The First Play Belonged to Riley

“They voted,” said Coach. “Sunday night. After the parents went home. I wasn’t in the room for most of it.”

Tyler took a sheet of notebook paper out of his back pocket. It was folded in eighths and it had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the creases had gone soft and white. He unfolded it. His hands shook so hard I could see the page move from the porch.

He cleared his throat.

“We voted twenty-six to nothing,” Tyler read. “Coach says he’d like it noted he voted no at first.”

“I did,” said Coach Dunn. “A man has a scouting report.”

Riley did not say a word. He stood on the step with his arms crossed over his chest, in the mask and the cap, exactly the way he had stood in the hospital when Dr. Lindqvist said the word.

“First play of every game this season is yours,” Tyler read. “You call it, we run it, whatever it is.”

He turned the sheet around so Riley could see the back of it. There were twenty-six names down the page in twenty-six kinds of handwriting. Jaxon Stang’s was so large that it ran off the bottom edge. One name had been signed and then signed again, harder, as if the boy wanted it clear that it counted twice.

“Even if it’s dumb?” said Riley.

“Especially if it’s dumb,” said Tyler.

Coach cleared his throat. “I got a vote, Riley. I voted no. I lost. You don’t owe anybody a thing. But I’d like to say I’m not doing you a favor. I’m hiring you.”

My son took a long time. I know, because Mark stood beside me with the rag and did not breathe.

“Okay,” Riley said, finally. “On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“Brady Tollefson snaps now.”

Brady Tollefson had been Riley’s backup at center for two years. He was a skinny junior, and he had not come, because Coach had told the team that two was enough in a driveway. Riley looked at the Buick as if Brady might be in the trunk.

“His left hand is too high,” my son said. “It’s always too high. Everybody sees it but him. Every Thursday, Coach, you put a tablet on a chair in the film room and I’ll tell him everything he’s doing wrong from the recliner. That’s the condition.”

“He’s going to hate it,” said Coach Dunn.

“It’s going to be a long season for him,” said my son, and under the mask, for the first time since the clinic called, he sounded entirely like himself.

That night at supper he ate a whole plate. It was the first time in two weeks.

The first call went in on Thursday.

Riley wrote it in the green notebook at the kitchen table, bent over the page with his sleeves pushed up. He drew it three times. He crossed it out twice. He asked Hannah what she thought, and Hannah, who had never watched a down of football with her eyes open, said it looked like a cow.

“It’s a fullback dive,” he said.

“It looks like a cow.”

“It’s a cow-shaped fullback dive.”