"I wanted to."
"There's nothing to see, though. You just stand there."
"I saw you on the hill."
"Yeah." He picked at the grass. "I was dying on the hill. I went out too hard." Then he said, "You don't have to come to these. Seriously. It's boring. Nobody's parents come except like the moms."
And I want to tell you I argued. I want to tell you I said, I'll come anyway, I'll come to every one, I don't care if I see four seconds, I'll stand on the hill. But I'd been standing in that field for forty minutes feeling like a man who'd shown up to a job site without his tools, and I was ashamed of it, and he'd just handed me a door to walk out of. So I walked out of it. I said, "All right, bud," and I squeezed his shoulder, and I drove home and got there in time to throw with Jesse till dark.
That was the last time. Three and a half years. He ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring and I asked him how it went and he said fine and I said that's good and Tonya went to the meets when she could, which wasn't often with her shifts, and the rest of the time he went alone on the team bus, and I told myself that's what he wanted. He'd said so. A boy says don't come, and you respect that. That's what I told myself.
I knew he was good. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. You can't live in a town of nine thousand people with a son who runs and not know. There was a banner at the school with his name on it after he won the region cross-country meet his junior year. I knew he'd run at state last spring and come in fourth in the 3200. I knew because Tonya texted me a picture of him on the podium while I was in the stands at the seven-on-seven in Athens watching Jesse's team get beat by a squad from Buford by four touchdowns. I remember I texted back a thumbs up.
The thing about football is that I understand it all the way down. I played it at Cagle County for four years under a man named Hollin Pickard who had a voice like a garbage truck and who picked me up from my house himself, every morning of two-a-days, in his Chevy Silverado, because he knew my father wasn't going to. My father worked for a sawmill in Ellijay, when he worked, and drank Natural Light from noon on when he didn't, and I don't remember him ever once asking me how practice went. Coach Pickard asked. Coach Pickard asked me every day. He told me when I was doing it wrong and he told me how to do it right and when I did it right he hit me on the helmet so hard my teeth clicked. I was an undersized linebacker who couldn't cover anybody, and I started my junior and senior year because I went where I was supposed to go every single snap, and in the second round of the playoffs my senior year a pulling guard from Jefferson rolled up on my left knee and that was the end of that. I was not going anywhere anyway. I wasn't any good. But I've never in my life loved anything the way I loved standing on the practice field at five-thirty in the evening with the sprinklers going and the sun going down behind the visitors' bleachers and a man with a whistle telling me exactly what to do.
That's what football was to me. It was the place where somebody told you what to do and then saw if you did it. And when I had sons, God help me, I think I figured that was the job. You learn the thing. You stand at the fence. You tell them what to do and you see if they do it.
You can't tell a runner what to do. Or I couldn't. I didn't have the words. With Jesse, every night in the backyard, I had something to give him, and every time he did it right I could see in his face that I'd given it, and I could go to bed feeling like a man who had done his job. With Luke I had nothing in my hands. He'd go out at five-twenty in the morning and run fourteen miles on a Sunday and come home and eat a mixing bowl of oatmeal and I'd say, "How far'd you go," and he'd say, "Fourteen," and I'd say, "Damn," and that was it. That was the whole of what I could offer. Damn.
I'd been telling myself for three and a half years that he didn't need me there. The truth is I didn't know what I was for there, and I couldn't stand it.
We finished on Old Toccoa Road at three-twenty. Ricky dropped me at the yard and I drove straight to the high school in my work clothes the way I had every day that week, and I parked my truck on the gravel by the practice field where I always parked it, and I walked over to the chain-link fence by the forty-yard line where I always stood, and I hung my fingers through the wire.