The First Play Belonged to Riley

The plays went on, week by week. Riley called them from the kitchen table, from his bed, from the chair in the waiting room of the clinic in St. Cloud while they ran his weekly counts. A fullback dive. A little pass to the tight end that he had drawn in the back of the hymnal during a sermon on Jonah. A reverse that Coach Dunn pronounced “frankly gutsy.”

“That was Colton,” he said, the night after the second game. “He did that. Colton ran it.”

“It was your play.”

“It was a play. Colton ran it.” He was almost angry. “Mom, don’t make it into something.”

So I did not. I washed the supper dishes and I held my tongue. That was a lesson I learned from him that fall, and I am still working on it.

The fourth week, he called a toss sweep. It lost three yards. Tyler texted a picture of the scoreboard and a message. “Riley’s play lost 3. Colton says it was blocked perfect and that it’s on the call.”

My son laughed so hard he had to sit down on the kitchen floor. They rode him for it all week. It was the best medicine in the house.

Then there were the clippers. It was the third week. The medicine does what it does. I came into the bathroom one morning and found hair in the drain, and Riley standing in front of the mirror in his shorts looking at it.

He did not ask for help. He went out to the shed, took Mark’s clippers off the nail, came back, and locked the door.

I stood on the other side of that door for the length of the whole job. The buzz went on a long time. When it stopped, I heard the water run, and I heard him put the clippers on the edge of the sink, and then I heard nothing.

I did not knock. That was the hardest thing I did all fall. When he came out, his head was bare and white above his tan line, and his face was round and strange. He looked at me and said, “Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to say something.”

“I’m still going to say something. I’m just not going to say it today.”

He almost smiled. “Okay.”

The Thursday film sessions had begun in the second week. Coach Dunn propped a tablet on a chair in the film room at the school, and Riley propped his own on a pillow in the recliner, and the two of them watched game tape for an hour with a boy named Brady Tollefson.

“Your hands, Brady. Hands.”

“I’m doing them.”

“You’re not. Run it back. Look at your elbow. Do you see your elbow?”

“I see it.”

“It’s in the wrong place. Again.”

“I’m sorry I got your spot,” Brady said once, in the third week. His voice came through the pillow thin and small.

The recliner was quiet.

“You didn’t get it,” Riley said at last. “It’s still mine. You’re keeping it warm. Try again.”

I put down the towel I was folding. By the middle of the season, Brady Tollefson’s left hand was where it belonged.