The Lost Quarterback Returns novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Left Hand
A thirteen-year-old with taped cleats throws like my husband at open tryouts, and the crescent mark behind his ear tells me what a locked clinic ward once made me swear I'd imagined.
The boy in the taped-up cleats had no number, no parent, and an arm exactly like my husband's.
It was a Saturday in August, ninety-four degrees, and two hundred boys had signed in for the Hartsell Youth Academy tryouts.
I stood on the sideline in my old Stags jersey, holding a clipboard I didn't need.
Griffin stood next to me with his arms crossed over his chest, the way he used to stand before a fourth down.
He was thirty-eight and retired for two years, and he still watched every throw.
Down the field, our son Rhett was warming up in a white number seven.
He was thirteen, all elbows and sandy curls, and he looked over at us after every throw.
I waved at him each time, and each time he almost smiled.
The scar ran from under his left ear down to his elbow, and he wore long sleeves in ninety-four degrees so nobody would see it.
"Next group," the head coach called.
A boy walked out of the parking lot instead of the registration tent.
He was thin, with dark hair under a faded ball cap, and he carried a football with the laces scuffed gray.
He walked straight to the line of quarterbacks and stopped at the end of it.
"Hey," the head coach said. "Kid. Where's your wristband?"
"I didn't have the fee."
"Then you can't throw."
"Let him throw," Griffin said.
The coach turned around, surprised. "Griff, there are two hundred boys on the list."
"Everybody throws once," Griffin said. "That's why it's called open."
The boy didn't thank him.
He just set his feet and looked down the field at a receiver standing fifty yards away.
Then he threw left-handed.
The ball left his hand with a sound, and it never wobbled once.
It dropped into the receiver's chest without the receiver taking a step.
Nobody on the sideline said anything.
Griffin made a small noise in his throat that I hadn't heard in years.
"Again," he said.
The boy threw again, and again, and every ball landed in the same spot.
On the fourth throw his cap came off.
He bent to pick it up, and sunlight caught the back of his head.
There was a small pale crescent behind his left ear, no bigger than a thumbnail.
My legs stopped holding me up.
I took hold of the fence rail and kept my face still.
Thirteen years ago I had counted my baby's toes in a hospital bed in the first hour of his life.
I had counted his fingers, and then I had found the little moon behind his left ear and kissed it.
Griffin had laughed at me for it.
The night of the fire, the whole left side of my baby's head was wrapped in gauze.
By the time the gauze came off, the burn doctors had grafted new skin over the place where a mark would have been.
Nobody but me had thought to look.
I looked now at the boy bending for his cap.
He had my grandmother's chin and my narrow hands.
When he straightened and glanced across the field, his eyes were hazel with a green ring around the center.
I had looked into those eyes in the mirror every morning of my life.
"What's your name, son?" Griffin called.
"Dylan Dellinger."
"Who taught you to throw like that?"
"My mom."
Griffin laughed, short and astonished.
"Your mom's got a good arm."
Rhett had stopped warming up.
He stood at the thirty-yard line with a football in his hands and watched his father smile at a stranger.
He looked very small out there in the white jersey.
"Alana?" Griffin turned toward me. "You're white as paper."
"It's the heat," I said.
He put a hand on my back, and I let him, because my knees might not have held.
Twelve years ago I told every doctor in the burn unit that the baby in the bed was not my son.
I told Griffin, and I told his mother, and I told a nurse who wouldn't look at me.
They told me I was in shock.
When I kept saying it, they put me in a private clinic with a locked door, and they kept me there until I said I was wrong.
I said it, and I went home to a boy with a scar.
I had spent twelve years loving him with everything I had.
I had not been wrong.
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