Luke looked at Jesse. Jesse shook his head. Luke looked at me, and I didn't say anything, because Jesse had warned me what happened when I made things into a thing, and because I didn't honestly know if it mattered. He'd have done the math either way. I believe that. But he looked at me a beat longer than he needed to, and then he looked down at the gravel, and the corner of his mouth went in.
Then he turned to Haskell and did something I'll remember until I die. He stuck out his hand like a grown man and said, "Sorry, Coach."
Carl Haskell looked at that hand. Then he took it in both of his, the stopwatch still in one of them, so it got pressed between their palms.
"Don't you dare," Haskell said. His voice was rough. "Don't you dare say sorry to me. You know what you did tonight? You did me the best favor anybody's done me in twenty-eight years. I mean that. Go look at that number on the board and don't ever be sorry for it." He let go. "Eight forty-eight three-one. To the hundredth. Nobody's going to wonder about that one."
Luke didn't know what that meant. I did. I didn't say anything.
Jesse hugged him then, a big, clumsy football hug with his cleats skidding on the gravel, and Luke said into his shoulder, "You skipped practice?" and Jesse said, "Coach skipped practice," and they both started laughing in a way that had something else under it, and Luke's teammates came in around them, and for a minute I stood back and let them have it.
I saw the sweatband when he put his arms around his brother. Red terrycloth, on his right wrist, damp and dark. There was a square shape under it about the size of a watch face. I looked at it, and then I looked away, and I didn't say a word about it. I'm proud of that, if I'm proud of anything from that night. I let it not be a thing.
He couldn't ride home with us. It was a team rule, Marlene said, coming up behind him. Everybody rides the bus both ways. She looked at me like she was waiting to see if I'd argue, the way I'd have argued with a football coach once, and I said, "Yes, ma'am, that's right," and she softened about one degree.
"He said you'd never come," she said to me, quiet, while Luke was signing a girl's heat sheet. "I asked him on the bus this morning. I said, Is your daddy coming, if you're going to go for it. He said, He doesn't come. That's all he said. He wasn't mad about it. He said it like it was the weather."
"Yes, ma'am," I said. There wasn't anything else.
"Well," she said. "Now he does." And she went to get her team on the bus.
My truck was not towed. There was a note under the wiper blade, among the feathers, written on the back of a heat sheet in black Sharpie by somebody from the Amicalola Valley athletic department, that said NO PARKING BUS LANE and under it, in different handwriting, CONGRATULATIONS.