Hangman's Game by Bill Syken

about what damage might be done to my brain—and what damage might have happened already—isn’t going to help me get through my workday. I once saw a study claiming that concussions are more likely to cause long-term brain damage if you have two of them close together, and I choose to keep that factoid at the top of my thoughts, because I’ve only had one serious concussion, and that was back when I was a college quarterback. I haven’t had one since.
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it right now, if you don’t mind,” I say.
    â€œI understand,” my mother says softly. She has been on this campaign for a year now, trying to get me to quit football, suggesting one day that I could go to law school, another day into real estate, throwing out career possibilities as if I were an unfocused wastrel.
    In search of a more pleasant topic, I ask my mom what is going on around my hometown of Waverly—she still works at her old salon there, though she lives in Elmira. She begins by reporting that Charlie Wentz, my dad’s old offensive coordinator, is doing well in his recovery from prostate cancer. Grace Albini, a girl from across the street who is a few years younger than me, just moved to Namibia to work for a nonprofit group treating women with HIV—despite her parents’ best efforts to talk her out of it. The big scandal in town: my old high school teammate Robby Polchuk, who I will always remember as the guy who caught my first touchdown pass, was just arrested and charged with seventeen counts of insurance fraud.
    â€œReally?” I say. Robby has always been a knucklehead, but not a particularly malevolent one, and he never struck me as the criminal type.
    â€œIt’s the craziest thing,” she says. “Robby would stop short so drivers would crash into him. He did it a couple of times a month. He had claims going against all these different insurance companies. It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself killed.”
    â€œWhat an idiot,” I say. The funny thing is that Polchuk always avoided contact when he was running routes over the middle. I guess you can become pretty desperate in ten years.
    â€œScams like that are more common than you’d think,” chips in Aaron, turning toward me.
    â€œAnd this you won’t believe,” my mom says, cradling an oversized coffee mug in both hands, her eyes lighting up. “Anna is getting married.”
    This is Anna Vilius, the woman who, my mother once believed, should have been my bride. Anna was my girlfriend for my junior and senior years of high school, and my mother to this day keeps our prom photo on her mantel. The one time I asked her to remove it she declined, saying, “It’s one of the few pictures I have of you smiling.” The photo shows Anna in a strapless white gown, with long blond hair and tan shoulders gleaming, and me in a complementary white tuxedo she had picked out. We looked completely goofy, which was the idea at the time. After high school Anna went off to Michigan—her dad’s school—while I stayed in New York for college, going to Hudson Valley State. She and I made what was in retrospect an obviously doomed run at staying together despite the distance, and that lasted only to Thanksgiving break, when she informed me that she had met another guy in Ann Arbor. (That relationship did not even last to winter break, by which time I had taken up with a girl from the Hudson State volleyball team.) Even though it was Anna who had left me, my mother would often look at our prom photo and murmur the same wistful sentiment. In the olden days, she would have worn your ring .
    â€œShe’s not marrying that same guy, is she?” I speak with forced disinterest, because I can feel my mother studying my face for signs of disappointment.
    â€œNo, thank God,” my mother says. “She finally wised up on the rock star.” The guy we are talking