The Coach They Fired By Email

I did not know that by the time I got my truck loaded, Tyler had already texted half the roster, and that by 10 o’clock that night Odell’s mother had called Marge Holt, who runs the booster club and has run it since her own boys played in the early 2000s, and that Marge had called 3 more women, and that this is simply how word moves in a town of 1,900 people. It does not go through a press release. It goes through a kitchen phone, a pickup truck window, a church parking lot, a diner counter, and by the next morning it has usually gone everywhere it needs to go.

I found a little of that out for myself around 11 that night, loading the last box, when the field house door opened one more time and it was Ike Dorrance standing in it, out of uniform, in jeans and a Carhartt jacket, looking like the 17 year old free safety I used to yell at instead of the county sheriff he has been for 6 years now.

“Heard you were up here,” Ike said.

“Who told you.”

“My mother-in-law, who heard it from Marge, who heard it from Odell’s mom, who heard it from Odell.” He looked around at the half-empty shelves. “This town doesn’t need a phone tree, Coach. It’s got women who talk at the Hy-Vee.”

I laughed for the first time all night. It felt strange in my chest, like a muscle I’d forgotten I had.

Ike picked up one of the boxes without asking and carried it out to my truck bed, the same way he used to carry a blocking sled across the practice field without being told. When he came back in he leaned against the wall by the 1998 photo, found himself in it, a skinny defensive back in the second row.

“You remember what you told me the week before districts my senior year?” he said.

I did, but I let him say it anyway, because some things a man needs to say out loud more than he needs you to already know them.

“My dad had gone to Lincoln for that job that fell through, and we didn’t have 2 nickels, and you drove out to the house on a Thursday with a sack of groceries and you told my mother it was leftover from a team dinner, like that was a believable lie, and you never once brought it up again.” He shook his head. “I became a cop because I wanted to be the kind of person in this town that you already were.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, “but I don’t want this to turn into anything. I don’t want trouble over an email.”

“Nobody’s talking about trouble,” Ike said. “They’re talking about Friday.”