The Far Empty Read Online Free PDF Page B

daddy had a thousand reasons for his drinking: stress and back pain, slights and old wounds that no one could ever see and that never healed. And how she’d spent far too many nights tending all those hurts, real and imagined, watching over him long after he’d passed out or been beaten senseless, eyeing the ragged rise and fall of his chest, praying his breathing would never stop so she wouldn’t be left on her own; but sometimes praying that it would.
    She’d wanted to say all those things and more—explain every detail of her shitty life to the sad voice on the phone who’d dared question it. But instead, she just let that voice cry itself out, holding the phone tight to her ear for more than an hour,
making
herself listen, knowing that she had to hear it all, knowing that she owed the voice—that other woman—at least that much . . . until the woman finally hung up on her.
    Mel had then sat for another hour in the dark, phone still in her hand. Before dawn, she deleted the assistant coach’s number, and when that wasn’t quite enough, she tossed the phone itself into the small fountain in front of her apartment.
    Her daddy had always said:
It
ain’t stealin’ if they won’t miss it.
But no matter what, it always was . . .
always
.
    After that came Chris Cherry. Even during his first year on campus—long past the time she should have graduated and left—she couldn’t help but notice him walking as often with a stack of books in his hand as a football. For the longest time they said hi every now and then but little more than that, as she watched him go from big and heavy to tall and strong. The time on campus carved him, cut away the excess, but he never saw it himself. He towered on the sidelines, a clipboard in his hand that she later found out had class notes on it rather than play sheets. The plays were easy for him and the classes he truly enjoyed.
    He was smart and came across as a gentleman through and through, moving slowly and carefully whenever they ran into each other, as if he was afraid his size would break her. He could also be shy for a guy so big, so much so that even as they started to speak to each other more and more, she felt like the one carrying both ends of the conversation. But he had an easy way of saying a lot without saying much at all, and a habit of listening serious and close, almost too intently. He could lose himself in a book that same way for hours on end, and even though they saw each other most often around the practice field and the Athletic Department, he never really talked about football or the team with her.
    She wondered then if the game was just his way out of some other place, too.
    And he never would have gotten off the sidelines had Tyler McGee not spun a shot glass off his girlfriend’s head two days before their season opener against Wofford. Tyler wasn’t even the starter, he backed up Billy Pressey. But when Billy suddenly got sidelined withappendicitis and Tyler got the call, he wanted to celebrate with a bar crawl, where he downed more than a few congratulatory Jäger shots and then got sideways with his girlfriend, Dominique.
    He might have played anyway, the whole goddamn ugly episode buried, if not for the stitches. Not the fifteen it took to close up Dominique’s head; no, it was the six tiny stitches on Tyler’s hand, his throwing hand, cut by striking his knuckles on the bar.
    That left Chris. Only Chris . . . suddenly walking into Floyd Casey Stadium in front of fifty thousand with “Old Fite” playing loud, over and over again, and his eyes hidden beneath his helmet.
    Months later, when they were twined together in her bed, Chris admitted his hands had been shaking so badly he’d kept them clasped together in front of him like he was praying, and in a lot of ways, he was.
    Still, it was only Wofford. The first game of the season, and the Bears would get back either Tyler or Billy before the real games. All Chris had to do was keep a