Page 41 of Good Guy Gabe

Gregorson is ancient, at least seventy. The last decade has not been kind to him. The team is down by twenty points at the half. They won’t win their own Homecoming. A shame. But the Homecoming King gives Gregorson his crown, the Queen gives him her roses, and the feeble old man looks every bit as proud as he did the day I let him know I’d been recruited.

“You ready to settle down, old man?” I laugh, clapping him on the shoulder, the gesture broad but the touch light.

He beams up at me, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve gotten taller, if he’s gotten shorter, or if he was just larger than life in my mind until my own world became larger than life. “I got seven grandkids now,” he says proudly. “That’s one of ‘em right there.” He points to a kid on the sideline, smaller than Merrick or even Lin, but he’s offensive line, holding his own. I’m literally twice his size. “Gonna have great-grandkids soon. Definitely seems about time to settle down. Maybe you should think about doing the same,” he adds with a wink.

I lean over to him to conspiratorially whisper, “You know, I’ve got someone in mind to do the settling down with.”

I didn’t think Gregorson could have been happier than he was a moment ago, but he lets out a whoop, claps me on the back hard enough I jolt, and says, “It’s about time, boy!”

“Dana Cambridge says Maycee Luzonn overheard Devyn Brown talking to Kayla Duncroft, and she said her little brother heard you tell Coach Gregorson you have a girlfriend.”

I grew up with three sisters. One older, two younger. So I don’t have issues working through what’s spewed out of Leah’s mouth the moment I walk into the kitchen of my childhood home. But it does take me a minute to orient myself to the fact that she’s not a baby anymore and at 22, she could be off and married and pregnant like Abby was two years ago. Instead, she chose to skip out on college, pull espresso shots at the local coffee shop down the street, and figure herself out. And since sheisthe baby, my parents agreed to it far more readily than they did when Phoebe attempted it, a constant bone of contention at holidays, but Ma swears Leah’s paying rent.

I have my doubts, but Phoebe got the last laugh there. She’s recently divorced, ‘transitioning’ to single life in her childhood bedroom, and currently sprawled across the velvet rose-print sofa in the living room while Dad Netflix-surfs in his old chocolate-brown recliner and nurses a beer. At the stove, Ma is stirring a vat of chili.

But then Leah makes that comment, and two of three heads spin to me, like women possessed.

Dad belches, which might actually be his acknowledgment of what she said. I’m not saying he’s inattentive at all, but he’s always been a pro at letting Ma and the girls lead the fact-finding mission while he quietly absorbs and processes.

Phoebe scrambles to her feet, nearly six feet herself and still like a newborn fawn on her gangly legs despite being two years my senior. “You didn’t tell us you had a girlfriend!” she shouts too loudly for the four yards of open air between us.

Ma, barely five feet, her hair a salt-and-pepper she has no interest in coloring, the red-headed stepchild despite being Ma and genetically brunette in a sea of blond and ginger giants, dumps a giant ladle of chili into one of the Thanksgiving servingbowls and thrusts it and a sleeve of saltines at me. “When are we going to meet her?”

Soon, definitely. I know I can’t expect pregnancy to just happen, it might never happen, but I have a good feeling. And as soon as Joss is expecting, Ma will literally drive half a day from Duluth to Wilmington to meet her if I don’t bring her out. But I’m not going to say all that — I don’t want the bowl of chili thrown at me — so I’m about to play it off like it’s no big deal.

And then Big-Mouth Leah tacks on, “Ryder Duncroft told Kayla Gabe told Coach he was ‘settling down’.” She even throws air quotes on it.

Oh shit.

I take the chili that yes, I very much want, as Ma lets out a shriek. Phoebe snorts and says, “You have the most sedentary life of any football player in the history of football players. You settled down years ago.”

Ma swats her with a kitchen towel. “Oh hush you. My boy’s in love!”

Phoebe and Leah both give me a horrified look that I throw back at Ma. “Jesus, slow down.”

That earns me a swat from the towel, and I lumber over to the kitchen table to shrink away from her as well as any of us can. I crunch up half the sleeve of saltines and dump them into the bowl, which is enough to keep her from terrorizing me further. Physically, at least. In Ma’s eyes, I’ll always be her growing boy. Since I’ve tracked my weight basically my entire life, I know that’s not entirely false.

“Well, tell us about her,” Phoebe says, crossing her arms over her chest like she’s planning on destroying Joss. Understandable, after that high school girlfriend I carriedthrough college until I found out she was sleeping with pretty much everyone on both my high school and college teams, apart from Blaise.

“Is she pretty?” Ma asks. “I bet she’s pretty.”

“She is very pretty,” I confirm, considering and then deciding against announcing that she has pageant sashes to attest to how pretty she is. I don’t want them to get the wrong idea about her, and Leah in particular has had some stellar rants about the blatant misogyny of beauty pageants.

“Is she tall?”

“Taller than you.” I nod to Phoebe. “Not so tall as you.”

This earns no points from her. “Hot and average height isn’t a personality. Sounds like one of the pro athlete chasers. The . . . bunnies, or whatever they’re called.”

I swallow a big spoonful of chili — the best chili, oh my god, the harassment is so worth it for Ma’s chili — and wipe a dribble out of my beard. “No one’s chasing me, Phoebe. Fuck.”

Ma spins her towel so she doesn’t forget to swat me for cursing once I’m done eating.

“You’re just too dumb to see those bimbos throwing themselves at you, you stupid shit,” Leah mutters. Does she get a swat or a threatening glare? Of course not. “What’s she do? She got a job?”

“What the—of course she has a job! She has her own business!”

“Doing what?” Leah and Phoebe ask in surround sound.

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