Callum's Father

POV: Callum

My father calls on my birthday every year.

Not always on the day. Sometimes a week after, sometimes two, once three weeks late with an explanation about a work trip that I did not ask the details of and he did not offer them convincingly. But he calls. Every year, without fail, which I have always thought said something specific about Daniel Reyes, though I have never been entirely sure what. That he remembers. That he feels something about remembering. That whatever he feels is not quite enough to make him show up in any way that counts but is enough to make him dial a number once a year and say happy birthday son in the particular voice of a man performing a feeling he is not sure he actually has.

I was nine when he left.

Marisol was four. She does not remember him the way I remember him, which is probably a mercy I have never said out loud to her because she is sharp enough to hear the pity in it and she does not need my pity about anything. What she has is the version I gave her when she was old enough to ask, which was the true version stripped of the parts that would have hurt her specifically. He left. He was not a bad man. He was a man who was not built for the weight of what he had and chose to put it down rather than figure out how to carry it better.

I was nine. I understood none of that at nine.

I understand it now and I have filed it under irrelevant, which is the most honest category I have for Daniel Reyes. Not hatred. Hatred requires ongoing energy and ongoing energy requires ongoing relevance and he has not been relevant to my actual life in a long time. He is a voice on a phone once a year. He is a name on a form I fill out that asks about family medical history. He is the reason Marisol and I have his last name instead of our mother's, which is the most present he has been in our daily existence since he walked out of a house in east Phoenix when I was in the fourth grade.

I do not think about him much.

I was not thinking about him at all when I walked onto the practice field that morning.

Practice ran clean. Coach Dara had us in a full eleven on eleven session with the defense, live reads, real pressure, the kind of practice that matters because it costs something to get wrong. I ran my routes with the focus I always brought and the ball came to me the way it had been coming since the second practice of preseason, with a precision that still landed somewhere complicated in my chest every time I let myself think about it, which I was working very hard not to do on a football field.

I got through the full session without incident.

Nothing in Dara's face when he looked at me. Nothing in the coordinator's office window, which I had a sightline to from the near hash mark and had learned to glance at the same way you learn to read defensive formations, automatically, without making it obvious. Nothing in my phone when I checked it between periods.

Whatever Jaxon's father had put in that text last night had not moved yet.

I held onto that through the rest of practice.

After I got home I showered and made coffee and sat at my desk with my laptop open to the calculus problem set Marisol had texted me a photo of two days ago. She was a sophomore at Phoenix Community College on a partial academic scholarship that she had earned entirely on her own, which I was proud of in a way I found difficult to say directly without it coming out wrong, so I usually said it sideways, through showing up, through the video calls, through the hours we spent on problem sets that I had covered two years ago and she was covering now.

She called at seven thirty.

Her face appeared on my screen with the particular expression she wore when she was stressed about something academic, which was different from her stressed about something personal expression and different again from her stressed about me expression, all of which I had catalogued over twenty years of being her brother.

"Okay," she said, without preamble, holding up her notebook to the camera. "Explain to me why integration by parts exists and who decided it was a good idea."

"Leibniz."

"Tell Leibniz I have opinions."

"He is not available."

"Obviously." She dropped the notebook onto her desk and looked at me through the screen. "Walk me through it. From the beginning. Pretend I know nothing."

"You know something."

"Pretend I know less than I know."

I walked her through it. From the beginning, the way she asked, the way our mother used to walk me through things when I was struggling, which was slowly and without impatience and with the particular conviction that understanding was available to anyone willing to sit with a problem long enough. I had learned more about teaching from watching Diana Reyes explain things at a kitchen table than I had learned from any formal instruction.

For an hour, I was just her brother.

Not a scholarship athlete on a team with a complicated season. Not the kid carrying Marcus's secret and Jaxon Whitfield's strange pre practice conversation and the text I had read on a film room table and was still turning over. Not any of the things that lived in my chest on a rotating basis, quiet and persistent and heavy in the specific way of things you have decided to carry without telling anyone you are carrying them.

Just her brother. Working through a problem set at seven thirty on a weeknight because she needed help and I was the person she called when she needed help, which was the arrangement that mattered most to me on this earth and always had been.

When we hung up she looked less stressed. She told me I was tolerable, which was her version of thank you, and I told her she was adequately competent at calculus, which was my version of I love you, and we hung up and I sat at my desk in the quiet of the apartment for a moment with the warmth of that hour sitting in my chest before the rest of it came back.

It always came back.

I went to the kitchen. I made rice and beans the way my mother made it, which was not a recipe so much as a sequence of small decisions she had made so many times they became instinct and which I had spent months reconstructing from memory after she died. The right amount of sofrito. The bay leaf she always said most people forgot. The particular ratio of liquid to rice that she had never written down because she said you learned it by feel and not by measurement, which had frustrated me at nineteen and which I now understood completely.

I ate alone at the kitchen table.

Marcus was at a team dinner for the running backs, one of those mandatory bonding events that the position coaches organized to build cohesion and which Marcus had attended tonight on a knee that had no business being walked on more than necessary. I had watched him leave the apartment and said nothing. I had been saying nothing about that for three days now and each day it sat heavier.

I washed my plate. I went to bed.

I did not sleep quickly.

---

Jaxon found me before practice.

Not in the corridor, not in the locker room, in the parking lot, before I had even made it through the side entrance. He was leaning against the wall near the door with his bag on one shoulder and his water bottle in his hand and something in his expression that I had not seen there before, something careful and deliberate in the way he held himself, like he had decided exactly what he was going to say before he arrived and was now measuring out the delivery.

He fell into step beside me without asking.

I let him.

We walked through the side entrance and down the corridor toward the locker room and he waited until we were past the main cluster of early arrivals before he spoke, low enough that it would not carry.

"Whatever you have heard about me." He kept his eyes forward. "Whatever my father says about people. He does not know anything."

I looked at him.

He was still looking forward, jaw set, the particular expression of someone delivering something they had rehearsed into something approximating casualness and not quite getting there.

It was the strangest thing he had ever said to me.

It was also clearly an apology. For something. The architecture of it was unmistakably an apology, the kind you make when you cannot explain the full context of what you are apologizing for but you need the other person to know, before whatever is coming, that you are not responsible for all of it.

I turned it over.

Whatever you have heard about me.

He did not know what I had heard. He did not know whether I had heard anything at all, whether his father's text had somehow reached me, whether I was already aware of whatever Richard Whitfield had dug up and decided was useful. He was apologizing preemptively. Defensively. The way you apologize when you know something is coming and you want to be on the right side of it before it arrives.

I said: "Okay."

One word. He glanced at me sideways, trying to read it, and I gave him nothing to read because I had nothing to give him yet. I did not know what I was supposed to have heard. I did not know what his father knew or had said or what paper trail was apparently attached to my name. I had a text I had read on a film room table and an apology delivered in a parking lot corridor and none of it was a complete picture yet.

I spent all of practice trying to build one.

I ran my routes. I caught my balls. I performed every mechanical requirement of the session with the muscle memory of someone who had trained long enough that his body could do the work while his mind was somewhere else entirely. I watched Jaxon between plays, which I was getting too good at doing without making it obvious. I watched the way he carried the morning, whether the deliberate thing in his expression had eased or tightened. I watched his hands on the ball, his eyes through his progressions, the small tells that I was accumulating without meaning to accumulate them.

I could not get to the full picture.

After practice I stayed for extra route work the way I always did, running the dummy rig until my legs had given everything available, and I was taping my wrist on the bench at the edge of the field when my phone buzzed.

The scholarship coordinator's office. Dr. Vasquez.

I stared at it for a second. Then I answered.

Her voice was professional. Measured in the specific way of someone choosing their words with care. She asked if I could come by her office before I left the complex. She said it was not urgent but she would appreciate not waiting until the end of the week.

The particular combination of not urgent and I would appreciate not waiting told me it was urgent.

I said I could be there in ten minutes.

I finished taping my wrist. I packed my bag. I walked to the administration building with the late afternoon sun throwing long shadows across the path and the specific calm of someone who has decided that whatever is coming, they will handle it the same way they have handled everything else. One step. Then the next.

Dr. Vasquez's office had a window that faced the east practice field. She closed the door when I came in, which was the first confirmation that this was not a routine check in. She gestured to the chair across her desk. I sat down.

She sat down across from me. She put a folder on the desk between us.

She looked at me with the particular expression of someone who genuinely did not want to be having this conversation.

"We need to talk about your father," she said.