What Check

After Fan Fest, everything happens fast and nothing happens at all.

A handler gets Jalen by the elbow. Tavion steps in front of the phones. Jude is swept up in a whirl of volunteers and a ribbon that says SPIRAL CHAMPION, AGES 5–6, and Jalen, being pulled backward toward the stage by three people, says only one thing to you, low, under the noise.

"Tonight. Please."

You take Jude home. You let him tell Mena the story nine times. You don't let him see your hands.

At ten, when he's asleep and Mena is sitting in the living room with the TV off and a baseball bat she bought in 1994 leaning against her chair, you drive back to the Orsay.

The Aurelia Ballroom after load-out is a different country. The chandeliers are dimmed to a glow. The tables are gone, the carpet bare, a few chairs stacked against the walls like they're waiting to be picked for a team. It smells like lilies and floor wax. Your footsteps echo.

He's already there, sitting on the edge of the empty stage in a black hoodie, elbows on his knees, cap in his hands, turning it around and around.

He stands up when he sees you. He doesn't come closer. He waits until you stop in the middle of the floor, twenty feet of bare carpet between you.

"Is he mine?"

His voice cracks on the last word.

You thought you'd have to decide. You thought, the whole drive up the 215, that you'd have a choice about this. But he asks, and you look at him, at the gold in his eyes that you see every morning across a bowl of cereal, and there isn't a choice. There never was.

"Yes."

He makes a sound like he's been hit in the stomach. He sits back down on the stage, hard.

"His name is Jude," you say. "Jude Easterly. No middle name, because I couldn't pick one without thinking of you. He was born December third at 4:12 in the morning at Sunrise Hospital. Seven pounds, two ounces. He hates peas. He sleeps with a football. He thinks you're the greatest person who ever lived and he doesn't know why."

Jalen puts his face in his hands.

You let him. You stand there and let the most famous quarterback in America cry in an empty ballroom, and you don't go to him, because something in you is still twenty-two and standing at a kitchen table in Mobile.

When he looks up, his eyes are red and his voice is very quiet.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did."

"Ava—"

"I called you. Draft week. The Tuesday. You were in interviews in Chicago, and someone else answered your phone." You make yourself say it. "Stanton Dryden. He said you were with a team and he'd take a message. I was crying. I told him. I told him I was pregnant and I needed to talk to you."

Jalen doesn't move.

"The next morning he was at my door. Gray suit. He had a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and an agreement with my name already typed in." Your throat closes and you push through it. "He said you knew. He said you'd made your choice, that your rookie contract had a morals clause, that the franchise wanted a clean face, and a baby with a waitress would end everything you'd worked for. He said you couldn't stand to tell me yourself. He said you were asking me to let you go."

Silence.

"So I signed," you say. "And I cashed it. And I left."

Jalen gets up. He walks to the edge of the stage. He walks back. He puts both hands on top of his head like a man who just watched a ball sail over his receiver's fingers in the last second of a game.

"I never knew."

"Jalen."

"I never knew." He turns and his face is wrecked. "He never told me you called. Nobody told me you called. I came back from Chicago and your apartment was empty, and I called you, I called you three hundred times, and it went to a message that said the number was disconnected." He's breathing hard. "I went to the Heron. Lavonne said you quit by text. I called every Easterly in the Mobile phone book. You told me once you had an aunt out west. You never said where. I thought you were dead, Ava."

"You didn't look very hard," you whisper. It's the meanest thing you've said in six years and you don't even believe it.

He laughs, a terrible sound. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, unlocks it, and holds it out to you across the stage.

"Look."

You walk to him. You take the phone.

It's a folder. A long, long folder of PDFs. Easterly Search, Report 1. Easterly Search, Report 2. Dates scrolling back. Six years. Three firms. Each report says the same thing in a different font. No current address located. Subject may have changed name. Recommend continued monitoring.

At the bottom of each one, the same line. Prepared for Mr. J. Covington at the request of Dryden Sports Management.

"He found them for me," Jalen says. "Every one. I'd give up, and he'd come to me, and he'd put his hand on my shoulder and say, 'Son, I've got a new guy, the best in the business.'" His voice breaks. "I paid them. I thanked him."

You can't feel your fingers.

"He answered your phone," you say slowly. "He must have blocked my number. On your phone."

"I never checked. Why would I check?" He takes the phone back and looks at it like it's poisoned. "What was on the check? Whose name?"

"The Covington Foundation." You see him flinch. "Letterhead and everything. It said scholarship."

"The foundation." He goes gray. "He set that up for me draft week. My first act as a pro, he called it. He's been the treasurer since day one."

The ballroom is very quiet. Somewhere far off, a vacuum runs in a hallway.

Six years. Six birthdays. Six Christmases with Jude asking Mena why his daddy didn't come. A man had sat in your kitchen, and in Jalen's, and told each of you what would hurt the most.

"I hated you," you say. "I hated you so much I watched every single one of your games."

Jalen makes a sound that's almost a laugh. He reaches out. He stops, his hand an inch from yours, waiting for you to decide.

His phone buzzes in his hand.

He glances down. You watch his jaw lock.

He turns the screen so you can see. A number you don't know. Shira Sheffield, the Peephole. Jalen, we're running a story at 6 a.m. on your secret five-year-old son in Las Vegas. Would you like to comment? We'd love your side.

"How," you breathe. "How does she—"

The phone buzzes again before you can finish.

This time the name at the top is one you know. Stanton Dryden.

There's a photo attached. It's from Fan Fest. Jude at the Spiral Challenge line, arms up, mouth open in a shout, the peeling 7 on his back, his face perfectly clear and perfectly lit.

Under it, a message.

Sign the extension tonight and I make the Peephole go away. Or don't, and the boy's face is on every screen in America by breakfast. Your call, son.