“He got a call at the bar, and he looked at me and said, ‘That boy is going to do the exact thing I could not do, and I am going to sit there and clap like a fool.” “Mrs. Okoro, I have known Ray for twenty years. I did not know he had played at Nebraska. He never mentioned it. But that night, after three bourbons, he told me everything. He said he walked on in 1993. He said he got cut in the spring of his sophomore year for a DUI and a fistfight. He said he spent thirty years pretending it did not hurt.”
I stood in my kitchen in Omaha with the phone pressed hard to my ear. Jalen was out in the yard shooting baskets at the hoop on the garage, the thump of the ball echoing through the screen door. I had not known about Lincoln. He had told me he went to a junior college. He had told me he never played anywhere that mattered. I had believed him, because I wanted a simple story, and because the real one would have required me to ask a harder question.
“He said something else,” Dwayne continued, awkwardly. “He said, ‘If I go to that signing, they will put me in the front row, the proud father of a Husker, and every man in that gym will shake my hand. And I will have to smile. And I will want to scream.” I sat down on the kitchen stool. It was so obviously, painfully true that I could hear Ray say it. He was a man who had been a football player and then a nobody, who had measured his life by the distance between those two things. And now, his son, an eighteen year old kid in a red hat, was walking into the very stadium where Ray had been thrown out.
A man who once was cut from a team could not bring himself to sit in the front row of his son signing.
On Sunday afternoon, he came in sweaty from the court and flopped on the couch, and I told him all of it, the DUI, the fight, the walk on. Jalen listened with his elbows on his knees, the way his father does. When I stopped, he let out a long breath. “So that is why he always changes the channel,” he said. “Whenever the Huskers are on.” I said I supposed so. He shook his head slowly. “I thought he just did not like football. Mom, I have been trying so hard to be good at something he never even cared about.”
“He cares,” I said. “That is exactly the problem. He cares so much that he cannot bear it.” Jalen stared at the floor. I could see him working through it, nineteen years of birthdays and missed games and half remembered promises rearranging themselves into a different pattern. “Do you think he is jealous of me?” he asked. I thought about that carefully. “I think he is afraid for you,” I said. “And I think he is ashamed. And when a man is both of those things, he makes himself small. He goes to Scottsdale. He hits golf balls. He does not look up.”
Then my son did something I did not expect. He got up and went upstairs and came down five minutes later in his practice jersey with a football under his arm. “Mom, drive me,” he said. I asked where. He said, “Scottsdale is a long way. But Lincoln is not.” It took me a minute. Then I understood. Ray lived in Lincoln. He had moved there in March, to a one bedroom apartment off O Street, and I had never once seen it. We drove the fifty miles in silence. Jalen held the football on his lap the whole way, turning it slowly in his big hands, the laces under his fingertips.
Ray opened the door in his undershirt. He looked at his son, then at me, then at his son again, and his face did something terrible and wonderful at the same time. “Jay,” he said. “Buddy. I am so sorry. I am so sorry I missed your signing.” Jalen held out the football. “Dad, I do not want sorry,” he said. “I want you to come outside and throw with me.” Ray stared at the ball. His hand shook as he reached for it. “I have not thrown in thirty years,” he said. “I will hurt my arm.” Jalen grinned the grin that belongs to both of them. “Then you will hurt your arm.”
I sat on the curb in front of the apartment building for an hour and watched them play catch in the parking lot. The first pass sailed ten feet over the head of my son and into a hedge. The second was low and wobbled. By the fifth, Ray had found something, a rhythm in the shoulder that I had not seen in him in ten years. The ball spiraled across the cracked asphalt in a clean tight line. Jalen caught it against his chest and shouted. And my former husband, forty nine years old and gray at the temples, raised both arms over his head like a man who had just scored.
That fall, Jalen played his first game in Memorial Stadium as a freshman. I sat in the stands in the eighty thousand strong red roar, with a program in my lap, and I looked to my left. There was Ray, in a red sweatshirt and a Nebraska cap, holding a hot chocolate in both hands. He had told Jalen that he would come, and he came, early, with a printed ticket. When the team ran out through the tunnel, he stood and he did not stop standing. He screamed the name of his son until his voice gave out. At halftime he turned to me, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
“Thirty years,” he said. “I have been so scared of this place.” I said nothing. I did not need to. He looked out over the field, the green and the white lines and the sun going gold over the north end zone, and he nodded slowly. “It is only grass,” he said. “It is only a game.” Then he said, softly, almost to himself, “It was never the field I could not stand. It was me.” I reached across and put my hand on his arm, and we sat there like that through the whole third quarter, two people who had once loved each other and now loved the same boy.