Page 129 of The Player

Her mother had sent a car. The driver had been waiting at the bottom of the escalator at baggage claim in a black overcoat, holding a little white sign that said WRIGHT, and Drew had looked at that sign, then at her, with both eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “You got a driver?” he’d said under his breath. “My mother has a driver,” Nicole had told him, which hadn’t helped. Now he was folded into the backseat of a black Lincoln Town Car that smelled like leather and the driver’s peppermints, his knees against the back of the front seat and his duffel bag on the floor between his feet, and he hadn’t said much since they’d pulled away from Dulles.

The driver had his eyes on the road and the radio on the smooth jazz station. He’d been driving for her mother for years, and anything said in the back of this car had a way of getting back to Roxanne Wright, so Nicole kept her voice low. Drew was watching the bare trees go by on the Dulles Toll Road, his fingers drumming on his thigh, and every few minutes he rubbed his thumb along the cut on his cheekbone without seeming to notice he was doing it. He was nervous. Drew Kiernan could stand in a stadium with thousands and thousands of people screaming at him and not even blink, and here he was, sweating a meeting with her mother. Nicole could tell he hated being nervous almost as much as he hated losing.

She couldn’t blame him. She’d been a wreck all week herself.

The last two weeks had gone by in a blur, mostly for him. They’d flown home from New York on separate planes and come back to finals, and Drew had studied for his the same way he got ready for a game, sitting up at her kitchen table past midnight with his notes spread out next to a bowl of cereal, swearing he’d passed every one. He’d better have. If he failed anything now, he could lose his eligibility for the bowl game, and the bowl game was all anybody at Drayton could talk about.

That was the extra game the best teams got to play after the regular season, a reward for a good year, and Drayton had earned a trip to Orlando for the Florida Citrus Bowl on New Year’s Day against one of the top teams in the Big Ten. It would be Drew’s last college game ever. So when finals were over, it was nothing but football. Practice almost every day, meetings, hours of film on a team he’d never played, and Jed calling with another interview somebody wanted, another reporter who needed fifteen minutes.

A couple of NFL scouts had shown up at practice and stood on the sideline in their windbreakers taking notes, and Drew had pretended not to care. He’d cared. He’d told her about every one of them that night, lying on her couch with his feet hanging off the end.

He still slept at her place most nights. He’d come in after practice smelling like the field house showers, eat whatever she put in front of him, and be asleep before the first comic on ComicView finished his set, one arm thrown across her stomach like he wanted to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. Neither of them had said much about New York.

He’d bought his own plane ticket for this trip too. Nicole knew what that ticket had cost him. She’d offered once, and he’d given her a look, and she hadn’t offered again.

The night he’d called Boston to tell his mother he wasn’t coming home for Christmas, Nicole had been in the kitchen, pretending not to listen. Mrs. Kiernan hadn’t taken it well. Nicole could tell that much from Drew’s side of it, from the way he kept rubbing his forehead and saying “Ma” over and over, trying to get a word in. But he never raised his voice. “I’m not mad at you, Ma. I’m not trying to start anything. I’ll be home before you know it, and you’ll get sick of me. I just want to be with her this Christmas. That’s all it is.” When he’d hung up, he’d sat on her couch for a minute with his elbows on his knees. Then he’d looked up and told her his mother would come around. Nicole hoped he was right. She also knew what he hadn’t said, the part neither of them said out loud anymore. This was the only Christmas they were going to get.

And then her mother had called.

Phallon hadn’t pressed charges. Nicole had spent about a week waiting for the New York police to call, or show up, or do whatever they did, and when nothing happened, she’d let herself believe that was the end of it. That Phallon had gone home to Mountain Brook with her split lip and her missing patch of hair and decided to cut her losses.

She should’ve known better. Girls like Phallon didn’t cut their losses. They got their daddies to hire lawyers.

The letter had come to the house in Great Falls, addressed to Miss Nicole Wright, from a law firm in Birmingham with three last names on the letterhead. Her mother had opened it. Of course she had. As far as Roxanne Wright was concerned, anything that came to her house with her daughter’s name on it was her business, especially after the last couple of months.

Two pages, according to her mother, who’d read parts of it out loud over the phone in a voice so calm it made the hair on Nicole’s arms stand up. Assault and battery, injuries to the face and scalp, medical treatment, emotional distress, and witnesses, including hotel security. And at the bottom, a number with more zeros than Nicole wanted to think about, and a polite little paragraph explaining that their client would prefer to resolve this matter privately, but if she couldn’t, she was prepared to file suit, and a lawsuit was a public record.

Translation: pay her, or everybody would get to read about Melvin Wright’s daughter beating a girl’s ass in a New York hotel room.

Beside her, Drew shifted, and his knee bumped the back of the driver’s seat. “Tell me again what she said,” he said, low, without taking his eyes off the window. “Your mom.”

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again.”

Nicole sighed. “She asked if I had something I wanted to tell her about New York.”

That had been the whole opening. No hello, no how are your finals going. And Nicole had known, instantly, that there was no point lying.

So she hadn’t. She’d sat on the edge of her bed with the cordless pressed to her ear and answered every question her mother asked, in order, the way she’d been raised to. Who was Drew Kiernan? The quarterback. Yes, that quarterback. How long had she been seeing him? Since October. Was it serious? Yes. She’d said it before she could think about saying anything else, and her mother had gone quiet for a second. Then, what exactly had happened in that hotel room? And Nicole had told her all of it: the flight, the girl in Drew’s room, the screaming she’d heard from the elevator, and the cut on Drew’s face. She’d told her about punching Phallon too, twice. She hadn’t left that part out, because her mother had the letter in her hand and would’ve known if she did.

“And then she asked who else knew,” Nicole said.

“And you told her.”

“I told her.” Her dad had known about Drew since Thanksgiving breakfast, and MJ had known since Thanksgiving night. Her mother hadn’t said a word when Nicole told her that her dad knew first, and that had been worse than anything she could’ve said.

At Thanksgiving, when Drew called and MJ answered her phone and put on a whole show about it, she’d dragged him into the laundry room afterward and made him swear on everything he loved not to say a word to their mother or Tiffany. She’d told him she’d tell them herself, on her own time, if she ever told them at all. That she and Drew had an understanding about the spring. That it might not even be worth upsetting everybody over. And MJ, who’d never kept a secret in his life, had actually done it. He’d kept quiet for a month, which her mother now considered a betrayal of its own. “She wasn’t happy about any of it.”

Nicole had made him promise one more thing in that laundry room. Whatever was going on with MJ and Drew’s dad, all the agent talk, it stayed out of the house. She’d said it was because of the rules, and that was true. Drew couldn’t sign with anybody, or take anything from anybody, until after his last game, or he could lose the bowl. But the real reason was her mother. If Roxanne Wright found out her son was trying to sign the college quarterback her daughter was in a relationship with, she’d decide in about two seconds that Drew was only with Nicole to get to the family. MJ had laughed at her. Then he’d agreed.

Drew shook his head. “And after all that, she still wants me there for Christmas.”

“After all that.”

Bring him home for Christmas, her mother had said, in that same calm voice. I’d like to meet the young man my daughter is fighting in hotels over.

Nicole had almost dropped the phone. Christmas wasn’t Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was everybody, cousins and play cousins and aunties and family friends, so many people that nobody would notice one more. Christmas was just them. Her mother, Tiffany, MJ, and Mama Gussie. It always had been. Her dad too, until this year.