I mean… he hadn’t played at all? Or just… I don’t know, hadn’t played a regulation game? By the look of his movements and his body language, it didn’t seem like he’d completely stopped playing, but what did I know? Two years couldn’t completely erase a lifetime spent with a white and black ball.
Harlow elbowed me in the ribs as she stopped right by me.
“Did he just call you a slow-ass?”
The team was running drills, and I’d been in the first group of players.
I hunched my shoulders up, saying nothing. What was there to say? Kulti had called me slow during a drill, and then asked another player if she had two left feet. She was the same girl I’d run with in the morning a few times by then, the one that always wanted to beat me at sprints.
Was she slow? No. Hell no. Sandy was really good.
“I would like to finish drills in this lifetime, can we move on?” a voice bellowed from the other side of the field.
Absently, I reached over to the shoulder that had been punched. At that moment, Kulti glanced over. The space between his eyebrows crinkled, and for a split second, I debated hunching over and pretending I had a shooting pain going through my shoulder so I could mess with him. He hadn’t brought it up the day before and neither had I.
I didn’t do it though. Harlow was a little too attentive. She’d notice. Plus, I had no idea how he’d handle it.
Really I had no idea how to handle any of this. Was I supposed to not be saying anything about giving Kulti rides home? Because I hadn’t. Not even my dad knew, and I usually told him everything. He wasn’t treating me any differently than he had before I gave him rides, so it didn’t mean anything.
There wasn’t anything to tell. Was there?
“Is your shoulder bothering you?” Harlow’s voice tore me away from looking at the German.
“No.” My face flushed as I turned back to her. “Ready?”
She shoved me to the side and took off. “Catch up, slow-poke.”
Little did I know that the ‘slow-ass’ and ‘slow-poke’ nicknames were only the beginning. Before practice was over Kulti had called my passes sloppy, and then followed up by saying I needed to learn how to play with both legs.
This was coming from the man who played with his right foot ninety percent of the time? Ha.
I didn’t let his comments get me down or bother me. I also didn’t worry too much about whether he was being overbearing because I’d recently learned his secret, or if it was because I just took his shit. Regardless, I listened to what he said and took it all in stride. I wasn’t going to let myself take it too personally.
When the end of practice rolled around an hour later, I was already expecting him in our usual spot, and he didn’t disappoint.
Skipping the obvious, I asked as I approached, “Ready?”
“Yes,” he answered.
That familiar silence followed us as we got inside and continued as I drove for a little bit.
Two minutes was as long as I could contain my curiosity before I broke down. “Do you miss it?”
Not a total idiot, he asked, “Playing?”
“Yeah.” As much as I tried to reason how he’d made it so long, I still couldn’t really comprehend the idea of not playing. I couldn’t.
He slid his gaze over to me as he nodded, so honest and straightforward it caught me off-guard. “I miss football every day.” Just as quickly as his gaze had moved to mine, it moved back as he swallowed.
So… “Why haven’t you, then?” I asked before I could talk myself out of it. What was the worst he would do? Not answer? Tell me to mind my own business?
Curiosity killed the Sal. Let it be said I went down in a blaze of glory asking Reiner Kulti about a secret I wasn’t sure he would share willingly.
Why he’d decided to share it with me, I still wasn’t positive, but I’d take what I could get.
A slow steady exhale made its way out of him. “Do you know why I retired?”
He’d torn his ACL for the third time. There’d been rumors from the prior tear that he wouldn’t come back one hundred percent, or even ninety or eighty or seventy percent. He was too old, people had said. When it finally happened, stacked on top of arthritis in his toe, and other small injuries that managed to add up over the years, everyone thought it was inevitable.
Reiner ‘The King’ Kulti had announced his retirement shortly afterward, ending his legacy.
Was I going to say that? Definitely not.
I settled for a nod and a “yeah.”
“It took a long time for me to heal,” he said. Then he didn’t say anything afterward.
I found myself slowly turning my head to give him an incredulous look I realized I had no right to give him. “Okay. Then what?”