The First Play Belonged to Riley

Then he took a photograph of the page with my phone and I sent it to Coach Dunn, and that was the first call of the season. It was the dullest play in football. A handoff straight up the middle behind a big tackle named Jaxon Stang. Three yards, maybe, with luck.

“You could call a bomb,” Mark said. “Might as well, first game.”

“If I call a bomb, they think I’m showing off.” Riley capped his pen. “If it’s dull, it’s mine.”

The first game was an away game, forty minutes south. I could not take him. Not in a crowd, not with his counts where they were, and Dr. Lindqvist had been very clear on that.

So I sat on the porch with Riley and an old transistor radio from Mark’s workbench, with the town station crackling out the play-by-play, and Hannah cross-legged on the boards at our feet.

The announcer on that station is a retired agronomy teacher. He has never in his life used the word “dedicated” on the air, and he did not use it that night. He did not say Riley’s name either, which was how I knew somebody had talked to him.

He said: “Sauk Centre has won the toss and elected to receive.” The kickoff came down in the end zone, and Colton Reiter, a junior with a face like a boiled potato and the sweetest disposition on the team, brought it out to the twenty-five. Tyler walked up to the line. The announcer said, “And Gerdes hands it to Reiter up the middle.”

That was all he said. Colton hit the line behind Jaxon. “A gain of three,” said the announcer.

My son sat back. His whole face went loose under the mask.

“They ran it,” he said.

“They ran it.”

“It was a dumb play.”

“It was a very dumb play.”

“Hannah, tell them it looked like a cow.”

Mark had gone into the kitchen. He came back with the printed schedule that hung on our refrigerator door, the kind the feed store gives out every August, and the flat carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear. He found the line for that night. In the margin, in square print, he wrote: R. Three yds.

He did not explain it. He is a man who needs a number. He hung the schedule back on the refrigerator door with the same magnet, and in the morning I saw that he had put it a little lower than it had been, at about the height of a boy’s eyes.

We won that night, twenty-eight to fourteen. Riley fell asleep in the chair before the end of the third quarter. I carried the radio in to the kitchen and turned it down to a whisper and listened to the finish alone.

A text came in from Tyler at 10:40 with a photograph. It showed the plastic wristband the quarterback wears on his forearm, with a card slid into a sleeve of little windows for the plays. In the top window, in black Sharpie, in a boy’s block capital, he had written one letter.

R.