Chapter Twenty-nine
After Eric left the water and aspirin by the bedside, he returned to the living room, handed Dale a pint of one of his craft beers, and slumped down on the couch with a tall glass of water in his own hand.
"No bull riding tonight, huh?" Dale asked him.
Eric shot him a warning look. "Tami drank a bit too much," he said.
"No kidding. I never would have guessed from the way she was nibbling on your ear. Or trying to."
Eric smiled. Dale's good humor was too infectious to resist. "She's about to pass out. I guess it's my turn to slam drawers in the morning."
"Doesn't she have to work tomorrow?"
"I suspect she'll be calling in sick."
Dale slipped a bookmark in his book and closed it. He took a sip of the beer. "This is good. I thought you were a Bud Light man."
"I'm a man of refined taste, Dale."
"I know. I've seen your wife."
Eric smiled and wagged a warning finger at him. "Watch it. I almost got into a fight with a guy tonight. And he was bigger than you."
"Do tell."
"He was commenting on Tami's ass."
Dale chuckled and sipped his beer.
"What are you reading?" Eric wanted to connect with his brother and manage to do it sober.
Dale turned the book outward. It had a French title. "It's about French-Arabic conflicts."
"Ah." Eric said. He didn't know a thing about that. So he asked, "What made you want to major in French anyway?"
"A girl," Dale answered.
"Did you get the girl?"
"It was Cindy."
"Oh." Eric bit his bottom lip and wished he hadn't asked.
"But Cindy switched to being an English major," Dale said, "and I stuck with French. It clicked with me. I don't know why. Maybe because I did that semester in Paris."
Paris. Eric had never even been outside of Texas, except for his college games. He and Dale were so different. How had they sprung from the same loins? "You talk to Dad recently?" Eric asked.
"I don't talk to Dad. You do?"
"Three or four times a year, on the phone. He came for Christmas last year. He made some snide comment about me not making it to the NFL again. Twelve years later. Twelve years!"
"You've got to get that toxicity out of your life, brother. That's what I did. Years ago. Just rid yourself of him."
"He's family," Eric said. "He's our father."
"Well, when he's too feeble to wipe his own ass, I'll pay someone to do it for him. That's as far as my sense of obligation for that man extends."
"Did he really not come to a single one of your high school baseball games?"
"Of course not. It wasn't football. You made him proud though."
"For a while," Eric said. "Until my stats fell in college. But eventually I realized there's only one person I should care about making proud."
"Yourself."
"Nah, I meant Tami, but she's my other half, you know…one flesh….so I guess you could say myself."
Dale looked a little pained, and Eric didn't know what he'd said to make him feel that way. "You're a lucky man, Eric. Always were. Wasn't that your nickname in high school? Lucky?"
Mo had given him that name after he'd made a surprise touchdown his freshman year during his second JV game, after which he'd been put directly on varsity. Eric had hated the nickname. "I've worked for what I've got."
"For Tami?"
"Yeah. For her too. What we share together…it didn't just fall in my lap."
"You think that's what happened, huh? I didn't work hard enough for Cindy?"
"I never said that! I don't know anything about that. But a good relationship is never just luck. I do know that."
"You don't think," Dale asked, "that what you and Tami have is at least 50% pure chemistry?"
"Yeah, maybe," Eric admitted. "Maybe so. But there's that other 50%. It would fall apart without that."
Dale set his book on the coffee table and sipped the pint of beer Eric had given him. "Do you think there's anything Mom could have done to make their marriage work?"
"Maybe. Maybe not," Eric replied. "But there's plenty Dad could have done."
"Well we agree on that, then. I never knew how you felt about that. I always got the impression you were disappointed with Mom."
"I was," Eric admitted. "Adultery is adultery. I understand why she did it, but I still don't think she should have. She should have told him. Told him what she wanted, and told him she was going to walk away if she didn't get it. Given him a chance, at least. "
"You think he would have done a damn thing with that chance?"
"I don't know, Dale. But it would have been fair to give him one. He didn't have the best upbringing. You know grandpa beat him something awful. Dad at least never did that. He never raised a hand to any of us."
"Sure," Dale said, "he just beat us down with his words. Th nice thing about a physical bruise is that it fades."
"So do the emotional ones, especially when you've got someone to – " Eric stopped. Someone like Tami to encourage you, he was thinking. "Does Cleo build you up?"
"She's never knocked me down."
"That's not quite what I asked."
"I feel good when I'm with her." Dale took another sip. "But I was torn down for so many years, I'm not sure I would even know the difference between someone who really admired me and someone who just didn't dislike me. If I'm not being criticized, I just assume I'm doing an acceptable job."
"Mom tried," Eric said. "She always tried to encourage us."
"Yeah, she tried. But it was too much against a force like Dad. And she wasn't around much. She had to work a lot, first to pay the debts and then to feed that secret college fund of hers." Dale laughed. "I guess Dad had no idea what she was making or what they owed."
"She did manage the finances," Eric said.
"I'm surprised Dad let her. I guess he saw it as a domestic chore."
"Or maybe he actually respected her ability," Eric suggested. "She got them out of debt."
Dale laughed. "Dad? Respect Mom? You know where I learned how to respect a woman? From Uncle Joey." That was their mother's brother. He'd lived in Midland for several years, but he and his wife had moved when Eric was seven and Dale was seventeen. "Where did you learn?"
Eric scratched his cheek. "Coach Rayburn."
"But not from Dad. I hate that man."
"Don't do that," Eric said. "Don't make that mistake. Let it go. I did. I knew so many kids with no dad at all. He was at least there."
"It would have been better if he wasn't."
"You don't really believe that," Eric said. "Can you imagine Mom, struggling to raise us alone?"
"Well, you did what he wanted. So he didn't have to tear you down unless you were messing up a play. He had to tear me down every chance he got. You don't even know what you're asking me to let go."
Eric set his now empty water glass on the end table. "A'right, so tell me."
"I graduated valedictorian of my high school class, and when I walked off that stage, Dad said, 'While you were wasting time caring about a couple tenths of a GPA point, your brother was winning the MVP Pee Wee award.'"
"What?"
"My junior year of college, I made first chair, violin, in the orchestra. He called me a sissy for playing, and he never came to a concert, and he said, 'Your brother is only ten and he's more a man than you are.'"
"Jesus! What? He said that?"
"I graduated a semester early, cum laude, from the number one state school in Texas, after borrowing and working my way through, and he said, 'Too bad you couldn't get a football scholarship like your brother will.' I got a federal law enforcement job straight out of college making almost as much money as he made after years on the force, and he said, 'Eric's gonna make a half a million at his first job in the NFL. You can't even outperform your little brother.'"
"I had no idea he said that kind of stuff." That wasn't entirely true. Eric had heard their father make occasional comparisons to their mother, but he'd never laid it all out in his mind like Dale was doing now. He'd never considered the enormity of it.
"Don't sound surprised. He was always telling me how you were making up for the fact that I was such a failure. I was so jealous of you, Eric. You had Dad's favor. You were the star of that high school football team. You didn't have to work for your grades. If you got a C-, they made it a B-. You could have any girl you wanted. As for me, there was nothing I could do that was worth anything to our father. And when I was in high school, I couldn't get a girlfriend. Nothing was ever handed to me. I'm ashamed to say it, but when you didn't make the NFL, I was glad."
"Dale, I had no idea you ever felt like that."
"Part of it was jealousy. I wanted the best for you, I did, but I also didn't want to be in the shadow of my own little brother. But part of it was that I loved you, and I was afraid what the NFL might do to you, that kind of attention and fame. I saw what a much smaller scale fame did to you in high school, and I didn't like it."
Eric might have bristled, if not for an earlier conversation with his wife. "Tami said I was an arrogant jerk, at least until sometime during my junior year. I didn't think I was that bad."
"It wasn't that you were that bad. It was that you weren't yourself. You were such a sweet kid in elementary school. So big hearted. It was just your nature. You'd see a kid playing alone on the playground, and you'd leave the popular group you were with, and you'd go play with him."
Dale was always the one taking Eric to the playground when he was little. It was never Dad. It was always Dale. No wonder Dale couldn't get a girlfriend in high school, Eric thought, with a five, six, seven, and then eight-year-old brother constantly in tow.
"You'd see a kid who signed up for Pee Wee for the first time who couldn't throw to save his life," Dale continued. For four years, Dale had been the one to take him to Pee Wee practices too. When Dad got home from work, he grilled Eric about the plays, but he couldn't come to his practices. Even when Dale was in college, that first year, he drove home for Eric's Saturday Pee Wee games. He must have missed out on a lot of college parties, now that Eric thought about it. "And then, when the other kids made fun of him, you'd shut them up. You'd walk up to that new kid and give him some pointers. But come about 7th or 8th grade….you just…you let it go to your head."
"I'm not that arrogant teenager anymore," Eric said.
"I know. And I know it's no thanks to me."
"Actually, Dale, I do owe you a little bit of the thanks. You weren't home often when I was in high school, but when you were, you said some things that I eventually took to heart."
"I guess we both turned out all right, despite Dad." Dale took another sip. Only a rim of suds remained in the bottom of his pint now. "This was good beer. Thank you. I need to call Cleo and then get some sleep." He stood up. "I do love you, little brother. I wasn't just saying that last night because I was drunk."
"I wasn't either." Eric stood and extended his hand. Dale clasped it, and Eric drew him into a hug. He slapped Dale's back twice before releasing him. He felt like he should hold him there a little longer, that he should say something more, but he didn't know what it was that he should say. So he just said, "Good night."
