“When you know, you know.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me before now?”
His expression grows serious. “I only proposed a few weeks ago. Yeah, it’s fast, but it’s right.”
“She’s a lot younger than you, Dad. You sure you want to do that again?”
“Jess is nothing like Breanne, Taysom. And fourteen years younger isn’t a big deal when you get to be this old,” he insists with a laugh.
Jess reminds me of the women who troll the NFL players, looking to date them.
“You haven’t known her very long,” I counter. Hearing this news is easier than hearing about Breanne because that was the first time he’d gotten married since our family breaking apart. It’s still strange though, and I worry about him.
“Doesn’t matter, Jess is…” He pauses and does a chef’s kiss. “…perfect in every way. Come on, be supportive.”
My stomach turns when I think of my older sister, Emma. I bet this will be hard for her, too. “Does Emma know?”
Dad bites down hard. “Not yet. But I’m telling her next.” He digs into his shoulder bag. “I wanted to hand-deliver the invitation.”
There’s already an invitation? This whole process is further along than I thought.
I take the envelope. “Thanks, Dad.” There’s an awkward silence before he turns back to talking about football.
“Dowell was looking good towards the end of the season. You sure he’s coming back?”
Dante Dowell is my go-to receiver, and we’ve had a lot of great plays over the years. But I’m not even sureI’mcoming back. “Yes, he’s committed to the team.”
I don’t mention that he’s going through a divorce. Dante opened up to me recently about how difficult traveling to away games was on his wife—it was a major contributing factor to her leaving him.
It’s just another piece of evidence that it seems nearly impossible to make a marriage and family work in this career.
Still, I welcome talking about the ins and outs of the game with my father. Football was the only thing we had as a family—the one thing that pulled us together. I saw it during my first game playing tackle football at eight years old. Mom didn’t want me to because she was terrified of injuries, especially concussions. But they’d only been divorced a year, and she was still trying to find her footing. Dad talked her into it, and because I wanted to so badly, she said yes.
I was excited to play. I was all about getting to hang out with Kyle and his dad—who was the coach—and getting the snacks at the end. But it was mostly about the game. I started watching games on TV when I was only two, and I’ve been obsessed ever since.
I had a lot of interests growing up, like playing the piano, building elaborate Lego sets, and trying to convince my mom to get us a dog or cat. That didn’t work, but my mom, even in the fog of divorce, always wanted me to try lots of things—to venture out and do what I wanted to do.
But football was always number one, and that first game? When I snatched a Hail Mary pass from Kyle in the last fewseconds of the game and scored a touchdown, causing our team to win? I saw how my parents, who’d been so angry with each other for so long, held each other as they screamed with joy. I saw how it brought them together.
And I vowed then and there to keep playing. Football would become my world. A world in which I believed I could shine enough to get my family back together.
It didn’t work.
I’m relieved when Coach Whittaker calls me back onto the field.
“I gotta go, Dad. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Hey, work harder than everyone else, okay?” He always says that.
“Sure thing.”
“And come by my place Sunday night? I want you to get to know Jess better before the wedding.”
“I’ll try.”
Again, it’s easier to just not say what I’m feeling and pretend with Dad. He doesn’t like hearing the truth from me; he never has.
But as I jog out onto the turf, trying and failing to rearrange my thoughts back into football and not into my sad family story, I nearly stumble.
