats back.”

  “See,” Lloyd said triumphantly, gesturing at Sandy as irre­futable proof of my suckiness.

  “Her name is Sandrine,” I said flatly.

  “Even sweeter,” Lloyd said to her.

  “Have we changed the subject?” I asked.

  “You were outstanding,” Sandy said, laughing and banging into me with her shoulder. “A little unnecessarily violent perhaps. . . .”

  “Yes! Unnecessarily violent. Exactly,” Lloyd shouted violently close to Dad’s ear. My father’s restraint is sometimes a thing to marvel at. “That is the thing you need to keep up. It’s what separates the men from the boys, the greats from the scrubs.”

  “And the sociopath from the productive citizen,” Dad said as he pulled the car sharply into the driveway. He stuck the car into park and got out so abruptly that Lloyd was left burning eyeholes into his headrest.

  “And he claims to love football,” Lloyd said, shaking his head in mock disbelief as he got out the passenger side and followed Dad into the house.

  Alone with Sandy for the first time that day, I kind of felt like this moment in the backseat in the parked car was going to stand as one of the non-­sports-­related high points of this Thanksgiving Day. Except I couldn’t help asking.

  “You didn’t really think I was unnecessarily violent, did you?”

  She paused, blinked a few times to let her butterfly lashes sweep away any bad airs.

  “Maybe it just takes time to figure out how much of it is necessary and how much isn’t. You’ll probably be an even better player when you don’t feel like you have to dismember people to get your job done.”

  “Ha,” I said back to her, thinking how much I loved the way she never didn’t have an answer if you gave her a few seconds to ponder anything. “That’s what you figure, huh?”

  “That’s what I figure.”

  ***

  “Bup, bup, bup,” Ma said, accompanied by a two-­finger no-­no wave and a forty-­five-­degree turn of her head. This was her way of letting you know she did not care to hear what you were about to say. “I already have all the information I need. You are here, walking upright like all the other great apes and superficially unscarred. And you are physically capable of feeding yourself, I assume.” As she said the last part, she reached out and lifted my top lip with both hands, examining my teeth like she was buying a horse.

  “ ‘A, ith thith not thorta wude?” I said, trying to somehow not be embarrassed in front of my guest.

  “Sandy,” Ma said anxiously, wiping traces of me off her hands and onto her apron. “Sandy, it is so lovely to meet you. Please, you have to forgive me, but I do get a little demented when there is a game on and I think all the worst until I get him back in one piece.”

  “Not at all,” Sandy answered, offering a polite hand until Ma seized her in a hug. “And you had nothing to worry about from what I saw.”

  “On the other hand, the mothers of all the boys he played against had plenty—” Lloyd started.

  “Bup, bup, bup,” Ma said, fingers no-­ing, head turning thataway. “It’s done, it’s nice you all went, now let’s get dinner ready.”

  Dad headed off to the living room to watch the Lions-­Bears game, and Lloyd headed off to his bedroom to do the same. That left Sandy and me on kitchen duty. It was all weirdly normal. Ma lightheartedly grilled Sandy about her family as I whaled away at a pot full of helpless potatoes.

  “I think they’re mashed,” Sandy said after a while. I stared down at the spuds, which looked like they had been put through the food processor. I had lost track of time, thinking about the game.

  “They just won’t need any milk, is all,” I said.

  “Right, salt and butter them,” Ma said, taking her bird out of the oven for its final roundup. “And focus this time. Too much salt and the entire day is a failure.”

  “No pressure then,” Sandy said, applying her own laser focus to the gravy chemistry. This was a serious leap of faith for Ma, ceding a pivotal job like gravying to a complete unknown.

  “Is it ready already?” Lloyd appeared in the doorway. “I’m starving.”

  “Lloydo!” Sandy called far more brightly than anyone else would have.

  “Lloydo,” Ma said. “I might have to adopt that.”

  “Well, you can’t,” he said. “That’s a thing, just between me and Sandra.”

  “Oh, how proprietary,” Ma said, then turned to Sandy. “Can I call you Sandra?”

  “Sure you can,” she said.

  “Except that her name is Sandrine,” I said.

  Ma stopped, offering open palms to the heavens like, Is this my birthday or what? “That,” she said to Sandy, “is the name I was going to give Arlo if he was a girl. Spooky, huh? Or fate, or kismet, or something?”

  “Or something. That something being nonsense,” I said. “You were going to name me Audrey if I turned out to be a girl. You told me that a hundred times. Arlo or Audrey, Audrey or Arlo. It kind of makes sense, like in the way that Arlo or Sandrine doesn’t.”

  My mother had, really, two modes, deeply serious and silly. I envied her silly. I lacked a capacity for it. But I could not recall one single TV interview with a great athlete who seemed like he was really just a goofy guy in his off hours. If the greats didn’t have time for silliness, why should I?

  “Come on, Sandra,” Lloyd said, holding his hand out in the manner of a guy who’s about to take a girl ice-­skating. “These people are a little bit nutty, but I hope that doesn’t put you off.”

  “Oh no, I have a pretty high threshold for nutty,” she said, skipping along with him. “I’m not certain, but I think somehow that’s why I’m here.”

  The kitchen went quiet as I pressed my mental ear, my whole self to the wall of the rest of the house to hear where they were going. I should have been more self-­confident than that, but I just wasn’t. She was there for me, and I had had my best day in front of her and everybody. Lloyd’s time with the likes of Sandy was already past, not to mention that Lloyd’s time with the likes of Sandy never was.

  And yet. My older brother, Lloyd. He was him, and I was me, and Sandy was elsewhere, and Your brother is sooo funny. . . .

  “She makes it like a family, practically,” said my dad, suddenly filling the doorway. He never helped out, so this was a stunning development. It certainly was a unique kind of day.

  “You mean Sandy?” I said, holding out the pot of mashed potatoes to him.

  He dipped a finger in. “Salty,” he said, lapping around at the air with his tongue like a lizard.

  My shoulders sank, my head sank. He
adored perfect potatoes. He wanted satisfying and simple dishes and clean, crisp tackles.

  “I will go get milk, and butter, and—”

  “But mostly butter, right? Cause the milk will just insipidize everything at this point.”

  “Insipidize, eh, Louis?” Ma said, She was sharp at pinpointing the moments when his criticism could tip into day spoilers. She took the pot of mashed potatoes from me and shooed us into the dining room with the turkey and green beans.

  We set the platters down. “I’ll go get Sandy—whose name is Sandrine—and Dad, you will sit right there and wait. Save this seat—this seat right here,” I said, slapping the chair to his left loudly. “And I will sit next to her and it will be a family, practically.”

  To my mild horror I found Sandy in Lloyd’s Lair, the two of them huddled next to his old oak bookcase. That’s what he called it, Lloyd’s Lair. My alarm rose further when I smelled the place.

  “Lloyd?” I said in a big whisper. “What are you smoking in here?”

  They both turned toward me. Sandy was holding one of my brother’s old trophies from his Pop Warner days, when he was the undisputed star. That was when I first witnessed football played by someone so crazy in love with it and crazy good at it that spending time on almost anything else didn’t make any sense.

  He was showing her his awards.

  “That smell was here when I got here,” she said, grinning.

  “Hey, I did it for Ma,” he said righteously. “She did all that cooking, and I wasn’t hungry. Now I am.”

  “He’s very gallant,” she said.

  He concurred. “I’m gallant.”

  I formed my hands into a kind of bullhorn, and called out in a police negotiator kind of style, “Miss Sandrine, put the little shiny man down, and walk slowly away from the big shiny knight. You may be in danger, and dinner is served.”

  Sandy placed the trophy back on the shelf. “Those are some pretty good reasons,” she said to Lloyd, patting him on the chest and walking my way.

  I did a little bow and “after you” gesture, and as she passed she said, “He’s really just a sweet and harmless creature.”

  “Yeah, people say the same thing about the poison dart frog. Until he gets all poisony on them.”

  I was still in scrape-­and-­bow posture as the boy himself passed through. “Hey, I think my charisma’s working,” he said, giving my head a little hammer of exclamation. “I just might get lucky here.”

  “Great, good luck with that,” I said as I straightened up quickly to catch up. Too quickly, as my head went swimmy for a second.

  But then again, not quickly enough. Sandy was already trapped between Dad and the usurper, an unholy Sandy sandwich.

  “Would anyone like a little glass of festive holiday wine?” Ma asked, standing by the table with a bottle of white wine in one hand and a bottle of pale ginger ale in the other. “Which for you youngsters means a wine spritzer, of course,” she said directly to Sandy and me.

  “No,” Lloyd snapped, drawing stunned looks all around. Then, after a good comedic pause, “I want a really big glass.”

  Ma and Dad looked at one another sort of helplessly. Lloyd knew exactly what he was doing and that they were going to shrink from any risk of serious disruption to our special day with a special guest.

  And we all knew that Lloyd was a serious risk of serious disruption at any given moment.

  Sandy took a little spritz, and so I took a little spritz. Dad and Lloyd took white wine, and Ma finally took her seat.

  And there she would remain for the duration of the meal. She always front loaded the effort, took care of every detail, laid out the whole thing for everyone to self-­serve, and then, plunk. A militant immobility, she said, was one of the great rewards.

  “Let’s tell stories,” Ma said brightly as she passed around the dark-­meat tray.

  “Let’s not,” I said quickly, sounding too alarmed to have done myself any good.

  “We never have stuffing in this house,” Dad said after shooting down his glass of wine briskly. He was sounding almost effusive under the influence of wine and possibly Sandy, who was looking around from person to person to person with such smiling energy she was powering up the whole room.

  “Oh, jeez, man,” Lloyd said, making short work of his own wine.

  “The reason we can never have stuffing is that Lloyd had a big chubby rabbit that died,” Dad continued. “And his name was Stuffing, and Lloyd gets all weepy if he’s around stuffing.”

  Sandy made the isn’t-­that-­just-­darling brand of an “Oh” sound, and Ma and I joined in as if we hadn’t ever heard it all before.

  “That’s a story,” Ma said.

  Lloyd calmly—on the outside, at least—refilled his glass and said, “Here’s another story. Dad killed Stuffing.”

  “I did no such thing,” Dad said, trying to sound light but not succeeding. “Someone didn’t lock his cage, and he ran away and got into the road. That happens.”

  “What was all that mess on your tire then, huh?”

  “Come to think of it,” I jumped in fast, “it looked a lot like sausage stuffing.”

  Sandy burst out laughing, slapped her hand over her mouth quickly, then wide-­eyeballed the room.

  “Was I not supposed to laugh?” she said from behind her hand.

  “Oh no, hon, you’re fine,” Ma said.

  “Yeah,” Dad said, “it comes out different every Thanksgiving. Sometimes nobody laughs, sometimes we all laugh.”

  “Except Lloyd,” I said. “He’s pretty consistent.”

  After that we all fell into our traditional pattern of fitting short questions and comments in between chewing bird and swallowing mushy stuff, clattering silverware, and clinking glasses. The food was impeccable as always, and I did believe that the improved gender balance had an undeniably positive effect on the holiday meal.

  Well into the meal when the tryptophan from the turkey must have been felling my mother, the conversation was allowed to turn to my football game. Dad, in particular, got so animated I thought he might start reenacting plays right there in the dining room.

  “. . . he was a mammoth guy, Emma, just a colossal specimen. And when they met, the clack of it sounded like a gunshot. Everybody in the place caught their breath. Full contact, I mean, full-­on, chests and arms and helmets and—Bang! Something. I know . . . but you couldn’t have helped being proud, even you.”

  Ma had that telltale shock-­horror-­rapture look of somebody who can’t stand the rough stuff and can’t manage to look away, either. She really had loved the game in the early days, before our injuries started mounting up, coming closer together, and most worryingly, traveling north.

  Lloyd was a freshman when ankle sprain became knee tweak became charley horse became hip pointer became rib crack became partially separated shoulder became eye-­gouge scratched retina.

  Became head trauma. Possible first concussion.

  It turned out never to even be a confirmed diagnosis. And it wasn’t even a result of playing the dangerous game too hard, because the touchdown had been scored, and Lloyd had been beaten by a receiver who then went on to celebrate that fact possibly a little too enthusiastically. Until Lloyd lost it and charged him and the receiver ducked at the very moment Lloyd lunged. So it was not the fault of the grand game of football played sideline-­to-­sideline that my brother lost his temper and that the league could not afford padding for everything at that time, and that the other guy was smart and slick and my brother slow and stupid as he rammed himself right into the base of the goalpost and right out of consciousness.

  That was the no mas moment for Ma and The File was started.

  “It was really, really something special,” Dad concluded with a big gulp of wine.

  I squirmed and waited for him to say something negative like he always did, something to make sure I wouldn’t turn into a diva. But he didn’t say another word, just held up his glass like he was toasting me.


  Lloyd got up and walked off to his room. With his third glass of wine.

  “What’s he doing?” Sandy asked.

  “What he always does,” I answered, “whatever he feels like.”

  “Probably off for his nap,” Ma said. The sound of hope speaking for itself.

  But no such luck. Five minutes later he was back with us, clutching his wine goblet—empty and upside down. He also smelled a little more like his room.

  “We missed you, Lloydo,” Sandy said into the sudden silence as he scraped back his chair and sat down.

  “Missed you, too, Saundra,” he said, possibly rewriting her name again, possibly just sludging it. “Now, where were we? Right, Dad’s admiration for our all-­pro here. Hey, Dadmiration. Look at that. Dadmiration, for ArlPro. Too perfect, huh? It’s like that thing, where they say a sculpture has been there inside the marble all the time, just waiting to be discovered. Those words were clearly just waiting for this minute to emerge into the world for this occasion. Awesome.”

  There are moments when it’s a real blessing to have an alien person at the table, who can choose to miss all the unhappy undercurrents family can’t.

  “Very good, Lloydo,” Sandy said. “You’re a natural words—”

  “Shush,” he said to her.

  “Hey,” I barked.

  He turned to me . . . turned on me, more like. “Shush,” he said again with his Doberman smile and a snarl.

  “Llllloyd,” Ma growled.

  He had never been able to put up much resistance when she rolled out the extra l’s in his name. So he stopped, but not before he gave her a modified, more modest edition of his snarly smile. Which was a whole new development. And she let it go. Gave up.

  I didn’t believe, then, that there were many links left in his leash. Not even for her.

  “Sorry, everybody. Anyway, I interrupted. Father, I believe you were going on about Arlo and his sporting awesomeness and how you were very proud of him.”

  “Yes,” Dad said, defiant on the witness stand. “Yes, I certainly was.”

  “Can we change the subject, please?” I said.

  “That would be nice,” Ma said.

  Lloyd wasn’t relinquishing the floor yet. “I used to play football, Saundra. Did you know that?”