Carver shrugged. “My shoulder’s been bothering me.”
“Are you gonna milk that for the rest of your life?”
“I’m just saying, I’m not gonna go full out.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.” Chip got up, and so did Lillian. He glanced at her and said, “Unless you want to sub in for him?”
“No, I’m good,” Lillian said. “I’ll watch, but I don’t really get playing catch.”
Chip looked amused. “What’s there to get?”
She shrugged. “Like, what’s the point, how do you know when you’re done?”
“I’ll play,” Carver said, more loudly than necessary. “I’ll play, it’s fine.”
“Good,” Chip said. “Let’s go, I’m bored.”
They all exited into the splendor of the backyard. The house sat on three well-shaded acres — past the patio was the long rectangle of the pool, which would remain covered up until Memorial Day, and its stately little poolhouse. The landscaping ended where the trees became dense, in a miniature woods that extended to the fenceline. Carver and his siblings had spent a lot of happy hours playing in their little woods.
Conway was no longer out here, but the long table she’d been decorating sat ready and waiting, festooned with tapered candles and little floral arrangements.
Chip stepped off the stonework and into the grass, squinting against the setting sun. Carver followed them, putting the requisite distance between them and giving his right shoulder a few subtle rolls in the socket to test its mettle.
He had torn his rotator cuff his junior year, during the only high school football game he played in. He’d been a third-string quarterback and only got play time because the first-stringquarterback Jeff was out with mono, and the second-string QB tired himself out in the first half of the game. Chip, in his day, was a first-string quarterback who helped take his team to the state championship — a great point of pride for him, even though they didn’t win. But that was Chip. As a teenager he was a little over six feet tall, light on his feet and fearless. As a teenager Carver was 5’9, even lighter on his feet and never dumb enough to lack fear.
Knowing Jeff would be out for that game, Carver practiced throwing so much in the days beforehand that his arm was already fatigued as he lifted the ball after receiving the snap. Then he had to contend with the fact that this was a real game, not a scrimmage, and therewasactually a difference. He could only catch split-second glimpses of open receivers before they were swallowed again in the widening gyre of players, while the other team’s defense began to bust through his O-line to come tackle him. Carver danced backward in terror while his receivers grew smaller and more obscured and the defensive linemen got bigger and bigger. Finally he was put out of his misery, all the wind knocked from him, as he got tackled and thrown violently into the turf for a total loss of fourteen yards. Dimly he registered that it felt like his right arm had been torn off at the shoulder. He knew it hadn’t, though, because he could still feel both hands cradling the ball to his stomach as linemen piled on him and elbowed and kicked him. His one saving grace was that somehow, miraculously, he’d managed not to fumble.
The torn rotator cuff was in a way a relief, because he was carried to the sidelines and examined by a medic instead of dealing with Coach Fietz, who wasn’t enough of a hardass to scream at an injured guy. Then, instead of enduring a silent ride home with his parents and Chip — who was home from college for the weekend just to see Carver play — he got to go to the hospital in an ambulance. The tear was exactly four centimeters,severe enough to require surgery, and he never played football again. He’d eventually made his way back to full function, pain aside, but as a triathlete he lived with a terrible fear of blowing the shoulder out again in the middle of the Hudson River.
Chip drew his arm back like a bow and tossed the ball at him in a nice spiral. Carver returned it with an equal amount of power but less showiness. This went on for a while, and it was actually nice; it was a beautiful day, and having a catch was pleasant in its open-ended simplicity. Lillian sat on the patio, half watching them and half looking at her phone.
Chip’s kids Bailey and Aaron, plus Priscilla’s daughter Kimmy, eventually wandered over from wherever they’d been playing in the backyard and sat in the manicured grass nearby, rolling around and tearing it from the ground in fistfuls.
“Dad, I want to play catch,” Bailey eventually whined.
“No you don’t,” Chip said without hesitating, delivering another perfect bomb into Carver’s chest. “You said no to me earlier.”
“But I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes you did.”
Bailey pretended to cry; Chip didn’t look interested. Her younger brother Aaron piped up, “Did you play football too, Uncle Carver?”
“Yeah,” Carver said in a distracted voice, concentrating on his throw.
“Yeah, Uncle Carverplayed football,” Chip said, effortlessly tossing the ball back with one hand while doing air quotes with the other, which was infuriating.
“I did fucking play football, Preston.”
The patio door scraped open, and Maggie shouted, “Kids, come get ready for dinner.” The kids did not move.
Chip’s face was developing a sneer. That was Chip: a nice guy until all of a sudden something went haywire in his brain andcaused the bullying bastard to come out. Carver delivered the football very hard into his hands in an attempt to ward this off.
“You and I did not play football in the same sense,” Chip said. “You played for about ten seconds and it ended with you looking for your jock strap in the stands.”
“What’s a jock strap?” Kimmy said, to an audience of no one.
“That was a tough play and a dirty sack, and you know it,” Carver snapped.
