"Torin is his little brother." She picked up the clipboard and held it against her chest, not looking at it. "Wyn Brackett was the best player I ever coached. Not the best athlete. The best player. He saw the field like it was a map and he was the only one holding it. He had a scholarship offer from Stanford when he was sixteen, which almost never happens for a kid from Merrimon, and he had a second one from UCLA, and he was going to take one of them." She paused. "And then he didn't. And he quit. In the middle of his senior year, seven years ago this November, he walked off a field and he never came back, and I have not seen him or spoken to him since."
The sprinklers ticked around.
"Why?" Tavo said.
Coach Pennock was quiet for a long time.
"That's his to tell you," she said finally. "Not mine. I'll tell you my part, someday, if you want it. But it's his." She stood up, slowly, favoring the knee. "You'll be here tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Good." She looked down at him, and at the cleat in his lap. "Your toe's black, isn't it? The right one."
He did not answer, which was an answer.
"Get new shoes," she said. "Not because of what that kid said. Because you're going to lose the nail. Those have done their job." She started toward the gate, then stopped, and turned back. "Tavo. Torin recognized them too. You saw that, I think."
"I saw something."
"That's what you saw." She tapped the clipboard once against her leg. "Go easy on him, if you can. He's carrying something that isn't his. So are you, I think. So, apparently, am I."
She went down the hill.
Rosalba's truck was parked where it always parked from eleven to two on weekdays in August, in the lot of the Napa Auto Parts on Pacheco Boulevard, across from the county building, where the clerks and the deputies and the men from the water district came out at noon in a long line for carnitas and al pastor and the agua de jamaica that she made in a five-gallon orange cooler every morning at four. The truck was called La Güera, after Rosalba's mother, who had been blonde, improbably, in a family of very dark-haired people. It was painted cream with a red stripe and had a hand-lettered menu taped inside the order window that Tavo had redone last spring in black marker, because the old one had faded to the point where people were ordering things that had not been on it for two years.
He rode up at twelve-fifteen with his cleats over his shoulder and his toe screaming and went around to the back door and knocked twice, and Bartolo's nephew Ximo opened it, sweating, a paper hat on his head, and said, "Gracias a Dios, she's been asking every five minutes."