Chapter Fourteen

Eric placed a protective hand on the small of Tami's back when they entered the Goudas' house. He wanted to keep her nearby.

Dale barely glanced at Hapi when the servant answered the door, nor did he show any obvious interest in the man throughout the evening. Instead, he seemed most fascinated by Mr. Gouda's paintings and arty nick nacks. Dale kept asking questions: "Is this from the Ming dynasty period? Is that an original? Why that looks like…" until Mr. Gouda finally offered to take him on a tour of the entire house.

At dinner, Mr. Gouda asked Dale how he knew so much about art.

"Well," Dale answered, "I was an art history minor in college."

That much was true. Dale hadn't lied about much tonight, except when he pretended to have come from New York instead of Cairo and to be a French tutor instead of a DEA agent.

It had been a joke to their father, Dale's French major and art history minor. "What's he going to do with that useless degree?" Dad had said. "Thank God we're not paying for it, because I'm sure as hell not paying for any son of mine to dance around paintings speaking French. No wonder he didn't want to play football. Little pansy might have gotten hurt."

And Mom said, "Stop it, Frank. Dale has his own interests, and I'm sure he'll find a job. He's clever and he could do all sorts of things. I could have too, if I had gone to college."

"Are you still bitter about that, sweetheart?" Dad asked her. "I wasn't the reason you couldn't go. Dale was the reason, technically, when you think about it."

"Well maybe I'll go now," she said. "I don't have any babies anymore. Eric is almost ten."

"It's a little late for that, don't you think, Nancy? Just stick with your receptionist job."

Eric's father hadn't gone to college either. He'd been signed as a rare free agent to the AFL, but he hadn't lived up to his initial promise. After a single season, his contract wasn't renewed. For the next two years, Eric's mom and dad (along with a young Dale) lived off of their savings and Mom's meager income, while Dad played amateur football, didn't earn anything, and waited to be picked up by a professional team again. When the bank accounts were all exhausted, and the debt began to pile up, Dad finally applied to attend the police academy. His career on the Midland police department advanced at a snail's pace. So when Dale graduated from college, and the next week went to FLETC, and within one year after that was, as a DEA agent, already making as much money as his father, Mom said, "See, I told you Dale would do fine. And aren't you proud of him? He chose law enforcement too. He's following in your footsteps."

"Being a cop was not my calling," Dad scoffed. "Eric's the one following in my footsteps. He's and even better player than I was, and this time, the Taylors aren't getting overlooked. A Taylor is going to be playing for the NFL."

"Pardon me, but where's your restroom?" Dale asked now. Mr. Gouda told him, and Dale excused himself from the table.

An uneasy feeling twisted and tumbled in Eric's stomach. Hapi was still in the room, serving as a kind of footman, and Eric wondered if he suspected Dale at all. He was busy refilling water glasses.

The dining room wall clock ticked and a cuckoo shot forth, clucking the hour. Eric leapt a little in his seat, laughed, and put a hand over his chest. Mr. Gouda chuckled, as did Tami. She gave Eric a sympathetic look. How could she be so calm through this entire dinner while he was so tense? Perhaps because it was his job to protect her.

To Eric, it seemed Dale was gone a very long time before he finally returned to the table.

"If you're done eating, want to go run a few plays?" Moss asked Eric when Dale had sat back down.

Eric didn't like leaving Tami in the house alone, and he hesitated. Tami must have known why, because she insisted, "Go on. You boys get some work done. Dale and Mr. Gouda can keep me company." She looked at him pointedly, as though to suggest he was being silly, and maybe she was right. Neither of these two men was going to let her get gunned down, and Hapi appeared rather harmless.

"We'll have dessert in about an hour," Mr. Gouda said. "You can rejoin us then."

Eric followed Moss outside. Once they started working, Eric forgot his worries and lost himself in the beauty of the game, half coaching Moss and half just playing with him, until his arm started aching. He sat down on one of the large, decorative rocks in the Goudas' backyard and circled his shoulder in a painful stretch. Moss sat on a rock next to him.

"Old football injury?" he asked. "Is that why you never went pro? I heard you were really good. Coach Ramsey mentioned it."

"Nah. I never had a major injury that kept me from playing. Guess I'm just not twenty anymore." Eric hadn't expected the soreness to creep up on him like that. He was only in his early thirties, after all, but he hadn't thrown the ball quite that much in a long while. "I didn't go pro because I wasn't quite good enough."

"But Coach said they started you your freshman year! And he was talking about that spectacular play you made, when the Aggies – "

"- I played a hell of a lot better my freshman and sophomore year than I did after that. Whatever reputation I'd earned, I lost my junior year. It was a bad year for me. I don't know why. I just couldn't seem to get my head in the game."

Eric did know why, even if he didn't say it. He'd found out about his mom's affair toward the end of his sophomore season, and his parents had officially gotten divorced the summer before his junior year. He couldn't comprehend it. His mother had finally gone to college, as she'd long wanted to, when Eric started college himself. She'd pursued an associate's degree in business administration, and it was one of her professors who became her lover. She was 50 at the time, and Eric, at not quite 20, couldn't even imagine sex at that age. Nor could he imagine his mother betraying his father. He knew his father was far from being an ideal husband, but the man didn't beat, and he didn't cheat, and he earned a living.

Dale had taken their mother's side, had told Eric, "What can you expect? The way he treats her?"

"But you must know how Dad feels," Eric had said, and instantly regretted it.

"That's completely different. I treated Cindy right. I didn't neglect her, or criticize her, or….I adored her. When was the last time Dad even complimented Mom? Can you remember?"

Eric hadn't taken anyone's side, but it had disturbed him deeply, the thought that his mother could stray from her vows, that a couple could be married for thirty years and yet the marriage could still end. Before he'd learned about the affair, he'd already been planning to propose to Tami. In fact, they'd begun to talk in some detail about the future, without actually being engaged. He thought he'd propose officially the same day he got drafted, because, at the time, everyone – Tami included – believed he would. But then he started thinking – what was the point of marriage, really, if your wife could just jilt you for another, any day, any moment, after two kids and three decades?

Tami held his hand through the divorce of his parents, the way he'd held hers through the death of her stepfather. "Divorce is a kind of death," Tami told him. "It's okay for you to mourn." His game improved his senior year, but by then it was too late. A younger quarterback had taken the limelight. And when he wasn't drafted, Eric was even more hesitant to propose. Tami had expected the life of a professional football player's wife, hadn't she? The house, the cars, the shoes, the pool. There wasn't going to be any of that. In the spring of his senior year, he was looking at a job at a junior high in Temple – where he could teach P.E., Public Speaking, and Shop and get paid just $21,000, with a mere $850 stipend to assistant coach the football team. He was supposed to be making over ten times that in the NFL. He thought maybe he wouldn't propose after all, that he'd wait and earn some money first and claw his way up coaching and then see if she still wanted him. But then she told him she was pregnant. He knew he could never be just her boyfriend, when he was already the father of her child.

The sun was setting in soft hues over the lake when he proposed, and the row boat rocked gently on the water. He'd rested the oars, and he and Tami were just floating, unanchored, drifting somewhere without direction. He fished out the ring. The diamond was twice what he could afford. He'd had to borrow half the money from Dale. That phone call to his brother had been embarrassing, but Dale had wired the money the next morning.

"Tami," he said, and gripped the ring tightly, for fear of somehow losing it in the water. He couldn't kneel, not in the boat, but he bowed with his eyes, looked at the floorboards instead of her face. "I love you. And I think I'm going to get that job, the one I told you about. I know it's not much, but...anyway..." He finally looked up, "will you marry me?"

She just nodded and held out her hand for the ring.

"You're not going to have the life you once imagined," he told her as she looked at the engagement ring he'd just slid on her finger.

"I imagined a life with a man who loves me," she said softly, "and a man I love. A man I respect, not because he can play football, but because he's good to me, and he's faithful, and he's honorable, and he works hard at whatever he tries to do. What did you imagine?"

Eric leaned forward, rested a hand gently on her hip, and pressed his forehead against hers. "I imagined I was worthy of you." He kissed her deeply; the boat swayed and half tipped, and they laughed and righted it.

"So you became a coach instead?" Moss asked now.

"So I became a coach," Eric answered. "And a teacher."

"I don't have any illusions about going pro. But I thought I might get a scholarship, maybe."

"Maybe," Eric said. "You've got another full year, and you're already damn good, son. And if you don't, well…" He looked toward the massive house and laughed.

"Yeah, I'd kind of like to make it on my own, though," Moss said. "It's always felt weird to me, all this. We didn't use to have all this. And when we didn't…I had my dad around more. Now he's just busy with the business. Gone half the time, to Egypt, France, Germany….all over."

"Well, he came to your game."

"He won't be at the next."

Eric patted him on his back. "I'll be there. Your team will be there. That's a family right there." He stood up. "I think we've still gotten minutes before dessert. Let me see you run a few more."

After the plays, before they went back inside for dessert, Moss paused on the shaded portico. "Thanks for taking so much time to work with me, Coach Taylor. No one's ever taken that much trouble for me before. Lately I've felt like…well, like I've been walking under the radar. Invisible."

"You weren't invisible when you made that pass Friday night, son." Of course, when this drug bust went down, Moss was perhaps going to wish he was invisible. Eric clapped a hand on the boy's shoulder. "You're a good kid. Whatever happens, remember that. You're a good kid."

"Thanks, Coach."

When they returned to the table, everything appeared peaceful and normal, except that Mr. Gouda had pulled his chair a bit closer to Tami's and had leaned in to speak with her. Dale was standing on the other side of the dining room table, his back to them, examining a painting on the wall. Hapi was gone from the room, presumably to fetch the dessert.

On the drive home, Eric said to Tami, "You know, not that I'm bothered, but you did promise you wouldn't flirt with Moss's dad."

"Eric, I was not flirting with Ammon. I was politely maintaining a conversation with him."

"If you were flirting," Dale said from the back seat of Tami's sedan, "you should recall that he's inadvertently employing a drug smuggler. You might want to set your sights on a clean-cut kid like Eric instead."

Tami reached out a hand to stroke Eric's cheek. "Not so clean cut at the moment. But the five o'clock shadow is kind of sexy."

"Are you two kids going to need this back seat?" Dale asked. "Should I be the one driving?"