Fiction: Pass

By: Anonymous

Two women of a particular age were walking together, talking about this and about that. Both were divorced. One had children – two teenage girls who were smart, beautiful, and, like their son-of-a-bitch dad, musically gifted. Already they were in a band, these teenage daughters, and had just played their first gig, a school fundraiser at the neighborhood rec center. Lynn, the mom, was telling Lyla, the non-mom, all about it when a much younger woman dressed for business and talking into some new, unfathomable cell phone accessory said to whoever she was talking to: “I really love the time zone that I'm in.”

This stopped Lynn and Lyla in their tracks in the middle of the sidewalk. They turned their heads and watched the au courant, likely still-married businesswoman walk a few more confident steps away from them.

“We could follow her,” Lyla suggested.

“We should,” said Lynn.

But they didn't. Not that they had anywhere to be; they were walking off a big, heavy lunch, and continued walking in the same direction – you can't just follow people being the unspoken consensus. Ten steps later, roughly across from the Women's Building, Lynn said, “Kombucha.”

“Pardon me?” said Lyla.

“Kombucha,” Lynn said. She was not a musician. She was an artist. “That's the name of their band.”

“Yuck,” said Lyla.

Lynn said, “Yeah.”

And then they didn't talk for a while. They were both thinking about love. Love of a time zone, and whether it might be possible for that kind of love, in life, to be enough.

Well, the new thing in this neighborhood was barber shops, and outside of the trendiest of these, on the corner of 18th and Valencia, Joe Montana was standing between a tree and a bike rack, talking on a cell phone the old-fashioned way, holding it to his ear. Lynn didn't notice him. Lyla, who was neither an artist nor a musician, did. She was mesmerized by his sheer height and tried not to stare as they passed. She had seen him play football many, many times, both on TV and in Candlestick Park. She had cheered her heart and lungs out for Joe Montana and, like anyone else of her time and place with a sporty bone in their body, had adored the man – somehow without ever really realizing just how tall he was. In fact, she thought she remembered him having been considered short for a quarterback.

“Did you see who that was? Did you see who that was?” she whispered to Lynn, tugging on her sleeve, as soon as they were safely beyond him.

“Who?”

She tapped her chin where his famous dimple was, as if that could only mean one thing.

“Who?” Lynn said again, turning and looking.

“Joe Montana!”

Even Lynn knew who Joe Montana was. At least by name. “Cool,” she said. Which was true.

“What's he doing here, I wonder.”

“Waiting for a haircut?” Lynn said. “Do you want to go back and talk to him?”

“He's married,” Lyla said.

“Talk to him, not propose to him.”

“I was kidding.”

Lynn laughed.

“He's very, very married,” Lyla said. “Not to mention on the phone.”

Lynn said, “I wonder if he has that brain disease.”

They crossed the street and went into their old favorite thrift store. Lynn wanted to find something funky for the squarer of her two talented daughters to wear for their next gig.

Lyla spotted a worn-out football in a bin with some roller skates and baseball gloves and didn't even tell her friend what she was doing. She bought the ball, left the store, and jogged back to the barber shop where Joe Montana was still standing, no longer talking on his phone, just looking at it; and, miraculously, not being bothered by any of the passing twenty-four-year-old millionaires or European tourists.

“Sorry to bother you,” Lyla said.

He looked over his phone at her, at the football in her hands, and smiled. The football, she suddenly noticed, was of a slightly odd shape, even for a football, a little squatter and rounder than regulation. She had the sudden, horrible thought that she'd picked up a rugby ball. Her knees almost buckled. But they didn't, because it wasn't. It wasn't a rugby ball, thank God! It was a cheap, used, made-in-China American football, brown and laced and dotted with nubs for “superior grip.” It said Wilson on it – in a girly light-blue script, but still.

Joe Montana was patting his pockets.

“Do you have a pen?” he said.

What in the world would he want a pen for? Lyla thought.

Before she could quite complete the next foolish thought – that he wanted her phone number – a second incredibly tall person, possibly a former teammate of his, stepped out of the barber shop with a Sharpie.

“No, no, no!” Lyla said. She almost smacked the Sharpie out of Joe Montana's friend's hand. “I don't want your autograph. I want a pass!”

The two tall men looked at each other and Lyla realized, with a rush of relief, delight, and adrenaline, that she was suddenly, for once in her life, in control of a situation. Like so many kids on so many playgrounds all across the country that they lived in, she drew her finger along the pimpled surface of the ball.

“You're here. I'll be here. I'll go eight yards down toward 17th and cut toward the street.”

She showed Joe Montana exactly where she wanted it.

“Here,” she said, tapping her finger at the end of the backwards L she had drawn, and looked up into Joe Cool's blue eyes. “Hit me.”

He looked from her to the football to her to the football. It was his friend, finally, who took the ball from Lyla and placed it in Joe Montana's hands. “Let's do this,” the friend said.

Lyla lined up wide left, against the barber shop window, watching Joe Montana, who was standing with the ball right where she had found him, still between the tree and the bike rack, near the curb. He waited for a pair of pedestrians to clear and then didn't say hut or even hike, but go!

And she did. She went. There was no way she could have known it, as intent as she was on Joe Montana himself, and then the perfect execution of her route, but every single person inside that many-chaired barber shop – some wearing their black haircut capes, some with foam on their faces, and the barbers themselves holding straight razors or scissors and combs – had gathered at the window to watch.

Her cut was sharp and true and even included a head fake.

When she turned at her break, sure enough, the ball was already in the air: a perfect spiral that settled into her soft hands like a warm baby. She hugged the ball to her body, closed her eyes, and listened to the applause, which came not only from inside the barber shop but from the sidewalks on either side of the street where, regardless of whether they knew who Joe Montana was, folks had stopped to watch.

Both Joe Montana and his friend gave her high-fives. “Nice pass,” she said.

“Nice catch,” said he.

The friend asked for her phone number and she wrote it down with his Sharpie on the football and handed it to him, not wondering for a moment whether he would call, or why. She said goodbye to the men, waved to her fans in the barber shop window, and walked back empty-handed toward the thrift store, loving the time zone that she lived in. Lynn, she knew, would by now have armloads of colorful blouses and tanks, short skirts, torn bell-bottoms, flares, and possibly even jumpers, some of which would need her approval.