"The paper, Roy. The Cagle County Courier. The paper that's sitting in the recycling under your Academy flyer." She tipped her head at the bin by the door. "Page eight."
"I'll look at it."
"You won't," she said, not mean, just like she was telling me the time. "But I'll leave it out."
She did. She fished it out of the recycling and flattened it on the counter by the coffee maker, page eight on top, and went back upstairs with her coffee to sit on the bed and drink it while Luke used the bathroom. I looked at the page for about two seconds. There was a photograph at the top of a boy in a red Cagle County singlet with his mouth open and every rib showing, running alone in front of a stand of pines, and I knew it was my son because I knew the singlet, but I swear to you I didn't know the face. He looked like somebody who was being chased. There was a headline under it in that skinny type the Courier uses and I read the first three words of it, which were RAMS SENIOR CHASING, and then my phone buzzed on the counter with a text from Ricky Dockery that said truck 14 got a blown hydraulic line, meet at the yard 6:45 not 7, and I put the coffee cup down on the newspaper and went to find my boots.
I'm a journeyman lineman. I've worked for Cagle Electric Membership Corporation for twenty-two years, since I was twenty-five and my knee was already shot and I understood I was not going to do anything with my life that involved being chosen for something. I climb poles and I work out of a bucket, and I set transformers and run new service and restore power when the storms come through, and I am good at it. I'll say that. I have hands that know what they're doing at forty feet in a sleet storm with fourteen thousand four hundred volts a yard from my face, and I have a body that holds up, and I can teach a twenty-year-old apprentice how not to die, which is most of what the job is. Men on the crew listen to me. I am the kind of man other men listen to when there's a thing that needs doing and they don't know how to do it.
That's the point I'm trying to make. I was useful. I was a useful man. I came from people who weren't, and I had made myself into a man who was, and I had taken it as a kind of religion that if you showed up and knew what to do, then that was love, or near enough to it that nobody could tell the difference.
With Jesse, I knew what to do.
With Luke, I never once in his life knew what to do. And so, God help me, most of the time I didn't do anything at all.
We spent that morning on a pole-mounted transformer out past the Ebenezer Church crossroads, where a bad squirrel had gotten into the bushing and taken out four houses and a hog barn, and then we spent the middle of the day re-tensioning a sagging span over a creek on Old Toccoa Road while a man in a camouflage hat stood in his yard and told us how the last crew had done it wrong. Ricky Dockery ran the bucket truck and I went up.
At lunch we sat on the tailgate of the truck at the Shell station on the Highway 52 cutoff and ate gas station chicken out of a box and Ricky asked me how Jesse was looking.
I told him. I told him for probably ten minutes. I told him about the three-step drop Coach Haskell was teaching that spring, how it was quicker than the one the old coach had used, and how Jesse's feet were getting it, and how on day two he'd hit the slot receiver on a seam route in the back corner of the end zone over a linebacker's hand, forty yards in the air, and how I'd watched Haskell's head turn when it happened.
"Ain't the other one running up at Amicalola today?" Ricky said, when I'd finished.