“Our plan,” Porter corrects himself. “I was making a distinct choice of picking you and all that you and your family are, over my own family and who I was and how I was raised. I was choosing a woman so different and so out of any context that my mother would understand, over her.”
“But you never wanted to go back to Manning. Were you lying to me all those times you told me you wanted a life of the mind and not one of physical labor? That in between the pages of books is where you felt your most actualized? That Princeton was where you felt true to yourself and who you were meant to become?”
“No, you’re right. I can’t imagine anyone who loved Princeton more than I did, despite the racial discomforts. The university allowed me the freedom, for the first time in my life, to choose my own way. I never wanted to go back to Manning, ever, but I never wanted to lose my family either, even if we had grown so dissimilar to one another.”
“So you applied to PhD programs and accepted the one at Princeton to make me happy, and then you abandoned our plan to make your mother happy. Instead of staying and fighting for us and fighting for yourself, you chose your mom. And that decision resulted in you up and leaving me on graduation morning without a word to do what, exactly?”
“To report to training camp.”
“Training camp?”
“For the 49ers. It started the same day as graduation.”
“You did? Where? How?” My mind is blown. Decades have passed, and learning all that I missed about this man I love ... loved ... is incomprehensible.
“I never turned down the NFL offer from the 49ers. I told you I did because I knew that was what you wanted to hear. But that offer was the way out of my predicament of being torn between two women and two places. After a bad crop, the NFL salary was reason enough for my parents not to pressure me to return home. They needed the help and I could give it. I was able to defer my PhD program, like Coach suggested. I went straight to California on graduation morning. I shut off my brain, I made my choice, and I escaped for a while to do the one other thing I was good at.”
“And in the moment, you couldn’t tell me any of this?” I challenge.
“I was a young man, and I did something dumb,” Porter owns. “Okay. Maybe I was an old boy with a brilliant mind, but I didn’t have any life experience to draw from. I didn’t know how to tell you, Callie. I didn’t know how to explain to you all that was going on with me. Graduation morning, I kissed you goodbye and took off for training camp. It’s as simple as that.”
“While I was left in the dark about, about everything, Charles knew all of this?”
“No, Charles didn’t know all of it until I called him before we played the New York Giants that October. And I use the wordweloosely. I played on special teams a little for the two seasons I was with the 49ers, and then they let me go.”
“Then you went back to Manning?”
“No. Then I was lost. I didn’t belong anywhere. Twenty-four years old and completely lost. No you. No close friends around. And a mom who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I needed to either continue to make good money to hire help for my dad on the farm and a caretaker for my mom, or I was going to have to be the one to go back and do it. I spent the next five years playing in the Canadian football league for the Saskatchewan Roughriders and living lean to support myfamily. I made my way back into Princeton’s English Literature program and doubled up on classes. I earned my PhD burying my head deep in the books during off-seasons from football.”
“You were less than ninety minutes away from me throughout our twenties, and you never once wanted to see me? Talk to me? Know if I was alright?” My incensement at Porter’s decision-making burns my eyes, but I will not let tears be shed over him.
“Every day, Callie. Every. Day,” Porter confesses, his eyes turning moist. “That’s why,” he continues tentatively, “as soon as I had my degree in hand, I headed straight back to California. I felt like the only way I could keep my worlds balanced was if I was as far away from temptation as possible. In California, I’ve lived a quiet life with Chap and books, and I still enjoy the game of football. That’s how I ended up teaching, coaching, and mentoring young men at Regis, which I am most grateful for. It’s been a perfect fit, and over the years I’ve even gotten a handful of my true scholar athletes into Princeton and onto the football team.”
“That’s quite a journey you’ve been on. Lucky you to have the freedom to become the man you were meant to be. A modern-day Odysseus,” I theorize on Porter’s hero’s journey, my head spinning, taking in the most I’ve ever learned about my first love. I, however, was not given the opportunity to be his Penelope, waiting at home, fending off suitors because I believed Porter would return. I had been forced to contend with the fact that I had been left forever.
Porter opens his mouth to respond, but I cut him off with the weighty question unanswered between us. “Did you ever marry?”
“No. I had my hands and heart full with Chap, Rose, the boys at Regis, and my memories of you, Callie. I can’t believe I moved across the country to be as far away from you as possible, and here you were all along. I always hoped that somehow, some way, at the right time, I would make my way back to you.” Porter put his hands on the table, palms up, presumably inviting me to place mine in his. “That we would find each other, and here we both are inSacramento.” I keep my hands to myself. “There’s another Gullah saying that’s one of my mom’s favorites: ‘All shut eye ain’t sleep; all goodbye ain’t gone.’ I held on to that proverb like a lifeline, Callie. It was never goodbye for me.”
“Porter, since the day I got to Sacramento, I’ve been trying to say goodbye to it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Present
I check my texts. Last night, Quinn didn’t pick up the three times I called her between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. New York time. Makes me think she may have popped a mother-of-the-bride prewedding Xanax and didn’t hear my desperate attempts at a cross-country freak-out. Ultimately her response to my text yelling,Call Me!was,I have an insane couple of days to tie things up in the office before Alice’s big New Year’s Eve weekend. Talk when you get here.Quinn has no idea what’s coming for her when I land at JFK and, in the light of morning, maybe the news of Porter’s reappearance is best disclosed face-to-face.
Cradling my cup of coffee, I hear tittering outside my front door just before I open it to get my early-morning hit of weak winter vitamin D.
“We thought you might want to go for a run before sitting on the plane for six hours,” Maureen opines, huddled up with Daphne in the damp thirty degrees. She is the worst liar.
“Yeah, go get dressed so you can spill the tea.” Maureen hip-checks Daphne. It appears that, in under ten seconds, Daphne has gone off script. “I mean, run with us.” Daphne waves her hand frantically tosend me back inside. “We’ll wait in your living room. My nips are about to fall off out here.”
I spot Lisa sprinting across the street in her fuzzy pink bathrobe and Uggs like a club-footed flamingo. “Don’t say a thing. Don’t you dare say a thing without me,” Lisa repeats at the top of her lungs. She is quite speedy when faced with the impending threat of being left out of the loop. Maybe even a potential member for the Heart and Sole Running Club after all.
When Lisa gets to my front door, she opens her bathrobe and flashes me. Her T-shirt declaresI Support Women’s Rights ... and Wrongs. “I slept in it, so I’d be ready this morning the minute you opened your front door. I’ve been stalking you from my kitchen-sink window.”
I have done the same thing in my running clothes a time or two when Daphne and Maureen insisted on dawn-patrol runs. Daphne calls it “REM to run.”
