As Coach Taylor approached the Hayes house with a record tucked under his arm, he saw Tami slip an envelope into the mailbox and put up the flag. "Morning, Coach Taylor," she said as he slowed to a stop near the curb. "I was just mailing that letter to your son."

"Good. If he doesn't write back, you let me know, and I'll make sure he does." If the boy ever returned his calls, that was. Since returning to Euless, Coach Taylor had been communicating entirely through Warren, who claimed the boy was doing well, fulfilling his chores, keeping his nose clean, and settling in well with the other boys. If anything good came out of this, he supposed, it might be a better relationship with his father-in-law. Or a relationship period. Ivy would have been glad to see them working together for Eric's sake.

"Thanks," Tami replied. "Headed to work?" She had a backpack on her left shoulder and looked ready to head to school herself. It was only a half mile walk.

He nodded. "In a few. Are you leaving this early?"

"I have to get my schedule and walk the halls and learn where everything is. Figured I'd give myself some time."

"Well, you have any trouble, let me know, I'll get one of my boys to show you around."

She thanked him and headed off across the street. He went on to her front door and rang the bell. Bonnie, clipping a long, green earring on her right ear, answered. He held out the record. "Roger Miller," he said. "You liked that fellow who opened at Billy Bob's Saturday night, and he reminded me of Roger Miller so...thought you might like it."

She took the record from him. "Never heard of him."

"Really?"

"I'll have to unpack my old player and dust it off to give this a listen." She put the record down inside somewhere, but she didn't invite him in. In fact, she checked her watch, as if she was in a hurry.

He better make this quick. "Listen...uh...I want to apologize. Saturday night...That was probably the worst date you've ever been on."

He'd talked about his late wife almost the entire time when they weren't dancing. He hadn't planned to, but Bonnie had let him, and he hadn't been able to talk about her with anyone before now. In the beginning, people always looked nervous or worried when he mentioned Ivy, like they were afraid he was going to break down, so he'd stopped mentioning her, and then he'd thrown himself into his work to try to stop thinking about her. Head down, he had pressed on. But Bonnie hadn't seemed the least bit uneasy. She'd even asked questions. And the memories had just poured out, like a flood.

"The barbecue wasn't that bad," she said. "It was average. And you know I loved the opening act. And line dancing is loads of fun."

"I meant the company. But I'm hoping you'll give me a second chance to make a better impression."

She smiled, a little sadly. "Deacon, it's fine that you want to talk about your wife. It's perfectly normal. You were married to her over half your life. But I think maybe you're not ready to date. So if you want to just hang out with me sometime, talk about her, I'm happy to learn about her. Really. But you don't have to take me out."

"Umm..."

"My fee is $50 an hour."

"Oh."

She laughed and patted his shoulder playfully. "I'm kidding you. We're neighbors. No reason we can't be friends."

He smiled, a bit hesitantly. The thing was, he thought maybe he wanted to take her out. She was pretty. And interesting. She wasn't like any woman he knew at work, and he knew lots of women at work. That's what happened when you worked in a school. Bonnie was smart, but not in an obvious kind of way. And she was incredibly lively. Her liveliness made him feel a strange sense of discomfort and amusement, a not entirely unpleasant feeling he wouldn't mind recreating. "Okay then. Well..." He took a step back. "Hope you enjoy the record." He tipped his coach's hat to her and made his getaway.

[*]

School would be re-starting back in Euless today, and Eric was surprised to find he didn't entirely wish himself there. He didn't really want to sit through lectures where his mind would drift to painful memories of his mother or go to weekend parties and pretend he was enjoying them when, really, there was a yawning emptiness inside of him and a vague sense that he was playing a role, and playing it bigger and bigger every day to convince everyone he was fine.

Here, the work was a better distraction, and there was no one to pretend for. The other boys didn't expect him to be content with his life back home. None of them were with their own. And yet, for all their differences, there was something genuine in the comradery they shared, and after long hours of work on the ranch, the play actually meant something, even if it was as simple as a card game or a scrimmage, even if there were no girls to fool around with and no beer to drink. Eric didn't need bigger and bigger here, because when he was exhausted from mucking stalls and tossing hay and milking cows, and he finally had an hour to relax, the simplest things felt good and fun.

After a week and a half on the ranch, Eric had come to understand what Dante meant when he said they weren't afraid of Warren Maddox. These boys didn't fear Grandpa, they respected him.

Eric didn't come from the kind of broken, often addicted homes they'd come from - worlds of neglect and abuse. He thought his father criticized him too much, and he was still angry with the man for abandoning him here, but when Billy told him his own pa started calling him "a no good worthless lazy ass piece of shit" when Billy was just four, it made his own father's correction seem somewhat more mild and appropriate.

Grandpa Maddox never criticized the boys. He found things to complement them for, and he did it frequently, but he did mete out losses of privilege and extra chores for violations of his clearly stated rules. He played football with them, and also soccer – which Javier (Eric knew which boy was which, now) insisted on also calling football. After dinner - which was some of the best, freshest, straight-off-the-ranch food Eric had ever eaten – Grandpa Maddox would tell them funny stories about his own unsupervised and sometimes risky youth that had them all - Eric included - rolling with laughter.

Grandpa had intentionally roomed boys together he hadn't expected to get along, applied the discipline for the infraction of an individual to the room as a whole, and somehow made them a team. Dante and Billy fought often enough, but they never got physical, and sometimes when they got loud, they'd stop suddenly and grow quiet, listening for Grandpa Maddox. Then one or the other would apologize and they'd go back to their bunks or their chores.

Eric liked Dante best of all of the boys. He was a good center for their little makeshift football team, which played 5 on 5, and he was the most articulate of the boys. Eric felt most comfortable with him, because he didn't seem to belong to a rough and tumble world, though in fact he had. One day Eric asked him how he could tolerate Billy, let alone get along so well with him most of the time, given how racist the guy was.

"Billy is a product of his environment," Dante told Eric. "His parents are probably racist, and part of him is too. But, you know, he's got my back here. Because this is a new environment."

"If you say so."

"First book Warren made me read was Up from Slavery," Dante told him. "He highlighted some things. One of the lines I think he wanted me to notice was when Booker T. Washington said - " He amazed Eric by reciting the passage word-for-word, "I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done."

"What was the first book my grandpa gave Billy?"

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Which he refused to read at first...but then he got into it. He could relate to what Malcolm said, about life being a hustle. He could relate a lot, actually, to being on the bottom. He grew up poorer than I did. You know, he didn't even have running water where he lived."

The first book Grandpa had assigned Eric was A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. It was the journal of a man who had lost his wife. "I lost my mom, not my wife," Eric told him, and Grandpa had said, "But you aren't the only one who lost something. Your father lost his wife. Maybe you ought to have some inkling what that's like."

Eric would hike out to a quiet spot on the ranch and settle beneath the shade of one of the few trees to read the book, because sometimes it made him feel like crying. He didn't cry, but he was afraid he might, and damn if he was going to do it in front of any of these boys.

[*]

In the mid-afternoon, during what was called "the siesta," when the boys had an hour to drink sweet tea and relax wherever and however they chose, mail was distributed. On Tuesday, Eric received two letters. One was yet another from his father - cool and formal and recounting mundane events relating largely to his job and the upkeep of the house. Like the last two, it concluded with the wish that Eric would come to realize he was only trying to help the boy. And as with the last two, Eric did not reply.

The second letter was from a cheerleader he had dated briefly, and who was apparently under the impression that they were boyfriend and girlfriend, even though Eric had already been with two other girls since he'd last gone out with her. He supposed she'd gotten the address from his father.

Though he didn't reply to his father's letter, he replied to the girl's. He was less callous than he might have been several days ago, and, as gently as he knew how, he told her that she was a great girl, and he'd had a great time, but he wasn't in a good place to be in a relationship right now, and she deserved more, and she should probably stop writing him and concentrate on finding another boyfriend.

That night, he was fading off to sleep when Billy and Dante began arguing about the division of tomorrow's chores.

Billy said, "Predictable. Ya's lazy."

Dante replied, "That fits your stereotype, does it?"

"Ain't got nothin' to do with stereotypes. It's just a fact that I end up doin' most of the back breakin' shit," Billy muttered. "I don't hate black people ya know. I just hate ni -" He stopped himself. "Ya know."

"I don't hate white people, you know," Dante told Billy. "I just hate trash."

Eric turned to the wall, hoping he didn't get dragged into the exchange.

"Ya sayin' I'm trash?"

"Being trash is a choice," Dante told him.

Billy rolled on his side and the top bunk creaked. Eric anticipated a serious blowout, but instead Billy just sounded thoughtful. "Used to be trash," he said. "Tryin' not to be. But what happens when we leave this ranch? Got to survive in the world's we's in."

"I'm not going back home," Dante replied. "Warren said I can stay on after my time is up if I want, work here in exchange for room and board and for tuition at UT-Brownsville. Bet he'd let you do it, too."

"I ain't gettin' into no UT-Brownsville."

"It's really not hard to get into. It's not exactly Yale."

"Dropped out of high school already," Billy told him.

"Then I bet Warren would let you stay and work until you get your GED and find a better job."

"Ain't gonna pass the GED."

"You aren't dumb," Dante told him. "I've seen the books you read. By choice."

"Hey, did ya get that girl's number at the indoor pool on Saturday?" Billy asked.

"Why do you always change the subject when someone tells you you aren't as dumb as you think you are?"

"Did ya get it or not?"

"I got it," Eric said. He rolled out of bed and pulled his jeans out from underneath his bunk and dug out the slip of paper. "One of you want it? I'm not interested." She'd come on a little too strongly for his tastes. He was getting tired of easy girls. He'd gone down that road after his mom died, and it hadn't done a damn thing to kill the pain. Now he just felt a little empty inside, and part of him felt guilty, too. That little speech his father had given him about respecting girls lingered in his mind, no matter how often he tried to purge it. He knew he should be more respectful, and that would probably be a lot easier if he started hanging out with girls worth respecting.

"How in the hell did you get it?" Dante asked.

"'Course Mr. All American got it," Billy said. "Look at the asshole."

"You want it?" Eric asked.

"Nah, I don't want it. She gave it to you. She don't want one of us callin' her up. Why don't you want it? Ya already got a steady girl back home?"

"Yeah," Eric lied, because that way he wouldn't have to explain why he wasn't interested in the girl at the pool.

"Well what she don't know won't hurt her," Billy reasoned.

Eric dropped his pants and rolled back into bed.

"Now that's just a lie," Dante said. "Ignorance is not bliss. I didn't know my father was addicted to drugs, but it sure hurt me anyway, when we lost the house."

"So you dealt 'em to get the house back?" Billy asked.

"That might not have been the wisest decision I ever made," Dante admitted.

Eric fell asleep that night, listening to them talk. The next morning, for the first time, he didn't wake up angry with his father. Instead, he woke up with tears in his eyes, from a dream of his mother pushing his two-year-old self on a swing. When he felt the wetness on his cheeks, he quickly pulled the sheet up to the tippy top of his head, before Dante or Billy could notice.

[*]

On Wednesday, when Grandpa distributed the mail, he slid a single envelope into Eric's hand. The return address, which was from Euless, had no name but indicated a girl's handwriting.

Eric went onto the back porch of the main house and settled into a rocking chair. He looked at the letter and sighed. Was his father giving out his address to every girl he'd fooled around with in the past six months?

Then he noticed the address. It was on his own street. Not only his own street, but the address was for the house right next to his. No one had lived in that house for months.

Curious, he quickly tore the letter open.