On Saturday morning, Coach Taylor awoke later than usual, at 7:30 AM. He went to Eric's room to check that the boy had come inside last night. The door creaked as he eased it open. The teenager was snoring softly beneath his heavy Cowboys comforter, the one his mother had quilted for him when he was just eight. Eric had put it in storage in the attic when he turned twelve, too old then, he thought, for a bedroom theme, but he'd drawn it out again a month after she died.
From Eric's wall hung a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar. Miss November was nearly naked. Ivy would have never allowed that on his wall, and maybe Coach Taylor should have told him to take it down. Ivy would have given Eric a lecture on respecting women if he'd put that up under her watch. Coach Taylor wasn't much for lectures himself, unless they related to football, but he hoped he'd at least shown Eric how to respect a woman by the way he had treated his own wife. He wasn't so sure, though. The boy had broken up with his steady girlfriend, a sweet, quiet and modest girl named Mary Ellen, and for the past few months, Coach Taylor had heard rumors that Eric had been jumping from cheerleader to cheerleader, leaving disappointment in his wake. Ivy would have made Coach Taylor talk to the boy about it, but in her absence, Deacon Taylor found it so much easier just to talk about football. Not that it mattered. Soon enough, Eric wouldn't have contact with any girls for seven months.
Coach Taylor quietly closed the door. He walked to the kitchen, started the coffee, and then slid the chair out from the kitchen desk and eased down on the hard wood. The plastic of the receiver from the kitchen phone was cool and slick in his hand. The cards of the rolodex fluttered as he turned it to the M's. Coach Taylor hadn't seen or spoken to Warren Maddox since Ivy's funeral. He put his finger in the hole for the number one, turned the wheel, and watched it whirl. He dialed the numbers one by one. His father-in-law would be awake. On the ranch, he woke with the sun.
"Second Chances Ranch," a teenage boy answered.
"Warren Maddox please."
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Coach Deacon Taylor."
A click of receiver against wood was followed by silence, and then his father-in-law's deep Texas drawl, "Deacon, what can I do ya for?"
"You were right. Eric started lashing out after Ivy died, just like you thought he would." Warren had warned him this might happen at the funeral, but Coach Taylor had shrugged off his father-in-law's unsolicited advice with the words, Eric's always been a well-behaved kid.
"And what have you done about it?" Warren asked.
"Hell, I've just been trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And I know I haven't done a good job with him. He's about to get convicted of a DUI."
"Is he now?"
"And that's the third time I've had to pick him up from the station. The others were for public intoxication. His grades are in the gutter. I've pulled him from the team. I'm at a loss. I was hoping you could take him when the semester's over. I'll drive him down during winter break, leave him with you until August. See if you can't straighten him out."
"You always were too concerned with your own things."
The heat rushed to Coach Taylor's head. "What the hell does that mean?"
"Well, you sure didn't think of Ivy – of her education - or of me or Ivy's mother when you eloped with her."
"That was twenty-one years ago."
"She was barely eighteen, Deacon."
"Legal marrying age," Coach Taylor reminded him. "And you got married when you were only sixteen."
"That was a different time, and I asked my future father-in-law for her hand. You were working for me, Deacon, living in my bunk house with the other ranch hands. I gave you not only a job but room and board when you desperately needed it. And you thanked me for it by seducing my daughter and moving her hundreds of miles away from me."
"I didn't go about it the right way twenty-one years ago," Coach Taylor told his father-in-law. "I should have asked for her hand and your blessing. All these delinquent boys you've turned around in the past fifteen years, these boys you've cared for like your own - and still you can't forgive me that one thing?"
"She was all I had after her mother died, and you just took her without a word. After seducing her under my roof."
Deacon didn't know what his father-in-law imagined went on back then. He and Ivy had flirted and kissed and maybe petted a little, but Ivy had refused to have sex with him outside of marriage. Maybe that was partly why he'd been so eager to marry her so fast. He'd been blindly infatuated with her back then – she was funny and smart and beautiful, so very beautiful. She could ride a horse and shoot like Annie Oakley, too, and Deacon didn't think there was another girl like her in all the world. He was older, but she was more mature, more grounded. He'd gone to Texas A&M on a full scholarship and lost it his freshman year when he broke his arm. The arm had healed, but he'd never gotten his scholarship back, and he'd never finished college. Deacon's parents barely had two dimes to rub together, so he sent his mother money from his jobs whenever he could. He'd drifted from town to town after dropping out of college, looking for work and taking it wherever he could find it.
He'd married Ivy for somewhat shallow reasons at first. He'd wanted to bed her something awful. And their first three years of marriage had been touch and go, as they eked out an existence hundreds of miles from both their families. They fought and they learned. She wouldn't take any crap from him at all, and she'd taught him how to argue and how to love. With her support, he worked his way up, and eventually, even without a degree, he became an Athletic Director and coach of a large high school. They grew together and grieved together through three miscarriages before finally rejoicing in Eric's birth. Deacon Taylor had grown to love that woman more than himself, and he'd have done anything to please her.
"I loved your daughter, Warren. I was faithful to her. I provided for her. I loved her long and hard. You can fault me for a hundred things, but not for my lack of love for her."
"Then love her son."
"I do. I love our son. That's why I'm willing to turn him over to you for a while. That's why I'm willing to take him off my team and probably lose the best chance I've had at State in the course of my entire career. Because I love him and I don't know how to help him become the man I know he can be. I don't know how to do it without Ivy."
"Did you tell him that's why you're sending him to me? Because you love him?"
"Not in those words."
"Then use those words," Warren Maddox said, "before you send him to me." And with that, he hung up.
[*]
Coach Taylor pushed the bottle of anabuse pills across the chipped yellow formica kitchen counter top. "I want to see you take it."
Eric sighed and rolled his eyes. He pushed down on the childproof cap, twisted, fingered out a pill, and then swallowed it dry. "Happy?"
"No, I'm not happy you have to take these."
"Don't know why the court's making me. I'm not an alcoholic. I only get drunk after games. So do a lot of other guys. I don't hear you chewing out Joey and Mack. They were with me when I got arrested, you know."
"They weren't driving. And I did chew them out. I'm benching them both for the next two games. They don't get to come back on the team until the playoffs."
Eric shoved a folder into his backpack, which was lying on the counter, and violently zipped it up. "You won't even make it to the playoffs without the three of us."
"Maybe not, but Mo McArnold is doing better than I expected." Mo was Coach Taylor's second string quarterback. He'd moved him up to replace Eric. "He's eager to prove himself. He's working hard. You could learn a thing or two from him."
"From Mo?" Eric slung his backpack over his shoulder.
"He's polite, a hard worker, no arrests. B+ average." Coach Taylor thought he better broach this subject. Ivy would have wanted him to, maybe more than any of the others: "And he's respectful toward girls."
Eric snorted. "You don't know what goes on off your field."
"I know enough to know you haven't been respectful to girls. And your mother would be mortified."
"Playing the dead mother card again, are you?" Eric leaned back against the stove and crossed his arms over his chest. "I haven't done anything with a girl she didn't want me to do."
"Oh, well congratulations on not being a rapist."
Eric shook his head and looked away.
"You break up with Mary Ellen, a truly sweet girl – because she won't put out for you, and then you start cycling through the cheer- "
"- Never bothered you when your star linebacker was doing it."
"Rick's not my son. You're my son. I have higher standards for you than my other players, and it's not true that it didn't bother me. But I'm not that boy's father." Coach Taylor sighed. He wasn't getting anywhere with this conversation. "Let's go."
"Why do I even have to go to school and finish out the semester, if you're just going to make me retake my entire junior year next year?"
"Because you're sixteen, Eric. This is what you do. You go to school."
"Until you can pawn me off on Grandpa Maddox, you mean?"
The sense of failure welled up in Coach Taylor's chest, churned, and turned to anger. "You brought this on yourself, Eric. Now get in the damn truck!"
Coach Taylor paced after his son to the kitchen door. As he was locking the door from the outside, the passenger's door of the truck slammed and echoed beneath the carport. When they were parked in the school lot, Eric didn't open the door right away. Coach Taylor thought he was bitter about the role he'd been assigned - hauling water, cleaning toilets, and doing laundry for the team. He had to watch, from the sidelines, Mo assume his mantle. "A little hard work never hurt anyone, son. You're going to be doing a hell of a lot more than this on the ranch."
"Yeah, I get paid for any of it?"
"Hopefully you'll get paid dividends in character."
"If you think Grandpa Maddox is such a great guy," Eric asked, jerking his backpack up from the floor. "Then why do you two hardly ever talk to each other? Why has he only come to visit twice since I was born?"
"We talk, your grandfather and I. A couple times a year. Your mother visited him a few times over the years, too, without us. But you know Weslaco's a long ways away."
Eric put his hand on the car door handle. "By the way, whatever you might have heard around school, I didn't break up with Mary Ellen because she wouldn't put out. We lost our virginity to each other a week before Mom died. And Mary Ellen initiated it."
Coach Taylor blinked.
"I didn't break up with her at all. She broke up with me because I wasn't fun to hang out with anymore after Mom died. She put up with me the first three months, out of guilt, but then she said she just couldn't do it anymore. She said she wasn't my psychiatrist, and she couldn't make me her project to fix. She had to move on with her life. So, yeah, I fooled around with some perfectly willing girls after she cut me loose, because I thought it would make her jealous and make me feel better. But you wouldn't know any of that, would you? Because you never fucking asked." He threw his shoulder against the door to push it open.
A thousand words clattered around in Coach Taylor's mind. I didn't know that, son, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't talk to you after your mother died. I'm sorry I could barely function myself. I'm sorry I've been drowning my sorrows in football. I love you, and I'm sorry I'm not the father your mother would have wanted me to be. I'm sorry...I'm sorry...I'm sorry. But what came out was, "Don't you ever use that language with me again!"
The passenger's door slammed shut.
