"I took the Silverado." He leaned his forearms on the rail. "Jo, I need to tell you some stuff, and I need you to let me get through it, because if you stop me I'm going to lose my nerve."
"Okay."
"I quit football in January."
I turned and looked at him.
"Not the injury," he said. "I mean, the shoulder's real. But I could've come back. The trainers said I'd be cleared by summer. I didn't want to come back. I sat in the film room the week before Christmas break and watched myself miss a tackle in practice, over and over, the coach running it back and forth, and I thought, I have never liked this. Not one day. Not in Little League, not in high school. I liked the guys. I liked being good at something Dad was proud of. I never liked the actual thing. I'd lie in bed the night before games and feel like I was going to throw up, every single game, since I was eight." He laughed, but it wasn't really a laugh. "You remember how Dad used to say I had a fire in me? It wasn't fire. It was the flu, basically, every Friday night for ten years."
"Grant."
"Let me finish. I withdrew from MTSU for the spring. Dad doesn't know. Mom doesn't know. I've been driving the Silverado to Chattanooga State four nights a week. I'm in the EMT-Basic program. I've got my clinicals with Hamilton County EMS. I did a ride-along last Thursday and we worked a cardiac arrest at a Dollar General on Highway 58 and we got him back, Jo. We got a pulse back in the back of the rig, and I was doing compressions, and I've never—" His voice cracked, and he stopped and swallowed. "I've never felt anything like that. That's the thing I want. That's the whole thing."
"Every morning," I said slowly. "Dad said you were in the training room every morning at five-thirty."
"I go to the Y on Hixson Pike," he said. "I lift and I sit in the parking lot and I study my protocols. Then I go to work at the AutoZone on Highway 153, because I needed money for the course. I get home around the time practice would've let out." He shrugged. "Dad never checked. Why would he check? He knew who I was."
I didn't know what to say. I'd spent two weeks being angry at my brother, and I'd been angry at a person who wasn't there.
"So he bought you a car," I said, "for a career you'd already quit."
"He bought me a car," Grant said, "so that when everybody at Rotary asked how his boy was doing, he could point at the driveway." He turned around and leaned back on the rail, facing the downtown side. "He told me Saturday night, after everybody