“I’m sure Mr. Whitley will put on a good show if it can’t,” Clark said.
Whatever Joel might have said in response was lost to a little whoop of greeting from the crowd. “My goodness, Officers, y’all never catch a breath of peace.” At the sound of her voice, Joel felt a knot loosen in his chest. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so grateful to know his mother was nearby.
She strode toward them with a hot dog in either hand, a massive leather bag dangling from the crook of her arm and a goggle-eyed Bison cap perched on her head.
“My Lord,” she said, looking Joel up and down and turning to Clark. “Don’t he look expensive?”
“Good to see you, Mrs. Whitley,” Clark said.
Browder tapped the brim of an invisible cap. “Your son’s a hell of a boy, ma’am,” he said, and turned very seriously toward the field as if to leave no doubt which son he meant.
“You two are pure charity,” said Joel’s mother. “Let me get this instigator out of y’all’s hair, no? Tell your father I said hello, Clark.”
Before Clark could turn away, Joel produced a business card from his wallet. A soft breeze toyed with the card’s corner. Clark looked at Joel, at his mother. With a puff of smoke, she plucked the card from his fingers.
“My Lord Jesus, will the ladies ever have words about this,” Joel’s mother murmured when they had cleared the crowd of onlookers. The man at the little ticket booth waved them through with a surprised “Oh” of recognition. “And folks only just stopped talking about all that business between you and Starsha back in the day. Not to mention all that sadness with her brother—oh, shit fire—did I not send you a jersey this year?”
Joel shook his head.
“Dylan said I should bring you an old one. He thinks of everything.” She handed Joel a hot dog. “There. Now it looks like you’re trying.”
Joel nibbled at the hot dog and took in his mother as she shouted her hellos and thank-yous to the folks who greeted her on their way by. Paulette Whitley, his indomitable mother. Her hair looked incredible and her makeup heavy: highlights and lowlights and two thick tracks of eyeliner. She was slimmer than Joel had ever seen her before—somehow her forearms were tighter than his own—yet he couldn’t help but notice that when she turned her head the skin of her neck was finally beginning to crack. With a sudden lurch of guilt, Joel saw that in his absence his mother had begun to grow old, an indignity he thought had been reserved entirely for him.
“We’re celebrities now, you know,” Paulette said, turning to Joel with a laugh. “Your brother calls me the Real Housewife of Pettis County.”
Joel smiled vaguely at this, at the familiar faces milling behind the stands. Curiously, there was no sign of that strange stuffed bison he’d encountered on his way in. Already Joel had written off the whisper he thought he’d heard in his speakers as road noise, written off the way the animal had seemed to study him from the bed of that truck but, still—Joel was glad he didn’t have to write it all off again.
“It sounds like Dylan is the real deal,” Joel said.
Paulette snorted. “You should hear the phone calls that boy gets.”
“Phone calls for football?”
“All the big schools is circling like sharks.” She counted her bright green nails. “Baylor, Notre Dame, Provincetown—”
“Princeton?”
“Penn State—they’re getting ready to spend some money on their college football, they say. Rumor has it there’s a baker’s dozen recruiters here tonight, but my bet is they’re waiting for the Perlin game next week. That’s the match you should have come home to see. These Cougars ain’t got much fight in them this year.” Paulette stopped as Joel took another bite of his hot dog. A shrewd look came into her eye. “Dylan still ain’t said why you decided to come down so sudden.”
Joel chewed slowly, considered all the ways this conversation could work against him. “Where’s Darren?”
“Houston. Killed him to miss this. He says hello.”
“I should call him.”
“He can text now.” She fumbled in her bag for something. “When Darren moved into the house, Dylan taught him how to use the little yellow faces. Tulum looked lovely.”
“More like salty.”
Paulette made a little hmm he remembered well. Some of Joel’s friends had mothers who gossiped with them about men and their attendant escapades as gleefully as they would with a daughter. Not Joel. He knew that, like subway travel and foreign food and apartment living, his queerness was the sort of thing Paulette could understand conceptually, could even see the appeal of in certain lights, but would rather not imagine in practice.
Why, he wondered, had she even brought it up tonight?
“Oh my word, look who it is!”
Joel turned to see a slim lady with a perfect shell of blond hair staring at him like he’d been fished from the lake.
“I had to come see for myself,” the lady said to Paulette. When she shook her head not a single strand of that hair moved. “Has he been here long?”
“You remember Mrs. Malacek, Joel.”
He didn’t. “Of course.”
“Mayor Malacek’s wife,” Paulette said. She always knew when he was lying. “Three terms later.”
“Soon to be four. My son loves your brother.” Mrs. Malacek let out a cackle like a wineglass striking a pool deck. With the most bizarre combination of pleasure and reproof Joel had ever heard, the woman added, “It takes a real talent to outshine the mayor’s firstborn, you know.”
“Oh my goodness, it is him!” called another thin woman, hustling to prevent any hope of escape. A small terrier trembled at its station in the woman’s purse.
“I told my husband, I told him it was you. Sweet mercy Lord, don’t you look growed? We needed a chest like that when you was in school.”
“Mrs. Mason,” Joel said, giving her a curt nod. Her nephew had gone well out of his way to make Joel’s high school years unbearable. “A pleasure.”
“He just arrived,” Mrs. Malacek said knowingly. “All the way from San Francisco.”
“New York, actually.”
“Have you met Raul?” Mrs. Mason hoisted the bag to show him the dog. Joel saw it was wearing a miniature Bison jersey with a tiny number 7. “He’s your brother’s biggest fan.”
Joel opened his mouth to say something, hesitated. “I’m sure Dylan needs all the support he can get.”