Page 38 of The Progressions

I held the door and then I stayed there to allow a path for her among the other fans. More and more people were showing up because the main doors had been opened for everyone now. We met up with the helpful guard who showed us to the little platform where there was room for Miss Gail’s chair and also a seat for me. We were so close to the field that I couldn’t believe it.

“Would you like some earplugs for later?” she suggested, taking two pairs from her purse. “Tyler said that it gets very loud in here.”

“Not right now.” I wasn’t sure if I would use them; I wanted to soak up everything. “They’ll be cheering for him as a Woodsmen now instead of booing him as a Seal, so it might be easier to listen to.”

“He had a difficult preseason even with the new jersey on,” she said quietly.

No one here had booed him, as far as I’d been able to hear on the TV broadcast, but they hadn’t been happy with his play so far. “I think he’ll be great,” I assured her. “I know how much he’s been going over the playbook and he’s been meeting a lot with the tight ends’ coach and the offensive coordinator, too. And I also know that he talked a few times with Kayden Matthews, the quarterback. Kayden’s wife owns a bar and I suggested that Tyler go there to hang out some. It really does seem like they’re getting along better now and I think that will help how he’s playing.”

She seemed surprised by my level of involvement, but I had asked a lot of questions as Tyler and I played poker. He had told me once that I needed to ask better questions and then he would answer, but I found that persistence had paid off. Once he’d gotten into a habit of telling me things, he kept on going, and he listened to what I said in return.

“I’m not surprised how he started off on the wrong foot. Ty was always like that with people at first,” she said. “When he was a boy, we had to move fairly frequently, for work and for…other reasons. Whenever he started at a new school, he would get into a fight. Every time.” She shook her head. “I would warn theteachers that it was going to happen and it did. Every time,” she said again. “He was afraid they wouldn’t like him.”

“So he fought them to make friends?”

Miss Gail smiled. “It was more that he was getting in the first lick,” she explained. “You know, hurting them, literally, before they could hurt his feelings. He was such a sensitive little thing.”

We both looked down at the field, where her sensitive son looked as large and tough as an ice-breaking ship.

“It got better when he started playing football,” she went on. “He was always so fast! You wouldn’t believe it now, looking at me, but I ran track in high school. I was a sprinter.”

“Maybe you could again—not sprint,” I corrected myself, “but you could work back up to running. Or maybe you could go for walks, which would also be great,” I added, because she seemed very skeptical. “My dad should get out and do more. He’s supposed to but we’re both afraid of him falling while he’s by himself.”

“Tyler mentioned that he has some trouble with getting around.”

“He does. I wish I could be there to help him, but I have to work and I’m trying to finish school. I was planning to go on to law school, too.” I had been thinking a lot about that, though. It made sense for me to quit spending so much time studying and going to class, preparing for the future. Maybe I needed to give myself more time to focus on the problems at hand, like my dad’s fitness. Like Iva and her baby. Like working more, and making more money right at the moment rather than at an undetermined date.

“We’ll see,” I said, and asked her to tell me more about her son.

Miss Gail had plenty to talk about, because she was very proud of him. He was so smart, she said—he wasn’t only good at football. “He always had such wonderful report cards!” she answered proudly, and she told me a whole lot more, about Tyler’s friends, his first car, his roommates in college, and lastly, his girlfriends. Before I could delve too much into that topic, though, the teams were coming back out onto the field.

It got so loud in the stadium when the Woodsmen ran through the tunnel that I thought about taking the earplugs. I couldn’t hear myself, but I was screaming along with everyone else. It was so fun to watch them on TV—so fun. But this, in person? I felt like I might burst out of my own skin. Malachi Hubbard returned the opening kickoff for thirty-eight yards and the Woodsmen had the ball, and I almost started crying again as the offense jogged out onto the field. Tyler was there, number sixty-two, lining up on the right side of the O-line. I looked over at Gail briefly and she had her eyes closed, like she might have been praying. Just in case, I said one, too.Zdrowas Maryjo…

He was doing so well. He was doing so well that several people seated near us patted me on the shoulder in recognition of my Hennessy jersey, and by halftime, the Woodsmen were up by three touchdowns. Two of those had been run in by Tyler. I was having more fun than I ever had in my whole life, but I did keep looking at the space next to me. There was room for another chair here, and my dad could have been in it. We were texting back and forth and he was ok, and so was Iva. She sentme pictures of her little guy (still unnamed) and as the halftime show started, I showed Miss Gail.

“Oh, look at that precious baby!” she gasped. “Who is he? What’s his name?”

I told her the story, the outlines of it without getting into gossip…except that I felt like I needed advice, too. “Stupid Dominic is such a—” I had been about to say “booty hole,” but changed my mind. “A jerk,” I concluded. “He treats her terribly.”

“Does he hurt her?”

I had a feeling that she meant more than emotional pain, so I shook my head. “He’s totally unsupportive, though, and now he’s missing. He won’t answer her or me and I don’t know what to do.”

“There are a few ways to go,” she said, and it turned out that she had spent a lot of years working in the court system, and part of what she’d done was help people navigate it. By the time that the Wonderwomen were concluding their routine, we had a plan starting to come together, a plan in which she played a major role.

“You would do all that? You don’t know her,” I pointed out, but Miss Gail said that Iva and her baby needed a hand and she was happy to lend one.

“Anyway, I can’t just sit in that beautiful house listening to the people next door argue about the volume of the bathroom fan,” she told me.

That woman was bananas. “Do you think we can make stupid Dominic respond?”

“We can try.”

The teams came back out then, and we broke off our conversation to focus. I calmed down slightly in the second half and breathed more normally, because the Woodsmen went up by even more. They were enough ahead that the starters were pulled and they sat on their bench or stood on the sidelines not too far from where we were. At one point, Tyler turned around, and both Miss Gail and I waved. I did that very violently, I realized afterwards, kind of like I was trying to dislocate my shoulder, and he nodded back to us. I rubbed my neck, which I had tweaked with my waving, as the clock slowly moved toward zero. I asked a few times if she wanted to go early, but she insisted that she wasn’t tired and we should stay. My dad and Iva still reported that they were fine, so I didn’t feel anything more than the usual pressure to be elsewhere.

As the game ended, we waited until most of the crowd had thinned and then we went to a lobby in that lower level, a lounge kind of place where we could wait for the players to finish all the post-game stuff that I had read about. Other family members and friends were there too, talking and hanging out together, with lots of kids running around.

Miss Gail said hello to several people and made quite a few acquaintances. I spent my time mentally matching families with the players and it did seem like a lot of them, maybe most of them, had people in this lounge. I wondered if the Seals team had the same kind of set-up, and if Shay Galton had gone andfought with the other girlfriends and wives there. Everyone here seemed generally friendly with each other, and certainly no one was pissing to demarcate territory. I looked at Tyler’s mother and decided that she wouldn’t have stood for that kind of behavior.

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