“Terrible.” I shake my head and allow him to come in, brushing my fingertips over Kai’s head. He’s strapped to his dad’s chest and seems to be conked out.
“Still?”
Erik spent a few days with me after the funeral, sitting in on meetings with my manager and agent, Malcolm and the PR company. Everyone wanted to decide what the hell I was doing with my life as it crashed around me, but it was my best friend who spoke for me when I didn’t feel like I could anymore. For as much as I know how the world sees me, Erik has been there with me from the beginning. We were drafted the same year to Philadelphia with the purpose of rebuilding a dying team, tasked with bringing it back to life. Which we did.
He’s the golden boy.
I’m the arrogant asshole. Because I like to have fun on and off the field. What is the point of making millions of dollars a year, doing the thing we dreamed of as kids, if we can’t have fun?
But now, I don’t know who I am. Or what all of this is for anymore.
Only that the last conversation I had with my parents before they died was how they were disappointed in me, and I’m now in charge of raising my kid sister.
“She barely comes out of her room,” I explain to Erik, motioning down the hall. “She hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” he assures me, but she won’t talk to me, and she’s pretty much cried every single day. Not that I can blame her.
She’s lost her parents, home, and friends in one fell swoop.
“I’m not cut out for this. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.” I grab two bottles of water from the fridge and toss one to him, which he catches with one hand, the other holding Kai’s tiny bum.
“You’ve just started. You can’t throw in the towel already.”
I heave a sigh. I love the dude. After seven seasons playing together, I know him almost as well as myself. I know what his favorite meals are, how he falls asleep to some English guy on an app telling him to relax his muscles and mind, and that he always has to put his left sock on before his right or his whole game will fall apart. But if he doesn’t know by now that I’m not cut out for raising a fourteen-year-old girl, I don’t know how else to convince him.
“Everything I do and say is wrong. She won’t leave the house, but also, I’m kinda glad because I don’t want those vultures outside to say anything to or about her.”
The internet had a field day when the news broke. My name and face were plastered everywhere. More than usual. Someone paid for their kids’ college with the pictures sold to the tabloids of me in my black suit, bent over two coffins, my hands resting on each, eyes closed.
I can’t even fucking bury my parents without the world trying to tear me down.
But I won’t let them tear my sister down simply to get a piece of me.
Erik nudges me out of the way to assess the inside of my refrigerator. “You might want to start with buying some groceries.”
I don’t cook, and I certainly don’t grocery shop. I have people for that.
The only items I have in my fridge are water, sports drinks, Greek yogurt, and eggs. I’ve been ordering in every day since we returned from Iowa, though I have my chef scheduled to drop off some meals tomorrow.
Leaning my elbows on the kitchen island, I focus my attention on the pattern of striations in the white marble. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I can’t be…a dad. I don’t know how to take care of another human. Especially one who’s fifteen years younger than I am who cries literally every time she looks at me.”
Erik takes a swig of his water and sets it down, eyes scanning my place, pristine from the cleaning service, before pinning me with his dark stare. “Then why don’t you try to be her brother instead?”
I huff an aggravated sound. “I don’t know how to do that either.”
He strokes the back of Kai’s little head. “Maybe that’s part of the reason she’s so upset. You went home, what? Once or twice a year?” I don’t need to answer because he knows. “Maybe work on getting to know each other again.”
Yeah, sure, that sounds good, but it’s easier said than done.
After I was born, my parents had trouble becoming pregnant again, so they figured it would just be me. But then in my sophomore year of high school, after my mom turned forty-one, surprise!
She got pregnant with my sister, but it wasn’t easy, and Paisley arrived really early. She was a sickly baby with an infection that caused her to lose most of her hearing. She spentmonths in the hospital before she could come home, but I recall being attached to my baby sister from day one. As soon as she started walking, she’d come to my high school games, and I doted on her, spending as much time as I could with her. But college came fast—and the draft even faster. She grew up in Cedar Falls, while I spent years away from her in Alabama and then in Pennsylvania. Now, I barely know her.
She certainly doesn’t know me, and she doesn’t seem like she wants to know me either.
“You talked to the counselor?” Erik asks, drawing my attention up to him, and when I shrug, it’s his turn to heave a tired sigh. “You have to. You need to wrap your head around all of this.”
Erik is into all that hippie-dippie horseshit of yoga and therapy, but that’s not me. That’s not what I do. The team is required to have small-and large-group meetings with the psychologist to maintain our mental game on the field and good relationships with teammates off the field, but the Founders also have a counselor on staff for individual sessions. For more personal matters, I guess.
