The auburn-haired boy stands on the slightly cracked basement flooring, sliding his left foot to the left, and then following it with his right before sliding his right foot to the right and following it with his left. Then he rolls backwards on his heels.
Coach Taylor pauses on the last concrete stair that leads down to a dim basement lit by two bright, dangling fluorescent bulbs. A fan has been plugged into the far wall to generate some extra air because the largely windowless basement can feel a little stifling in August. He puts a hand on the wood railing and looks at the boy, who, between 8th and 9th grade, went suddenly from resembling the squat trunk of a solid oak tree to looking like a tall piece of skinny bamboo.
Coach Taylor waves his hand to capture the young teenager's attention and asks, "What are you doing, Liam?"
Liam steps back and bumps into the pool table. The formidable piece of furniture has replaced the ping pong table that Tami forced Eric to sell prior to their move to Philadelphia. After they returned from Julie's wedding, Coach Taylor immediately went out and purchased the pool table. He made a great production of setting it all up, going on and on about how he'd always wanted a pool table, how he'd only bought the ping pong table because of Julie, and how now he could get whatever he wanted, because he didn't have to make his daughter happy, because that was Matt's job now. Tami stood watching him hang the pool cue holder against the wall and set out the balls and the triangle, shaking her head. "You have a strange way of consoling yourself, sugar," she said.
"Better than going through an entire box of tissues like you," he replied, and then jerked his head toward the table. "Play with me, babe." Then he grinned. "Remember that one time? In college?"
"Lord, Eric, that was decades ago, and I was much naughtier back then." But she walked coquettishly toward him and took the pole from his hand.
Liam now raises his hands to about the height of his chin. "Step together," he signs with his hands. "Step together. Step together. Rock back. I was practicing. Swing dance."
Coach Taylor adjusts his burgundy cap. It's a better shade of color than the one he had years ago in his brief stint at TMU – simultaneously darker and more vibrant. Franklin Academy has good uniforms at least. He was just hired by the school this summer, and this morning he had his first meeting with his assistant coaches. All two of them. Late try-outs are tomorrow and summer training will start in a week. It was an enlightening meeting that made him painfully aware of how many changes await him, and so he wanted to raid the basement beer fridge as soon as he got home.
Franklin Academy is a small, private school with a grand total of 206 kids in grades 9-12. He won't have to struggle with the painful necessity of cutting kids from the team anymore. He'll have to struggle to fill the ranks. But he accepted the coaching gig because Franklin Academy is the best high school for the deaf on the entire east coast, and they agreed to waive Liam's $25,000 annual tuition when Coach Taylor came on board.
The Taylors have only had Liam for three months now, and Eric is not yet fluent in sign language, but he's taught himself quite a bit in that short time, having thrown himself into the study of the language like a rookie at summer football camp. He'll have to learn more on his feet at Franklin. Most of the kids can read lips, but he'll have to understand them, and he'll have to develop a whole new set of coaching habits, ones that don't rely on the projection of his voice. How can you win at football without sound? He's still having trouble envisioning a mostly silent practice field and finds the practical restraints daunting.
"Swing dance?" Eric forgets his beer, steps off the stair, and comes to sit in chair just under the dry erase board, against the unfinished brick wall on the other side of the pool table.
Get milk, Tami has written in red dry erase marker on the white surface, just below a play diagram. And flowers. It's been awhile. "You want to be a dancer like your mother?"
The boy looks down straight at his feet and swallows. Coach Taylor tips his hat over his own eyes. He didn't mean to remind the kid, but he supposes when you lose your mom suddenly like that, you never forget it for more than a moment. Liam is Tami's second cousin. Or is the kid her first cousin once removed? Eric never can keep that cousin stuff straight, no matter how many times Tami explains it to him.
Anyway, Liam's mother was Tami's aunt's daughter, and Tami saw her once every few years at family weddings, funerals, and reunions. So it was kind of a shock when they put in an obligatory appearance at the woman's funeral only to discover they'd been named as guardians of a boy they hadn't seen in three years and with whom Eric had never exchanged more than three words at a time.
"Why us?" Tami asked that first night back in Phili, after Liam retreated to the guest bedroom that they will have to make his bedroom for at least the next four years.
"I don't know," Eric said. "Maybe because we're the only couple in your entire family with a functional marriage and a steady income?"
"Don't you start."
"Start what?" It was simply a statement of fact, but he should have known better.
Tami has always been sensitive about her family background. She was the first in her family ever to go to college, whereas both of Eric's parents went – his father on a football scholarship and his mother on an academic one. He certainly didn't grow up rich – his mother chose not to work after he was born, and his parents settled in a small Texas town - but he grew up comfortable and with high expectations for his future, with parents who more or less respected each other, even if they didn't quite love each other, instead of parents who broke glasses every Monday and threw things at walls every Wednesday and threatened divorce every Friday.
The first time he and Tami had a major fight after they were married, while he was a junior in college and she was a senior, Tami yelled at the top of her lungs, jerked her purse off the coffee table, knocked over a vase, ran out the front door, and slammed it hard, rattling the whole apartment. Eric followed her, grabbed her by the shoulders, whirled her around, looked her straight in the eyes, and said, "This is not how grown-ups fight. Get back inside."
She blinked, and then she followed. She had chosen a psychology major in order to understand her own family, but it wasn't until she married Eric that she really began to understand herself and to grow fully into the person she wanted to be. Years later, most people would never guess that she was anything but the calm, level counselor, but her husband and her daughters would be privy to her occasional flashes of passion.
Now Eric crosses his arms over his chest and waits for his…cousin-in-law?...to answer. No, he reminds himself. Not his cousin-in-law. His son.
Liam shakes his head. "Homecoming dance," he signs.
Coach Taylor smiles lightly, because he remembers the first time he asked a girl to a dance, in seventh grade, and what a horrid, messy knot his stomach was. Cynthia Johnson. A sweet, pretty girl he thought just might like him, and still it was all he could do to muster the courage. She'd said yes, and he still remembered his first, real kiss that night. He doesn't think Liam has kissed a girl yet, but he doesn't really know Liam. The kid seems shy to him, but who knows how much of that is because he's just lost his mother. "Got a girl in mind already?"
Liam looks down at the floor. Eric can't imagine where he'd have found a girl, since he's lived here only three months and hasn't started school here yet. Liam has spent most of his time alone in his room, in the counseling sessions Tami forces him to attend, or doing yard work silently beside Eric. ("I never know what to say to him," Eric told Tami one day when he came in for iced tea. "You don't have to say anything," she assured him. "He just likes being with you. He never had a father around, you know. And now…I can't ever replace his mom. But I think he sees you…I don't know. Just be there, hon.")
Eventually, Liam looks back up and signs, "She'll probably say no. "
"Well you can't know if you don't ask, son. No pain, no gain." Coach Taylor stands from the chair and grabs a pool cue. He taps Liam's shoulder because the boy has turned away. When Liam's eyes are on his lips, he says, "What say we play a game, son?"
While they're playing, Eric asks him who the girl is, how he met her. Liam is reluctant to answer, but tells Coach Taylor that he rides by her house every afternoon. Eric forgot about the afternoon, hour-long bike rides. Liam's form of exercise. The kid has no interest in football, though Coach Taylor plans to change that. He'll need every body he can get on his team.
Liam says he helped the girl, a junior, when she was coming home from summer school and dropped a mess of papers that scattered in the street. Liam didn't speak to her, though, because he's embarrassed by the way he sounds when he tries. He just nodded when she said thank you. But he rides by and waves every afternoon when she gets home from summer school.
"An older girl," Coach Taylor says, with an atta-boy tone in his voice. The truth is, he thinks the age difference is unrealistic, not to mention the language barrier, but he also thinks a boy needs ideals. And Liam is a good looking kid, with those arresting blue-green eyes that ten-year-old Gracie calls "the world's prettiest boy eyes." And on the rare occasions when Liam can be made to smile, he has brilliant even white teeth and the sort of dimples girls adore. Sure he's a bit awkward and lanky at the moment, with that sudden height, but that will change. After an initial two months of grief-picking at his food, Liam's began wolfing down second and third helpings at dinner every night. If he keeps riding an hour a day, and Eric can get him to throw in some weight lifting, he'll solidify.
"She's out of my league," Liam signs.
"Well, Mrs. Taylor was out of mine." Sometimes the ideal trips and falls in your lap, like Tami literally did with him one afternoon in the cafeteria. She was a year older, and at the height of her young beauty, when he was pimply and still working on shedding that extra weight. True, it took him another full year after that stumble to get her to drop Mo and date him, but he'd succeeded.
"She still is," Liam signs, and that rare smile bursts out, lighting up his young eyes.