“I’m very, very nervous about Davis being back on the field,” she quickly admitted. “I mean, this will be his first real test since he got hurt. He’s pushing it to even play today.”
Honestly, now it looked like she was going to cry. “Did his doctors give him the ok?” I asked.
She nodded. “But I don’t know if he’s being honest with them or with himself about pain or anything else. All he wants to do is get back out there.” She watched her boyfriend jogging down the sidelines. “Do you get nervous when you watch César?”
“I never watched him play as…I didn’t really know him before, when I watched him,” I said. After our night together and the problems with my Woodsmen father, I had totally tuned out everything football-related last season. “I didn’t really think about him getting hurt today,” I said, considering it now. César and I had both been so excited to come, it hadn’t crossed my mind until this moment that he could get injured. Oh, shit. What if something happened? I craned my neck to find him down on the field.
“My husband, Knox, used to say that he couldn’t even feel anything through the pads,” a soft voice said next to me. “I know he was lying so I wouldn’t worry, but it did make me believe that it wasn’t as bad as I had been imagining.” This woman acted nice, unlike most of the other Woodsmen wives who sat around me. There seemed to be a dividing line between wives and girlfriends, and the GFs like Katie were second-class citizens in whatever hierarchy the wives had devised. It left me, neither a wife or a girlfriend, but only a pregnant roommate, totally out in the cold. Like, literally, I had to sit on the edge as some kind of lonely windbreak until Katie joined me on the bleachers.
“I hope César can’t feel anything with his pads, but I think you’re right that your husband was telling a lie to spare you,” I said to her.
“Is César your boyfriend?” the nice woman asked.
“César is her baby-daddy,” one of the Woodsmen wives announced, her voice loud and high so it carried across the stands. “They’re having a shower next weekend, Daisy. I guess you weren’t invited.”
Well, that was one way to describe my relationship with César. “Wow, what’s the matter with you?” I asked the wife. “Did you forget to take your anti-bitch pill this morning? Daisy is awesome and she’s definitely invited.” I leaned over to the woman next to me. “That’s your name, right? You’re totally invited to the baby shower. It’s next weekend at Davis Blake’s house.”
Daisy nodded, eyes kind of big. She obviously wasn’t used to dealing with nasty wenches like that one. “Are you and César Hidalgo really having a baby?” she asked me.
You couldn’t see with all my clothes and blankets, so I nodded.
She smiled. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Why was that woman so mean to you just now?”
“Her husband used to be the other defensive end when Knox played for the Woodsmen,” Daisy explained. “He wasn’t quite as strong a player as Knox was, and it made her upset. They moved her husband over to be a strong-side linebacker and she took it personally. He’s a very talented athlete,” Daisy said quickly. She didn’t seem to have a lot of mean in her. “He doesn’t hold any bad feelings against Knox but his wife, well, she’s always…a little angry.”
“Why are you the only Woodsmen wife who’s talking to me?” I asked.
“They hang together a lot,” she said. “They don’t care very much for the women who aren’t actually married to the players.”
“Next season you and I will stick like glue,” Katie told me. “We can be the Inferior Girlfriends’ Club.”
I nodded slowly, even though I wasn’t a girlfriend. That bitchy woman had been right about me being the baby carrier, but I thought I was also a friend. And right now, I was a friend who was getting increasingly worried, not so much about this game, but about football in general. “Did your husband ever get hurt when he played for the Woodsmen?” I asked Daisy. I looked over at Katie, thinking about when her boyfriend had taken the hit last year and then been driven off on the injury cart, not to return for six months. I remembered all of Warren Wilde’s injuries when he had played, the ones that had hurt him so badly that now, he had trouble walking. Jesus and Mary, I started playing with my hair, too.
“Oh, no, Knox was never really injured,” Daisy answered. “I mean, he’s had groin pulls, ankle sprains, a torn pectoral, a broken arm, hip pointers, turf toe, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, a meniscus tear…” She stopped. “He’s fine now,” she told me. “Nothing kept him out of the game for too long.”
“Great,” I said faintly. “Do you guys happen to know what are the most common injuries for tight ends?” I knew what had happened to my father and to Davis Blake, the quarterbacks, but I wasn’t up on how the other offensive players got pounded.
“Isn’t César playing both ways today?” Katie reminded me. She was also craning her neck and watching Davis Blake as he warmed up, throwing with the Junior Woodsmen quarterback. If possible, she looked even more nervous.
Yes, César was playing offense and defense, so double the chance at injuries. “They’re not going to really hurt each other,” I told Katie, reassuring both of us. “They’re definitely not going to hit Davis.”
She gave me a small smile as the new head coach, Jim Roberts, came out to the 50-yard line with various Woodsmen owners and execs, and with a younger
