Football Sunrise | Emily Pulsifer, Faculty When it was over, Sheila May refused to admit the fuss she’d made about me going. After the camera crews showed up with their bright lights and questions, she made it sound like she sent me out that night, like she wrote up instructions on how to be a hero and passed them to me like a grocery list. But that wasn’t how it was. Not one bit. After dinner that night, she followed me to my truck. “No bathroom needs a babysitter,” she said, wagging a pink latex fingernail under my nose. “You spend your weekdays hotfooting after those boys. You’d think they could find their way to the crapper without you on the weekends. Have some self-respect, Tiny.” I tried to look down at my work boots but Sheila May stepped close and rubbed her stomach below my belt. “I could get us a pecan pie and some Cool Whip down at Ingles,” she said. “We could watch us a movie, head upstairs?” She blinked her loaded lashes and did some more rubbing. There was a time when this would have had me hustling to the bedroom but not anymore. “I gotta go,” I said. “It’s the state championship.” “You think I don’t know that? There’s nothing in the paper except Lions Football and that Hastings kid. I’m sick to death of it.” “He’s special, that one,” I said. “I’ve never seen any like him.” Sheila May removed her stomach from my mid-section. She was wearing her favorite Jeff Gordon t-shirt and when she crossed her arms over her DD-cups, her forearms cut off his head. “You say that about all of them.” “Sure, there’s always a few real good ones every year, but I tell you, Jon Hastings’s different.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t start.” “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen. I’d bet good money on him going all the way.” “Is that you’re doing now, placing bets? Doesn’t surprise me. Here I am, trying to keep house on the nothing you make and you go and piss it away on high school football. This isn’t what I signed up for when I married you, Tiny Smalls. If my momma were here, bless her soul, she’d have something to say about this.” Whenever Sheila May summoned her momma, that was my cue to get moving. “See you around eleven,” I said and lifted my right leg to the truck’s bench seat. I had to grip my hand under my thigh to get it up there; after my own years of football, my right hip didn’t do all it should. “Shower before you get in my bed,” Sheila May yelled as I pulled onto Chester Street. “I can’t stand that football smell.” I opened the truck’s back window and let the cool breeze clear the cab. It felt good to be moving
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