The Uber driver introduced himself as Hooper. He was a heavyset man wearing a white button-down and jeans. Bo could barely see the man’s face because it was covered with a crimson trucker cap with the words Roll Tide embroidered on the bill. Once Bo was seated in the back of the car, which was a tan Nissan Maxima, the driver turned to look at him. “Bocephus Haynes.” After saying Bo’s name, Hooper nodded as if he was sizing Bo up.

“That’s right,” Bo said.

“Middle linebacker. 1979 Bama team. Made a couple of tackles and a sack in the Sugar Bowl against Arkansas.”

Bo forced a smile. It had been a while since he’d been recognized from his playing days, but it still happened from time to time, especially when he was in Alabama. “Good memory.”

“You were a hell of a player,” Hooper said, pulling out of the parking lot. “Preseason All-American in 1980 but blew out your knee in the first game that season, right?”

“Yep,” Bo said. “Damn artificial turf at Legion Field.”

“Too bad,” Hooper said. “Hey, are you hungry?”

At this, Bo smiled. He was famished after having not eaten since lunch and was beginning to feel the first beginnings of a hangover. “I’m starved.”

Thirty minutes later, Hooper pulled the Maxima up the driveway to Bo’s rental house in Hazel Green. “Nice looking farm,” Hooper said. “How long have you owned it?”

“Not mine,” Bo muttered, chewing up the last of his burger and washing it down with a sip of Diet Coke. On the way home, they had stopped at a Krystal drive-through, which Hooper had described as “one of his old stomping grounds.” Apparently, in the late 1980s, the kids from Huntsville High School had liked to loiter in the parking lots of Krystal, AmSouth Bank, and an old grocery store called Big Brothers, which were all within a half-mile radius on Whitesburg Drive. “Good times,” Hooper had said with a hint of wistfulness in his voice. “Been a lot of places, but for my money, the girls at Huntsville High School in the late ’80s were the hottest chicks that have ever breathed air.”

Bo had smiled at the memory. He figured a lot of men remembered their own high school glory days in the same nostalgic manner. Hell, Bruce Springsteen had written a song about it. Sometimes he wished that he had been able to have a normal childhood, where he’d hung out with other teens in the backs of parking lots drinking Miller Lite out of the can and scoping girls, but alas, that hadn’t been in the cards.

Normal wasn’t a word that could ever be used to describe Bo’s life.