Before the Ever After(10)

I am sitting on the stairs in the living room, half hidden and listening.

Too many of them, my mom says. I hear her put the coffeepot on the stove. Hear the click, click, click of the igniter catching flame.

Too many of them are doing things nobody understands. And they’re young like Zachariah.

The fridge door opens and closes. I hear the glug of milk into a pitcher, the clink

of the sugar spoon against the bowl.

She tells Bernadette about Sarah’s husband, Mike, who used to throw me so high in the air, it felt like flying. Mike ran through their glass door and kept on running, Mama says.

I hear Bernadette take a deep breath.

Harrison can’t say his alphabet, Mama tells her.

And he was premed in college.

Linebacker, wasn’t he? Bernadette asks. Even before she met my father, Bernadette

could tell you the position of every player on most of the teams in the NFL. She follows football like astronomers follow stars.

Too many of them, Mama says, are going through some kind of thing.

Headaches and rages, memory loss

and fainting spells. Zachariah isn’t the only one suffering. And yet, Mama says,

setting her coffee cup down hard,

the doctors act like this is new.

I’m not the only football wife out here, Mama says, who thinks they’re lying.





Over Breakfast


Friday night, Mama and I eat alone while Daddy lies in his room with the lights off, the door closed.

Light’s too much for him, my mom says.

We’re eating breakfast for dinner pancakes and bacon and scrambled eggs because Mama knows it’s my favorite.

We don’t say much, just eat in the quiet kitchen, watch out the window as the sky goes from blue to black.

The headaches, my mom says. Then for a long time she just looks at me like she’s trying to figure out if I can take the news.

One of the new doctors thinks the headaches have something to do

with all the times your dad got banged around, she says.

I stop eating.

So they know what it is and now they can fix him.

And he can go back to playing ball and we can all be regular again!

The happiness in my stomach takes the place of everything else.

My dad’s going to be well again. I don’t need food tonight.

Just this moment right here. This right now, over dinner-breakfast,

with the doctors finally knowing.

But my mother shakes her head. Her eyes, usually a gray-blue, are dark now.

There are even darker circles beneath them.

She takes a deep breath,

lets it out slowly. For the first time, I see how tired she looks.

And how sad.

I wish it was that simple, ZJ, she finally says to me.

He needs more tests. Some experimental drugs— But Daddy doesn’t like drugs.

These might help him, Mama says.

Might? But how come they don’t know?

I push my plate away. Still not hungry but a different full feeling now. A lamer one.

How come they can’t just fix him?

I’m remembering all the times over the years I watched my dad get rammed.

All the times I saw his helmet

bang into another player’s helmet.

I’m remembering all the times I saw him go down.

How it felt like my heart stopped

until he got up again.

How that one time he got hit so hard, a vein broke in his left eye

and it stayed bloodred for days and days.

How come they can’t just fix him? I say again, but softer this time.

All those times he got knocked down and knocked out, my daddy kept getting up but maybe some part of him

stayed on the ground.





Playing Something Pretty


My daddy got me a guitar when I was seven. A six-string.

Acoustic.

I always wanted to play, he said.

I asked him how come he didn’t.

No money for lessons.

And the only instrument in our house when I was a kid was a broke-down banjo that once upon a time belonged to some distant relative.

It only had one string on it.

I’d plink at it but it never made any real kinda sound.

Just plink, plink, plink.

But I wanted drums, Daddy.

My daddy took me over to the window. See that beautiful yard?

I looked out at our yard, the grass sloping down into a line of trees

that hid our pool and climbing bars and the swings Daddy had someone design for me.

Yeah, I said. I see it.

Then Daddy turned me around. See all of this house?

I nodded again, looking at the way the marble stairs led up to all the bedrooms and the floor above that my dad always called the ballroom because a long time ago

people used it for dancing.

Now we have a half-court up there for indoor hoops in the wintertime.

What’s the house and the yard and the pool got to do with a guitar?

Sometimes, my daddy said,

a parent’s going to give you something they wished they had when they were kids.

He took the guitar from me, plucked at it and smiled.

Now you try it.

I strummed it, and the sound that filled up the living room was so soft and clear, I knew I was gonna love it forever.

Even though I was still mad about the drums.