A/N: "This is a part of a series of stories, but you can read it as a stand-alone. Each of these stories is meant to be readable in isolation, but, if you want to read them in the chronological order of events, they go like this:

Tami Taylor Is Always Right (between Season 1 and Season 2)
Back in the Saddle (Season 2)
How Did I Get Here (Season 2)
The Best Man Wins (Season 2)

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Chapter One

"Eric," Shelley cooed, "I can't believe I spent all this time being jealous of you. This is what I make teaching preschool."

His sister-in-law had picked up his paycheck from off the counter. What did she thinks she was doing, touching his stuff? He was glad she'd come to watch Gracie so Tami could get back to work like she wanted, but Shelley had shown up late – at the very last minute – and then she'd immediately started touching his things.

"We're going to get that taken care of," Tami said. "It was just a mistake."

Tami was not going to be happy if he didn't resolve this paycheck error soon. And he wasn't going to be happy if he didn't get out of this house before Shelley brought up the environmental necessity of cloth diapers again. "Good to see you," he told his sister-in-law and made his escape, although not before Tami told him forty-seven times "you need to get that taken care of." Like he didn't know.

He looked at the paystub again on the way out the door. Now that he ran the numbers in his head, he saw that his total salary was about forty percent less than it had been last time he coached the Panthers. It must be an accounting error.

He climbed into his SUV and started driving.

Wait a minute.

Shelley made 60% of what he did teaching preschool? What the hell? What was that? A six-hour-a-day job? Forty weeks a year, maybe? How in the hell did she make that much money teaching preschool?

Then again, lately, it had felt as if he was dealing with a bunch of preschoolers on the Panthers, and it hadn't been worth the pay.

[*]

Eric stopped by Buddy's dealership. It should only take a moment to straighten out this pay check error. Of course, he first had to watch some kid wrestle a pig under a "Hog Wild" sign. San Diego, Buddy said his name was. Or something like that.

When San Diego (or whatever his name was) finally caught the pig, Buddy said, "I think we've found our new tight end."

Damn Buddy. Always trying to do his job for him. Eric, frowning deeply, showed him his paystub.

"Let's go in the office," Buddy said.

When they were settled in the office, Eric lit into Buddy. "I win a state championship and my salary gets reduced 40%?"

"No. It's 37. And I have every intention of doing something about that."

"I've got a baby. I've got a mortgage. Tami wants to put a new room on the house!"

"That's not very good timing," Buddy told him.

Eric knew it wasn't good timing. Tami was always wanting to expand beyond their means, always calling him a tightwad. We've already paid down 70 percent of the mortgage, she'd told him. And you can't see fit to take out a teeny tiny little low-interest home equity loan to make this house fit the size of our growing family? When I've got a full-time job? Yap, yap, yap. Yeah, well, what was she going to do if one of them lost a job? If somebody got really sick? If a plane crashed in the back yard and the tail took out half the house and they had to rebuild? What then?

He knew it was bad timing. It was always bad timing to take out a loan, as far as he was concerned, but he didn't like Buddy telling him how to run his own ship. "You think?" he shouted.

"Listen, Eric, I know you're upset, and I understand, but let me tell you something right now. We had to pay McGregor off, and we had to get you back here, and that depleted the booster club funds." Then Buddy told him the fund wasn't even solvent.

"Fix it," Eric muttered between his teeth before he stood.

"What?"

"You fix it!"

[*]

When Eric came in and set a grocery bag down on the counter that evening, Julie was wearing some skimpy, skanky bikini. If there was one thing he hoped to accomplish as a father, it was to raise daughters who knew they were loved and who therefore respected themselves. "Why are you dressed like that?" he demanded.

"It's what everybody in Brazil's wearing," Shelley said nonchalantly.

He didn't know which irritated him more – what Julie was wearing, or what Shelley was saying. "We're not in Brazil."

Then Shelley told Julie to write a thank you note to her grandmother for those boobs. She'd have to write it all the way to Italy, because that's where Tami's mother was. She'd married some Italian man and moved there years ago. Eric and Tami kept meaning to visit her, but life and budgets always got in the way of an overseas trip.

Tami told Julie to go change, and then Shelley started going off about some summer when Tami was prancing around in a string bikini, her butt hanging out. Eric was pretty sure he was working his ass off to help put Tami through college that summer, so he sure hoped she wasn't strutting around the beach showing hers off. And Shelley had to have been in 10th grade that summer. She was just making stuff up and talking to talk, wasn't she? "If I gave you a hundred dollars, would you please stop?" Eric asked his sister-in-law.

"Yes," Shelley smirked, "but you don't have a hundred dollars, Eric."

Shelley sure knew how to hit a man where it hurt. "I'll be back in my office." The office he'd had to move to a crowded corner of the cold garage, because Shelley had taken over the guest bedroom where his office used to be.

As he was heading toward the garage, he overhead Shelley inviting Tami to a Dixie Chicks concert on Wednesday and hollered, "I've got a booster meeting on Wednesday, Tam!"

Dixie Chicks. Yeah, that's just what Tami needed to be doing after popping out a baby and getting up two times a night to breastfeed. Rocking out at a concert and inhaling the pot fumes. Then again, maybe if she got a little secondhand buzz, maybe he'd finally get some action around here. They'd only done it the one time since Gracie was born. It had been fantastic, but it had only been the once. He was trying not to pressure her, but…damn. A man had needs.

Did Dixie Chick fans smoke pot? Probably.

[*]

In the principal's office, Buddy told Eric there was a solution to the paystub "snafu." They weren't going to raise his coaching salary, but they would make him Athletic Director.

That's what Eric's father used to do, after he'd quit managing the car dealership. He'd worked as an athletic director at a large high school in Odessa, and then at a university in El Paso. Mr. Taylor had just retired last year from the university, and he'd been making well over six figures. Of course, a university wasn't anything like a high school, but Eric knew his father had made enough at Westfield High to pay the bills. He'd never understood what his father did, exactly, but it had certainly seemed to him it was a full-time job, even at the high school level. "Athletic Director?"

"You would be in charge of our entire Athletic Department."

Eric wasn't looking for two full-time jobs. "That's great, but I think I've got enough responsibilities."

"Eric, it's not that big a deal," the principal told him. "The department pretty much runs itself."

Buddy tried to sell it to him by saying it would look really good on a resume if he was ever applying for another job. He better not be applying for another job anytime soon. He'd just quit his last one. And he was still skeptical this position wasn't going to require a huge portion of his time.

"It's pretty much just a gravy train paycheck," the principal reassured him.

"How much does this job pay?" Eric asked.

The principal told him it was a part-time position and that, combined with his coaching salary, the job would put him within spitting distance of his old salary.

"Spitting distance? What exactly is spitting distance?"

"It's just temporary," Buddy assured him.

As he left, he thought about how much more his TMU job had paid. He'd come home to Dillon with his tail tucked between his legs, and now he was going to have to humble himself even farther. His hands tensed on the steering wheel.