A few strands of hair slipped over her ear and brushed her cheek. I loved the shorter length. She’d always worn it long but there was something that punched me in the gut about it now. I reached up, caught those strands between two fingers. “Because I actually like soccer.”
“Mmm. That would help.”
“What? No,I told you so?”
Another obstinate head shake. “Nope.” But then, because she’d never been able to walk away from this topic without getting the last word in, she added, “But it’s good you’re excited about life after football.”
“I am,” I said, willing her to meet my eyes. She didn’t.
“It’s good you’re finally doing something because it’s what you want,” she said.
“I finally can.”
She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. I felt her soft sigh on my forehead. “You can tell me youhadto go to Arizona and youhadto enter the draft all you want but I know what’s true and what you’ve let everyone else believe is true.”
I closed my eyes as her knuckles pressed the hinge of my jaw. “That’s not fair, Em. I had to take care of my family.”
“What’s not fair is how every game you’ve ever played has been about your dad first and you a distant second,” she said. “The only reason you played in college is because everyone told you how proud he would’ve been, how all he’d ever wanted was to see you make it to that level, how much it would mean to him. Not a single person stopped to ask if you wanted that. They just told you how much your dad would’ve loved cheering for a Big 12 team.”
My father spent nearly half of my life dying. It was a slow avalanche that consumed everything in its path for years until it gained speed and wiped out everything.
He’d always been larger than life. He did everything, knew everyone, helped everywhere. He was the guy who’d come over to help you patch your roof after a storm, the one who hosted the best tailgate parties for any game, and the one who coached both girls’ field hockey and peewee football until he couldn’t stand on the sidelines any longer. There were photos of him carrying all four of my sisters through the snow one year, and another, from an earlier era, of him lifting a full keg one-handed.
When he was sick, everything we did was for him. Rearranging our bedrooms so he didn’t have to climb the stairs, rearranging schedules so someone would always be with him, rearranging the ways we thought about what it meant to be alive.
The least I could do was take the field every Friday night and play the game of my life. My father needed that joy, that hope. Weallneeded it. And I’d needed the purpose.
But then we rearranged our lives again, and that time it was to make room for grief and loss.
Those Friday nights turned into a tribute. Every game was played in his honor, a memorial service in many parts. My family—the whole town, really—had grieved and celebrated his life through those games but it’d never worked that way for me.
When the scholarships rolled in, I went as far from home as I could get. As far from the soft-eyed expressions and “Your dad’s up there cheering you on!” as I could get.
But it wasn’t far enough because college sports news reporters were obsessed with my backstory. There were four or five different human interest packages they played every game day. The worst was the one about me finally winning the state high school football championship less than five months after my father’s death and I’d dedicated the game to him. Never once had I dedicated a game to anyone, and myteamwon that game. But as far as that reel was concerned, my arm and I were the only things that mattered.
Pro ball had never appealed to me but my mom was going to have to sell the house in order to swing all the payment plans for Dad’s medical expenses and my sisters’ college tuition. She hadn’t let me worry about those things at U of A but when I realized the scope of the debt bearing down on her, I couldn’t come up with a better option.
So, I kept playing with the ghost at my back. The human interest stories never stopped. Draft day was—well, fuck, I’d dissociated through most of it but my origin story video nearly drowned itself in its own tears.
Now I was on the board for the leading ALS foundation in the US. I was their celebrity spokesperson and helped raise millions of dollars for them each year and matched every penny. I appeared in their commercials along with a photo montage of my dad coaching my peewee teams and I voiced a line about me carrying on his legacy of sportsmanship that made my stomach drop every time I heard it. I would’ve done it regardless of whether anyone knew my story, but goddamn, Emme was right.
She’d always been right.
I didn’t want to live in a life written by loss—and I knew now that my dad wouldn’t have wanted that either.
“And allow me to add,” Emme went on, “that there were years between the time he passed and when you got your draft day signing bonus. If taking care of your family was your biggest concern, you would’ve skipped college ball and gone to work on a lobster boat.”
“I wouldn’t have lasted a week on a lobster boat.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Think of it this way,” I said. “If I hadn’t entered the draft against your very specific advice, I wouldn’t be buying these teams which means I wouldn’t have asked you to marry me.” I turned my head and rubbed my face against her belly. She pushed her fingers through my hair. I wanted to pry my ribsopen and show her my heart because I’d swear to god it only beat like this for her. “I’m not complaining. You don’t have to either.”
“I’ll stop bringing it up,” she said, “if you stop doing things you hate.”
“I don’t hate football.” When she didn’t volley that comment back to me, I added, “I started seeing a sports therapist three—four?—years ago. Whenever we lost to Minnesota in the Super Bowl.”
“That was five years ago, my friend.”
