Chapter 3

I spent the next several days going through all my options. I couldn’t get another job for at least two months, and even then, I wasn’t sure what job I could end up with. The only two jobs I’d ever had were playing football and being a police officer, and I couldn’t do either anymore.

I had managed to get a degree while playing at OU, but I’d done what a lot of guys who thought they’d be playing football and would never actually need a degree did. I went for something easy instead of something that could actually be useful. In my case, I’d gotten a degree in kinesiology, which with a teaching certificate meant I could be a gym teacher, but I’d never bothered to get the teaching certificate, since it didn’t seem to matter at the time.

There was only one choice really left to me, and it was almost bad enough to make me go crawling back to the lieutenant, begging for my job back. Almost.

Instead, I spent the rest of the next two weeks finding someone to sublet my place and arranging to uproot my life. In that respect at least, Terri did me a favor; since she left pretty much nothing besides my clothes, I didn’t have to ship a bunch of stuff home.

Seventeen days after I’d been shot and fifteen days after I’d gotten fired to make someone’s budget sheet look right, I was back in West Virginia. I was standing in front of the small, two-story house I’d grown up in. When I’d been a kid, this place had seemed like a castle. My dad had picked it up in the early seventies when the housing prices in the area took a giant nosedive before bouncing back in the early eighties. My room had been on the second floor and there’d been this old tree whose big branches reached almost to my window.

I’d tried to make the jump for it one day when I was around ten, and missed it completely, breaking my leg when I landed. I didn’t realize at the time that would become my trademark.

Looking at it now, the house seemed so narrow, about the same width as a New York City brownstone, but made out of wood and plank with a fenced-in porch out front instead of bricks with a cement stoop. I hadn’t been back since my senior year of college, and everything seemed smaller than I remembered. It also seemed older and more run-down than I remembered.

The front yard had gone from this field where I could play catch with my friends, to a couple of small brownish patches of mostly dead grass. Intellectually, I knew it was the same size and I was the one who’d gotten bigger, but memory is a funny thing. Uber wasn’t a thing out here and any cab company would have charged an arm and a leg to pick me up from the airport and drive me almost two hours to Buxton. Thankfully, small as it was, the town rated a Greyhound stop at the post office on the edge of Main Street, so I’d had options. My leg was screaming at me after hobbling the mile out of town to my parent’s place, and I was sure Mom would raise all kinds of hell when she found out I’d taken the bus instead of having Dad pick me up, but I just couldn’t take that long car ride alternating between answering questions I didn’t feel like answering and awkward silences.

Here, at least, I could escape when things got too bad. I squared my shoulders, readying myself, and limped through the small, chain fence that boxed in the tiny yard and up the steps. Mom had always had bat-like hearing when it came to the front porch and had some kind of deep psychological aversion to letting someone get close enough to push the doorbell before she made it to the front door. She’d apparently still had the gift, because the front door popped open by the time I made it to the second step.

“Henry, what are you doing here? Why didn’t you call when you landed? I asked you to send me your flight itinerary. Did you take the bus and walk out?”

I suppressed a sigh. I knew she meant it from a place of love, but whenever things weren’t going the way she felt they should, she went into overdrive.

“It wasn’t that far to walk. The doctor said I needed to try and move around some every day, to keep it from scarring up too bad, anyway.”

“Moving around some and walking a mile down the side of a road are not the same thing, and you know it.”

“You’re right,” I said, knowing that if I told her the real reason I didn’t want to be picked up, it would be a whole new set of hysterics. “I’m tired and just want to lay down. Can we put this off till later?”

She put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips, the warring impulses to get me to admit I was wrong and should have done as I was told fighting against her ingrained nature to take care of everyone around her.

“Fine. Next time let’s just try and communicate better. I put fresh sheets on your bed and dinner won’t be ready for an hour. Go wash up and lay down, and I’ll get you when it’s ready. Do you think you can make it up the stairs okay?”

“Yeah. I had to go up and down the stairs at my brownstone as I was packing up, so I’ve gotten some practice. I just have to take it slow,” I said, making my way up the rest of the steps.

She gave one final disapproving look before pulling me down to her level so she could give me a hug. I will say, one of the great things about my mom is that, while she could get annoyed with me easily, she didn’t hold grudges and moved on from her annoyance pretty quickly.

“I’m glad you’re home, Henry.”

“Thanks. I won’t be for long. I just have to figure out my next move and I’ll be out of your hair.”

“Stay as long as you need. You know your father and I are here for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She opened the screen door to let me through. Everything was almost exactly as I remembered it. The door led into the front part of the house, with the left half set up as a dining room with an old wooden table that Mom had gotten before I was born. It wasn’t fancy, but it also wasn’t the plywood piece of crap Terri and I’d gotten from Ikea. I’d fallen into it a few times over the years roughhousing with friends, and the table always came out better than I did in the exchange.

The right side was the living room, with Dad’s recliner smack dab in the middle of the room, facing the TV, with a couch positioned so it kind of separated the living room from the pathway leading to the back of the house and the dining room. Dad was in his recliner as usual, watching Sports Nation, which basically played on a repeated loop throughout the day, adding in new stuff segments as news broke. It was March on a Wednesday, so there wasn’t much in breaking news, which meant he’d probably seen everything once or twice already, but it didn’t matter. For him, it was almost a meditative experience.

“Henry,” he said in acknowledgement.

“Hey, Dad. How’s the mine?”

“Bud Freeman’s retiring. I think they’re going to make Larry the new shift supervisor.”

I remembered Bud Freeman. Looked mean enough to chew nails, but was actually a pretty nice guy. He’d been Dad’s boss for about ten years, ever since beating Dad out the last time a supervisor retired. Larry was a guy who started several years after Dad did, which meant him getting shift supervisor over Dad was a slap in the face. Of course, Dad had a long history of saying whatever was on his mind and filtered none of it, which didn’t usually go over well with the higher-ups. I remember when Bud got promoted, Dad made the same stink about him kissing all the right ass and being a company man.

“He’s retiring?”

“Has to. Got ‘the cough’ a few years ago and can’t keep up anymore. He’s going to move down with his kid in Florida.”

‘The Cough’ was one of the way miners referred to black lung disease. Most of them had lung damage in various stages caused by years of breathing in coal dust. They had protective gear, but only the rookies ever wore all of it. It was hot and it was difficult to breathe inside all that gear. It made your time in the ground each day feel like an eternity. I’d only worked there one summer when I was sixteen, and that was enough to tell me I never wanted to do it again. Thankfully, Coach had convinced Dad I had a future playing ball and working in the mines might cause enough damage to keep me out of the big leagues. Of course, clean lungs didn’t really end up helping me after all, but those were the breaks.

“Damn, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. It’s a real shame. Bud was a damn fine supervisor.”

“Yeah,” I said, not really knowing what else to say.

Except for when he felt like giving a lecture, Dad and I only really talked about sports, the mine and my schoolwork, and all of it in sort of a superficial way. That was just the kind of guy he was. He didn’t really see the need to spend too much time discussing any one subject, especially in those small windows of time when he got to relax.

“Henry walked all the way from the bus stop and said he’s tired, so he was going to go up and lie down,” Mom said, both ratting on me and rescuing me at the same time.

“Sure,” he said, and turned his attention back to the TV.

“Go on and get some rest. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”

“Thanks.”

She followed me through the door that led into the back of the house and waited as I turned and went up the narrow stairs. I’d always been a little annoyed with them, since I had a pretty wide frame and it sometimes felt like I was being squeezed as I went up and down the stairs. Although I liked to say both of my shoulders could touch the walls of the stairs at the same time, it wasn’t quite that narrow. I was glad they were so narrow now, however, since I could use one crutch to lean on and brace myself against the wall with the other as I slowly made my way up them.

Upstairs the guest bedroom’s door was closed, as always. Mom kept the thing practically hermetically sealed except for those rare occasions we had someone staying the night. I was very clearly forbidden from ever going in there, even when I came back home as an adult. I guess if Terri had ever wanted to stay, we might have gotten to use it, but she’d always refused to stay anywhere that wasn’t the nicest hotel in town, which ruled out staying with my parents. Of course, Buxton’s best hotel was a motor lodge a mile out the other side of town that only got business because it was the only hotel or motel for thirty miles in any direction.

Although it’d never be called luxury accommodations, it apparently rated higher than my parents’ house, because the few times we’d been back, she’d chosen that over staying with family.

The other direction from the stairs led to the room I’d grown up in. Because Terri had always wanted to stay at a motel when we’d visited, I hadn’t been in there, except for a few seconds here or there to grab something, since college. Opening the door, it was like taking a time machine back ten years.

It looked like Mom still came up here and cleaned occasionally, or at least she had when I’d asked to come home to stay for a bit, since there wasn’t dust anywhere. Other than that, everything was exactly as I’d left it as a teenager. Posters on the wall for bands that I thought were edgy and cool, none of whom were still together, and a few posters of women risqué enough for the teenage brain but clean enough that my mom would let them stay up.

The bookcase, which had been brought in by my dad when they had hopes I’d aspire to be a doctor or a lawyer, held only a handful of books, most unread. Instead, every shelf held a trophy or plaque from the days when I’d thought sports was everything and dreamed of being on the TV Sundays, running down the field to the cheers of fans. As a kid, I’d been so proud of each of these little symbols of victory and could relate how I’d won, or at least contributed to each one. Looking at them now, most I couldn’t remember, even after reading the name of whatever sports camp or club league they came from.

Everything else in the room was fairly mundane. A dresser, empty now, since what clothes I didn’t take when I’d moved to New York City to start my big life in the NFL my mom had sold off at garage sales or given to charities. The same thing for the closet, except for a letterman’s jacket from high school that I guess I’d decided I didn’t need any more once I’d gone to college.

My leg was aching and I realized that I really had overdone it walking here and hobbled over to the bed and lowered myself down on it. It was old and squeaked as I put my weight on it. They’d changed the bed out when I’d hit a big growth spurt just before my freshman year, but even so I didn’t remember the bed being this small. It felt like it could barely hold me, despite my memories of sneaking Terri up here when we were seniors and my parents were out late. We hadn’t lived in a palace or anything in New York City, but this room felt so small it made even our tiny apartment feel like a mansion.