Nobody talked much on the way back down. It was full dark by then, and the road over Burnt Mill was empty, and the flagger was gone and the asphalt patch was steaming in the headlights. Jesse fell asleep in the back seat before Damascus with his cleats still on and his mouth open. Haskell sat in the passenger seat with Marlene's stopwatch in his lap, turning it over the way he'd turned his phone over, and somewhere past the poultry houses, with the lights of Pettit coming up in the valley, he said, "State's the ninth."
"I know."
"That's a Saturday. In Carrollton. We don't practice Saturdays."
"I know, Coach."
"I know you know. I'm just saying it out loud so it's been said." He looked out the window. "Spring game's the Friday before. Jesse'll get thirty snaps. You come to that. Of course you come to that." He paused. "But Roy. Starting Monday. You come to practice if you want to come. I'm not going to run any man off my fence. But you stand somewhere else for a while. Up in the stands. Behind the end zone. Somewhere he has to look for you if he wants to find you." He glanced at Jesse in the mirror, asleep. "Let him throw a few bad balls nobody sees."
I dropped him at his truck in the empty school lot under the one light. He got out and leaned back in through the door.
"I'm going to call the GHSA at eight in the morning," he said. "I'm going to ask them to put it through as fast as they can. I want it on the wall at state with his name on it." Then he said, "My daddy would've hated this," and he smiled that loose crooked smile again, and shut the door.
Tonya came home at eleven-forty. I was at the kitchen table. She stood in the doorway in her plant scrubs and her hairnet still in her pocket and looked at me, and I could tell she knew; Luke had texted her, and so had Marlene, and so had probably half of Cagle County. She came over and stood behind my chair and put both her hands on my shoulders and left them there.
"You went," she said.
"I went."
"Mm," she said, and it was one I'd never heard before.
Luke came down at a little before midnight in a T-shirt and gym shorts and sat across from me with a composition notebook, the black-and-white marbled kind they sell at the Dollar General for a dollar, and a pencil. He didn't say anything. He opened it to a page about two-thirds full and started writing. I watched him. I'd never watched him do it. His handwriting was small and square, all capitals, like a draftsman's.