Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty Six

COLE

Sacramento State wanted me in March.

The visit was a Thursday, which meant missing two classes and a practice, both of which Coach signed off on without comment because he understood what a recruitment visit meant and he was not a man who got in the way of his players' futures. My mother ironed a shirt the night before, which she hadn't done since my grandfather's funeral, and I told her it was just a visit and she said I know and ironed it anyway.

Mara texted at seven AM: eat breakfast. you always skip it.

I was already eating breakfast. I didn't tell her that. I sent back: yes ma'am and she sent back a single unimpressed punctuation mark that made me smile at my cereal.

The campus was two hours south. I drove with my mother, who talked for the first forty minutes about her coworker situation and then fell into a comfortable quiet that I'd inherited from her, the ability to share space without filling it. The valley opened up flat and wide past the city limits, the January fields pale and wet, and I thought about football and scholarship numbers and the conversation I hadn't had with Mara yet.

The one about distance.

Sacramento was two hours from San Francisco. Berkeley was thirty minutes. NYU was three thousand miles. I'd been holding all three of these numbers in my head since Christmas and not doing the math out loud because the math led somewhere neither of us was ready to go yet.

The campus was bigger than I'd expected. The facilities were serious — I could see it the moment we pulled into the athletics parking lot, the weight of resources behind it, the deliberate infrastructure of a program that meant what it said. The position coach met us at the entrance, a compact serious man named Reyes who shook my hand like he'd already decided something and was confirming it.

We walked the facility. Film room, weight room, the field, the locker room that smelled like every locker room I'd ever been in but newer. Reyes talked while we walked, numbers and expectations and what the program was building toward, and I asked the right questions because Mara had made me write them down the night before and I'd been too grateful to be embarrassed about that.

My mother asked three questions Reyes hadn't been asked before. I watched him recalibrate, give her real answers instead of the presentation version. She nodded at each one and said nothing and I knew she was filing it all somewhere precise and would give me her actual assessment in the car.

At lunch with two current players I asked about the academic support. One of them, a junior named Torres, said something that stuck: they don't just want you for the game. they want you to leave here with something. He said it plainly, like a fact he'd tested and found true, and I believed him.

I texted Mara under the table: I like it here.

She replied in four minutes: tell me everything later. how's the academic support.

I sent her Torres's exact words. She sent back: good. that's what matters.

The drive home my mother was quiet until we hit the bridge and then she said, "It's real."

"Yeah."

"They want you."

"I think so."

"Cole." She looked at the road. "This is what we worked for."

I looked out at the bay, flat and silver in the late afternoon. "I know."

"You're not excited."

"I am."

"You're thinking about something else."

I was always thinking about something else lately and it always had the same shape. "I'm excited, Mom. I just need to process it."

She let it go with the grace she had for knowing when to.

I called Mara from the parking garage at home.

She picked up on the first ring. "Tell me."

I told her everything. The facility, Reyes, Torres, the numbers, my mother's three questions that had surprised the coach. She listened without interrupting, which was her focused listening, the kind that meant she was building a picture.

"Cole," she said when I finished. "This is real. This is a real offer."

"Almost. They'll send the formal package next week."

"What did you feel. Not what you observed. What did you feel when you were there."

I leaned against my car in the quiet garage. "Like I could play there. Like it would be real football, not just a continuation of high school football. Like—" I stopped. "Like it was actually possible."

"It's not just possible."

"Mara."

"It's not. You've been possible since October. You just didn't have the paperwork yet."

I was quiet for a moment. "Berkeley's thirty minutes from Sacramento."

A pause. Longer than her usual pauses. "I know."

"I'm not saying anything about it right now."

"I know you're not."

"But I'm aware of it."

"So am I," she said quietly.

The garage was dim and smelled like concrete and car exhaust and somewhere above it the city was doing its evening thing, lights coming on, the bay going dark. I leaned against the car and held the phone and thought about a girl in a corner of a cafeteria who'd said fifty dollars an hour like it was the only true thing in the room.

"Come over," I said. "Bring your mother. My mom will make food."

"Cole you just got home."

"So? My mom already has the stove on. I heard it when I came in."

A pause. Then Jess's voice in the background, distant — Mara wasn't alone. Then Mara back: "Jess is here."

"Bring Jess."

A longer pause. Then: "Give us twenty minutes."

I went upstairs and changed and came down to find my mother already adding to whatever was on the stove with the quiet certainty of someone who'd known this was happening before I'd asked.

"How many?" she said.

"Four. Maybe five if Dex shows up."

She added more without comment.

I set the table and thought about Sacramento and Berkeley and thirty minutes and three thousand miles and the specific feeling of a life that was getting ready to ask you something big.

I wasn't ready to answer yet.

But I was getting there.