"See," I said. "He's just trying to get to state. Your brother understands. State's the one that matters. State's the one we go to." I picked up the blender pitcher and rinsed it under the tap. "That's two weeks from Saturday. We'll all go to that."
Luke stood up. He had one shoe off and one shoe on, and he held the off one by the heel. He looked at me for a second with his mother's eyes, very level, and then he nodded.
"Okay," he said.
That was all. Okay. He went up the stairs in one shoe and the shower came on, and Jesse finished his shake and set the glass down harder than he needed to.
"You said that last year," Jesse said.
"Said what."
"State's the one we go to." He picked up his backpack off the hook. "You said that last year. And then you took me to the seven-on-seven in Athens."
"That was a qualifying tournament. College coaches were at that."
"Coaches from where."
"Coaches," I said. "There were coaches." I dried the pitcher. "Go get dressed. You're going to be late, and you don't want to be late this week either."
He went. I stood at the sink. Out the window over the sink was the backyard, the grass worn down to dirt in two lines eighteen yards long where Jesse dropped back and I ran my routes, and past that the field where the Rutledge place used to keep cows, and past that the long gray rooflines of the poultry houses along Wilkie Bridge, four of them, each one four hundred feet long, with the fans just starting to turn at the ends. The sky over the ridge was going from black to that dirty pink color it gets. Somewhere out there, not an hour before, my older son had been running in the dark along the edge of that road with a light on his head, and I had been asleep.
I want to tell this right, so I'll tell it plain. I loved both of my boys. I would have stepped in front of a truck for either of them, and I mean that the way men in my line of work mean it, because I'd seen what a truck does to a man. But I did not know how to be a father to Luke, and I did know how to be one to Jesse, and over seventeen years I had let the one thing I knew how to do eat up the room where the other thing should have been. That's not an excuse. That's just the shape of it.