Telling him the brutal truth of his situation would prove to him that he was still the same man he always was in my eyes, but I couldn’t. Not today. Probably not ever again. Instead, I took the beer he pulled out of a cooler beside him and relaxed with one leg crossed over my opposite knee.
“How long you stayin’?” he asked, unfocused eyes staring at the screen.
“I have to take off by four,” I responded. Another wave of guilt washed over me. If I was a better friend, I’d cancel my flight to stay here.
No, you wouldn’t, I scolded myself.Patrick wouldn’t want you putting your life on hold to watch over him.
It was the truth. He’d pushed most of his friends away in the weeks following his diagnosis. I was only still here because I was too stubborn to give up on him. “Which game do you want to watch?”
“Wilmington’s playing Austin today,” he said flatly. He flipped to the network carrying the Breakers/Mustangs game and tossed the remote to the opposite end of the couch. “If I pass out, don’t take it personal. Haven’t had much energy lately.”
That might’ve had something to do with the fact that he’d resorted to drinking before noon, but I wasn’t going to pull the pin out of that grenade, either.
Somewhere in the part of Patrick’s brain that still functioned properly, he had to realize he was self-destructing. But if he did understand what he was doing to himself and his family, would he even care? Maybe the whole point was to try and mask the pain of knowing every day was one less day he’d have with them.
As we listened to the analysts drone on about today’s matchup, I thought a bit about my own life. Where he’d basically given up, I felt as though I was just starting to live. I couldn’t imagine putting Hunter through the hell Tanner dealt with every day, but now I had the added incentive of finally getting what I’d wanted. Nixon. Someone to spend my life with, without the shroud of secrets between us.
“You ain’t been around lately,” Patrick observed during a commercial break.
He didn’t seem accusatory for a change. His improved demeanor allowed me to relax just a bit. Maybe Angie was right and he needed me to be more present. I was the only friend from his playing days who wasn’t completely scared away by what was happening to him. No one would admit it, but they’d stopped calling Patrick to hang out shortly after his diagnosis because he was, for now, a living, breathing reminder of the abuse we’d all put our bodies through.
“Nope,” I said, hoping that was the end of the conversation. Damn, Nixon was rubbing off on me. I used to be the one who wanted to talk, yet I was giving curt one-word answers to try and shut this down.
The corner of my mouth turned up, the way it did every time I thought about Nixon. North Carolina was quickly becoming home to me. Wherever he was, that’s where I wanted to be.
“Why?” Patrick pressed, eyes narrowed beneath a furrowed brow. “You finally get sick of dealing with the cripple?”
Self-pity. Wonderful.
This was almost worse than angry Patrick. When he was pissed off, I knew what to say. When he slipped into this place of despair, I had no clue how to pull him out. Anything I said would be empty platitudes.
“You know that’s not why. Don’t be an asshole.” Patrick flinched. Good. Maybe what he needed was someone to call him out on his bullshit. “If, and that’s a huge if, I stopped visiting because of you, it’d be your pissy attitude, not your physical condition. Besides, last I checked, your body still worked just fine.”
“For now. But what about when it doesn’t?” This was a rare flash of vulnerability from my friend. He seemed to curl in on himself, staring blankly out the window over the backyard.
Somewhere down the hall, our sons were engaged in a heated debate about the game they were playing, their voices carrying through the house.
A single tear tracked down Patrick’s face. “I did this to them, Lincoln. Angie asked me so many times to hang up my cleats. Every time I got hurt, she asked me how many more times I could go through this. I blew her off, swore I’d be fine. And for a long time, I was.”
I scooted to the opposite end of the couch, closer to my friend. Seeing him this close up, I was struck by how far he’d deteriorated, even in the past month. His eyes were sunken and hollow, his clothes swallowing his frame when they’d once stretched tight over the body he treated like a temple.
I reached out to him, unsurprised when he scowled at my proffered hand. I allowed my arm to drop back to the couch cushion, ignoring the stab of pain. This wasn’t about me. He wasn’t rejecting me. He wasn’t going to push me away the way he had everyone else.
“You can’t think like that, Patrick. None of us understood how dangerous playing was back then. I know you, and I know you’d have done anything to protect Angie and Tanner. You kept playing because you thought it was what you needed to do to take care of them.”
“Yeah.” He huffed out a weak chuckle. His voice cracked as he continued. “At least they’ll have a good insurance payout when I finally keel over. Say what you want about what drove me to play week after week, but it was selfish. I didn’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings. I can’t even count the number of times Angie and I fought on Saturdays because she knew I wasn’t in any shape to play. I hated her at the time. Thought she was trying to tell me what to do with my life.”
“She tried to stop you because she worried about you,” I insisted.
Isabella had done the same thing to me on more than one occasion. They didn’t understand that the team doctors were waiting for us, all too willing to hand us a pill or bend us over for a shot of something strong enough to mask the pain for a few hours.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but you have a choice now. You may not be able to change what’s happening under that thick skull of yours, but every day you wake up, you have the choice to fight through the pain, the same way you did on the field. It’s not too late for you to be the husband and father you want them to remember after.”
I couldn’t mention death. Couldn’t acknowledge that his fate was sealed. He knew. Hell, we both knew. Time was ticking away before I had to take Hunter back to the house and catch my flight, and I wanted to try a little harder to turn Patrick’s thinking around so he didn’t view himself as a burden on everyone. Angie loved him. She would until the day he died, but it was killing her to live with him.
“How do I do that?” The question was barely a whisper before his body went still. I tried to come up with some sort of advice, but drew a blank. This was one of those times nothing I said meant a damn thing, because I wasn’t living his reality. “How do I look them in the eye, knowing the pain I’ve put them through? Knowing their pain won’t end when mine does?”
“You do the same thing we do, Dad.” Both of our heads whipped to see Tanner and Hunter standing in the doorway.
