Finding his mother's cirrhotic hemorrhage; the end of football; the first cigarette

pivotal · ~age 17, B.S.

• When: late October, junior season, at age seventeen
• What: Coming in after football (his last season), Gately found his mother mid-cirrhotic-hemorrhage — blood jetting up her throat — and first thought the M.P. had come back and stabbed her. The hemorrhage/cerebral event vegetabilized her ("at roughly the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout"); she was moved to a Long-Term-Care Medicaid place out past Yirrell Beach in Point Shirley, where Gately still cannot bring himself to visit her ("Ten-plus years have gone like that"). He smoked his first cigarette (a 100 from her leftover pack) that day, never returned to high school, and never played organized ball again.