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cool head, not make any mistakes; let the defense and the running game hold the fort, and he’d have the win.But that game plan had only lasted through the first fumble, the first blocked punt, and a long run by a Wofford back who’d never gained more than eighty yards in any game. Chris once told her that when he walked onto the field for the second quarter, he didn’t really think much about his BBC games—all the games he’d played and won in high school—choosing instead to remember only what it was like to be
here
, in his backyard with his dad telling him to let ’er rip, just so they both could see how hard and high he could throw it.
    And for the last half of the Wofford game, that’s all he did: let ’er rip. With fifty thousand fans watching to see how hard and high Chris Cherry could throw it.
    He started the Louisiana-Monroe game the following week, and then again at Iowa State. Two days after that, Chris came up to her after practice and officially asked her out. He was so serious, so sweet and awkward about it, with his hair still wet from the showers and a bruise across his forehead from a hard hit turning blue to black, that she almost laughed.
    Instead, she asked him why it took him so damn long.
    They’d been together ever since.
    •   •   •
    Tyler McGee married Dominique and lost his scholarship, and Billy Pressey never took another snap as the starter. They talked about it a few times, how fast the pieces fell into place: Billy’s bad appendix and Tyler’s bad temper and a few stitches and some shitty team defense. All the little things adding up to Chris finally letting ’er rip all through the rest of his junior year, when packs of overweight, tired men with video cameras and cellphones and notepads sprouted in the stands like thick weeds, just to see him play.
    And on through the long following summer, where they holed up in her apartment, sleeping but not really sleeping together in the bed that was too small for her, let alone Chris. Chris pushing himself harder and harder while she waited, supported. She didn’t really understand the secret language of the game, but she didn’t have to, because she understood the players . . . men . . . and all the things they needed. Although after they first heard his name together on
SportsCenter
she’d cried for an hour, while he sat there, quiet, twisting his callused hands.
    Then his final year, and those first six wins and not one, but two, ESPN video profiles of Chris’s high school career in Murfee: all grainy, washed-out footage of Chris towering over fields far toosmall. He was noticeably heavier, and that was the reason, according to everyone, he’d never been given a serious look . . . but there was still that goddamn arm, always that arm—lightning chained to that earthbound body.
    And finally, that heartbeat moment of the Kansas State game beneath the lights, the ESPN2 Game of the Week, where K State’s Lonnie Ray Holliday showed that he knew how to let ’er rip pretty damn well too, catching Chris clean from the blind side right at the knees and Mel knowing—knowing for goddamn certain—that it was all over even before it really began.
    There was an agent, briefly, who popped in like a magic trick, wearing suits a bit too shiny at the cuffs, who talked big about Chris having the opportunity to show off all of his
intangibles
. But then his phone went dead and he was gone as if he had never even existed. Vanished like a rabbit in a hat. Mel had called the agent over and over again even after Chris wouldn’t, standing over their sink, smoking cigarettes, trying not to cry.
    •   •   •
    When she was thinking straight she didn’t blame Chris for the injury itself, no more than she’d blame someone for getting hit by a car he never saw coming. It was more about what happened after, all the things that
didn’t
happen. Chris had started working on a master’s degree in literature, but let that go. He