Page 39 of Full Coverage (Boys of Fall)

She straightened and pinned him with a don’t-ever-say-that-again look. “I paid attention to every play of every game, Mr. Winters. Don’t ever doubt me.”

He didn’t looked chagrined at all. “Sorry, Ms. Doyle. I misspoke.”

“Yeah, you did.” She went back to the car.

“So what else?”

“What else? Oh, you mean the game?” She’d been talking about one of the games from the boys’ senior year. “That one was the one where Colt broke free for an eighty-yarder.”

“No, what else in the stands?”

She looked over at him. He seemed genuinely interested in the extraneous stories. And Randi had about a million.

“Well, there was the stuff that went on behind the stands too,” she said. “That was where Jason Dawes found out that Missy was pregnant.”

Nolan’s eyes widened. “She told him at the game?”

“He bought her a hot dog and she ran behind the bleachers and puked her guts out.”

Nolan shook his head again and wrote.

“You can’t put that in your book,” she protested.

“I won’t use their names and I can change up the details,” he said. “But this is…this is football in Quinn. It’s not just the guys on the field. It’s everyone’s game.”

She nodded. “You can’t be the pride and joy if no one’s proud or joyful.”

Nolan looked up at her. “I’m quoting you on that too.”

He was funny. She went back to the truck. And kept talking.

“Okay, so second half of that game was pretty boring. No one scored and we went a solid quarter without even a first down on either side.”

“Tell me more people stories,” he interrupted.

“Really?” she asked as she exchanged her wrench for a smaller one.

“Yeah. I mean a lot of people know the game stats. But no one else has told me any of these other stories.”

That’s because they were just stories. But Randi shrugged. She liked having him here with her while she worked and if he wanted to hear stories, she could tell stories.

“Okay, well, there have been at least a dozen proposals during games.”

“I knew of a couple,” Nolan said. “But that many?”

“Oh easily. And then Shelly Corver went into labor and delivered her baby in the press box.”

The press box was a fancy name for the wooden box that sat at the top of the bleachers where the announcer sat. TheQuinn Quibblercovered the game, but Blake Thomas, the sole owner and reporter, sat in the stands with his buddies. The local radio station, WKKP, covered the games from there though, and when it got to play-off time, a couple of television station reporters would cram into the tiny box.

“No kidding,” Nolan said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yep. And they named him Titan.”

“Shelly Corver named her son Titan?” Nolan repeated.

Randi nodded.

“What else?”

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