Tavo sat down in the other folding chair.
"You don't have to tell me," he said. "She said it was yours to tell. I'm just. I wanted to make sure you were okay."
Wyn looked up at him. Something in his face shifted.
"That's what she said? It was mine to tell?"
"Yeah."
Wyn nodded slowly. He opened the foil. He took out one of the tacos and ate it in two bites, and wiped his mouth, and then he told it, looking mostly at the team photo over the bed.
It was the state semifinal, he said. Not high school; club. The NorCal Premier final four, in Visalia, in November, on a field outside a hotel by the freeway where the wind came off the cotton fields so hard that the corner flags bent sideways. Delta Valley against a club from Walnut Creek with three kids already committed to Division One programs. It was nil-nil after ninety minutes and nil-nil after extra time, and it went to penalties.
"My heel had split the day before," he said. "The left one. At the seam. I was going to play anyway, I'd have played in sandals, and Coach saw me trying to tape it in the lobby and took it up to her room and stitched it. Red thread." He almost smiled. "I told my dad the shoe was fine. He would've driven to Fresno at ten o'clock at night to buy new ones, and then he'd have made me break them in in the parking lot until midnight, and timed me doing it."
"Timed you?"
"He times everything. You'll see him. Top of the bleachers at Torin's games. Stopwatch. He timed my sprints from the time I was eight. He timed how long I took to tie my shoes. He had a notebook. Every touch I took in every game from the time I was eleven, he had it in a notebook, and he'd go over it with me in the car on the way home. Successful passes, failed passes, shots on target, shots off. He loved me." Wyn said that very plainly, as a fact, not as a defense. "He loved me like a project. Like a car he was restoring. And I was good, so it worked, for a long time. It worked until it didn't."
He was the fifth shooter. The first eight went in, four and four. He walked up from the center circle in the wind, and as he went past the bench, Coach Pennock said to him what she said to all of them, what she had said to him a thousand times in practice: Show me what you got. And then, because she knew where he liked to go, because she knew it was his shot, she said: Top corner. Go.
"So I went top corner," Wyn said.
He went top corner, and the wind took it, or his hip closed, or both, and it went a yard over the bar and out into the cotton field behind the goal, and the Walnut Creek kid after him buried his, and that was the game.