The First Play Belonged to Riley

On Sunday afternoon they sent us home with a bag of pill bottles bigger than a bag of groceries and a binder with a rubber band around it. Our pastor had been to the room twice by then, and the prayer chain at church had reached, as far as I could tell, every Lutheran between Sauk Centre and Fargo. Casseroles began to appear on the porch in coolers, each with a name on a strip of masking tape, left without a knock.

Riley took all of it in with good manners and the look of a man being handed a bill. He could eat none of it. The steroids made him hungry for nothing but cereal and then angry at the cereal.

On Monday and Tuesday he did not leave the recliner. A homebound teacher, Mrs. Sather, came out Tuesday afternoon with a stack of assignments and sat three chairs away from him with a mask on, and I heard him ask her very politely whether the chemistry quiz could be moved, and I heard her say that it could be moved as far as he liked. He did not need it moved. He took it that night, all of it, with the cap pulled down.

So that is how my son came to be standing, on Wednesday, behind the screen door, with a coach and a quarterback in the drive and no idea what either one had come to say.

Coach Dunn got out first. He is a thick, gray man who has taught shop and coached football in Sauk Centre since before Riley was born. In twenty-eight years, I have never heard him give a speech that did not contain the word “execute.”

He did not come up to the house. He took a pump bottle of hand sanitizer off the dash, and he used it, and he handed it across the roof of the Buick to Tyler Gerdes, who used it too. Tyler’s mother had put it in the car. I could tell by the label she had written on it in marker, with his name, in case anybody else was thinking of taking it.

Then the two of them walked up to the bottom of the porch steps and stopped about eight feet short, which was where Dr. Lindqvist had said the line was, and which Coach Dunn plainly had written on his hand.

Riley came out onto the step in his mask and his stocking cap. Mark came around the machine shed wiping his hands on a rag, and stopped when he saw the Buick. I shook my head. I had not known either.

Tyler Gerdes was a senior, the quarterback, six foot two, a boy with a good arm and a good heart and an iron objection to reading aloud. I had watched him throw for three hundred yards in a rainstorm and I had never seen him look the way he looked at the bottom of my steps.

“Riley,” Coach said. “I know what you told me on the phone. I want it understood that I wrote it down and I read it to them. No shirts, no signs, nothing on the helmets, no poster. Every boy in that room heard me say it. That’s page two.”

“Page two of what?” said Riley.