Page 12 of The Wrong Game

I didn’t miss the look on my dad’s face as he listened to his youngest son talk about art class and the cute girl who keeps staring at him in the lunch room.

Because Dad never thought Micah would make it to sixteen.

None of us did.

My brother was diagnosed with juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia when he was just four years old.

I was eighteen at the time, in my first semester of college, and football was my life. I had a scholarship and, though I was young and just starting out in my college career, my coach said he saw a promising path to playing pro for me. But when Micah got sick, everything in my life changed.

First and foremost, my priorities.

At first, his survival rate expectancy was dismal. Even with treatment, we were told we’d be lucky to have even three more years with him. Playing football and going to college didn’t feel as important with numbers like that staring me in my face.

Sure, I knew I could talk to coach, maybe get redshirted for my first year and come back. I knew that, with my skills and reputation, I could come back any time I wanted to. But right then, at eighteen years old with my baby brother in and out of the hospital like it was a playground, none of that mattered. My parents were doing everything they could to have someone stay home with him, or taking him to and from the hospital, or sitting up with him on the nights he couldn’t sleep when he had to stay overnight.

I couldn’t do much, but I could help with that.

What was more important was being there for Micah,withMicah, and supporting my parents. I knew I could have put in the four years at college, maybe gone pro, given my family the money they really needed and my brother the fighting chance he deserved.

But the problem was, Micah wasn’t promised four years.

He wasn’t even promised one.

But now, twelve years later, Micah was considered cancer-free and healthy. He still had frequent visits to the doctor for check-ups, and Mom worried any time he had so much as a cold, but his quality of life was better than we ever could have expected.

The fact that he was livingat allwas better than we expected.

I could have gone back to college. I could have tried out for a pro team. But, as it often does, time just kept on ticking, and every year we celebrated Micah’s birthday, all I could think about was that he was alive, my family was healthy, I made enough money to help them and support myself, and that we were all happy. That was what mattered.

Life was good.

And I would go back and give up football time and time again for the same result.

“You know, I really would like you to watch your mouth more,” Mom told Micah. “I know you’re sixteen now, but you’re still my baby boy. And I don’t want to hear about any of the things you talked about tonight.”

“Come on, you know me, Mom,” he said, rubbing her back. “It’s just video game talk.”

“Video game talk?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. You talk trash to look all big and bad. I’m still your sweet little boy. Promise.”

He grinned at her and she rolled her eyes, but she seemed content for the moment. I knew in her mind, she could blink and travel back to when her “sweet little boy” had more tubes running in and out of him than the back of an old 90s computer.

We all could.

Andthat’swhy I would make my same choices time and time again.

After dinner, Micah helped Mom clean up in the kitchen while Dad asked me and Doc to join him for a cigar on the back porch. It was Saturday night tradition, and tonight, Doc supplied the cigars — three dark Robustos with a bourbon kick and warm vanilla aftertaste.

Doc launched into a story from that week at the bar, one I’d already heard but was new to Dad. And as the smoke danced with the warm September wind on the porch, I finally let myself think about the woman everyone had asked me about all night.

Gemma Mancini.

Damn, did she come out of nowhere and knock me on my ass.

If I hadn’t already done a double-take at her long, dark, thick curtain of hair falling over her shoulders when she walked in the bar, if her almost neon-green eyes hadn’t been enough to make me want to know her name, if the way the Chicago Bears jersey she wore didn’t stretch across her curves like a dream — I still would have wanted to know more after the words her friend spoke.

“A friend who could, potentially, rail you into next year with his hammer cock.”