Dog Bite

I first noticed it about a week before school started. I took the girls to watch Alamosa High versus some school running the wishbone from north of the valley. We only went because Stevie’s kid made the roster as a freshman. And by made, the coaches had trouble filling out the 53 and they stuck him on the bench. Third string corner used only in the nickel. Still, Stevie’s kid is like a nephew to me, a cousin to the girls. That kind of thing is important. Keeping some semblance of a family.

Bella really didn’t want to go.

She’d been like this lately. I couldn’t remember if it started before or after Heather left, but losing your mom to the streets, pockmarks on her face, couldn’t have helped any. Her little sister and I sat in the truck while Bella pitched a fit just outside the front door. With the truck running, the valley’s last slanted light spewing from Monte Vista over the rows of rented alfalfa, she forced me to pry her hands from the door handle and carry her like a deflated football into the pickup. We didn’t talk on the seven-minute drive to the high school. She didn’t turn on the radio. Sophie in a car seat in the back plugged into a kid’s iPad, too young to feel the pain of feeling left out.

I noticed first how Bella sat on the bleachers. Slumped over. Knees into her chest. Hands clasped around her shins. Like she was burrowing into herself. Waiting for the sun to go down. Waiting for the game to be over. Waiting for high school to be over. It would be a while. She was only a freshman.

Stevie was Heather’s ex from twenty years ago who spent his college years outside of Boston. Black hair pulled tight into a little bun, two-day beard, and a jaw line that used to get him places he didn’t belong. Now he wore a Mean Moose hoody with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, jeans and work boots. We didn’t talk about Heather. Nobody did. But he was family just the same, and he was so excited for his boy to make the team. I never pointed out that anybody could have made the team this year. They didn’t have enough bodies. Stevie snuck two Styrofoam loaf-and-jug cups full of rodeo juice - lemonade and cheap vodka - into the stands. I sipped mine slowly. Out of habit. To be nice.

“There he is,” Stevie shouted from the top bleacher. The setting sun so bright off the aluminum bleachers that I actually couldn’t see my nephew way down there warming up. “Hit somebody, boy! Hit ‘em!”

Stevie sat down. Sophie wore a tutu every day since her mother left. The stains were starting to be obvious. She climbed on Stevie’s neck like a little happy monkey.

“They’re just warming up,” I said. “You’re not supposed to hit anybody during warmups.”

“Got to make the most out of your opportunity,” Stevie said to me and sucked the rodeo juice through his teeth. “He ain’t making the field anytime soon.” Then he stood and slugged his drink and yelled to the field, “That-a-boy, hit somebody, tonight!”

A few parents turned and stared. Nephew Billy looked like a kid trying on his dad’s suit there on the forty doing a runner’s lunge. Even through his helmet, we could see he was embarrassed, giving his dad a don’t-make-me-look dumb pleading gaze. Stevie sat down and waved his hand toward the field.

“He’s a good kid,” I said.

“Too small to get in the game,” he said like it just occurred to him. “Probably for the best, they’d kill him out there. But I grew four inches when I was a sophomore. Maybe next year will be his time, eh?”

“He’ll grow,” I said. And nephew Billy tripped on his untied cleats running to the sidelines.

I laughed and bumped a shoulder into Bella curled up beside me. She didn’t even look up from her shoelaces. Lost somewhere unseen.

I took another swig of the rodeo juice. This one for real, and I realized I needed to stop right there if I was going to drive the girls home. I set the cup between my feet. Bella’s laces were untied too.

Down the row of bleachers, a gaggle of teenage girls. None of them as pretty as Bella. They snickered and sneered and passed a vape pen around, trying to be sneaky, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to watch them. They caught me staring, and I flipped back to the field where nephew Billy now sat on the bench, unsure if he should join the team’s pregame huddle at the 50. Stevie shooing him from up here, but Billy never turned back.

The girls laughed, and one pointed this way. I watched them out of the corner of my vision. Bella turned to them and shot up a shy hand, like a little salute almost. They laughed harder, and a few of them copied her gesture. Bella sunk more into herself.

“You know them?” I asked. Eyes to the coin toss.

“They’re nobody,” she said.

Bella didn’t say a thing on the ride home.