Chapter Five

Gracie was still nine when Liam came to live with them, but last week she turned ten. Double digits. It frightens Eric. His first child made him feel suddenly older, as if he aged ten years in six months. Yet Gracie slowed down time for him, rebooted life, delayed all thought of end goals. She was like an unexpected time out, just when you thought the game was almost over.

It was hard enough to imagine Julie growing up and branching out, but when Gracie goes, it won't just mark her maturity, but his own…well, why not just say it?...decline. As long as Gracie Belle's in the nest, he's still young.

There's another reason double digits frightens him. The teen years are double digit years. Gracie's just that much closer now. Although his eldest daughter has matured by leaps and bounds in her new life, he has not forgotten the hell Julie once put them through, the wild, curving maze of unexpected choices. After shrugging off a loyal and respectable boyfriend to chase the Swede, committing adultery with one of her T.A.'s, totaling her car, failing to return to college when she said she would, and getting engaged with absolutely no warning (he didn't even know she was dating Matt again), Julie has found her place in life. She and Matt have been married four years now, she has her B.A., and she's the only reason Eric ever turns off sports radio in the car.

Every Monday and Wednesday morning, Coach Taylor makes the sacrifice of tuning his radio to NPR. Julie is the host of Books and Things. The things is politics, as far as he can tell. Julie pokes around her guest's edges and ruffles them a bit, but she interviews them in soft tones while she's doing so. She speaks in a voice that is largely foreign to Eric and that sounds much more like Tami in counselor mode than his old Julie asking for the keys to the car. It's strange, that someone could be more or less dependent upon you for eighteen long years, and then …suddenly….one day…you could hear her on the radio and almost think you were listening to a peer.

In her teen age years, Gracie Belle will probably pose a completely different set of obstacles than Julie did, for reasons of both personality and appearance. Gracie will always be Coach Taylor's princess, but the cold truth is that she isn't pretty like Julie or her mother. Puberty might yet change that in some ways, but at the moment the girl is quite plain.

One time, when Eric picked her up from school, he overheard some other girl smirking and calling her "ugly" to a chorus of minion-like snickers. He wanted to get out of the car and strangle that girl with the jump rope she was holding, but instead he pretended he didn't hear it, because he didn't want to be one of those fathers either - you know, the kind who strangles nine-year-old girls with jump ropes.

Gracie pretended she didn't hear it too, and Eric could see she was trying her hardest not to show it, her jaw clenched tight and her face almost quivering with the repressed tears, but four minutes from the school, she broke down crying. He pulled over in a grocery store parking lot and told her she was beautiful over and over.

"I don't know if it helps," he told Tami later that night, "if it isn't really true, you know, by the world's standards."

"It helps," Tami reassured him. "Every little girl needs to be told she's beautiful by her father. I wish mine had told me that. Maybe in high school I wouldn't have tried so hard to get so many boys to tell me."

"Well, at least Gracie will attract the less shallow kind of guys. The kind that care about character and intelligence more than appearance."

"Like you, huh?" Tami quipped. "Because the first thing that attracted you to me was my character and intelligence, right?"

"No," he admitted, "but that's what kept me attracted. Twenty-seven years. That's a long time to talk to one woman just because she's pretty."

Gracie will be fine, they assure each other, but they're worried. It isn't just Gracie's plainness that threatens to make her a bit of an outcast – it's her bizarre intelligence, which outstrips that of either of her parents and sometimes leaves them feeling helpless. Gracie was the youngest in her fourth grade class last year, and she was in the most advanced math and reading groups, but she was still bored. She constantly got in trouble for reading under her desk throughout the school day, until eventually the teacher judiciously chose to ignore the fact.

As far as Eric could deduce, there were two group of girls in Gracie's class – the ones who mocked her, and the ones who felt bad for her but ignored her because they didn't want to become the object of mockery either. Tami tried to sit Gracie down and talk to her about it, but Gracie was reserved. When Tami suggested talking to her teacher and maybe even some parents, Gracie was mortified.

"You need to back off a little," Eric told her. "She's afraid you'll make things worse. No kid wants to be perceived as the one who's mommy comes in to the rescue." They argued about it, and although Tami didn't exactly "back off," she slipped behind the scenes. She stopped pressuring Gracie to talk about it, while still being there for her, keeping a watchful eye, drawing things out of her subtly, communicating with the teacher, and considering future options.

Finally, about the same time they got Liam, after which Gracie became even more withdrawn than usual, they settled on Veritas Academy, which they hope will challenge her mentally and boost her social self-confidence.

"Look at us," Eric muttered as he wrote the deposit for Gracie's school. "We're all private school people now." Franklin. Braemore. Veritas. "I never thought we'd be that type."

"You never thought we'd be east coast people either, sugar."

"We're not," he insisted. "We're just…good at adapting when we have to."

With a sharp decrease in their rate of savings, they can afford Gracie's new school. What they can't afford is two private school tuitions, so the bonus of waived tuition was enough to draw Eric to Franklin. He knows this is the right thing to do, but he's never felt more nervous about a job in his life, not even that very first teaching and assistant coaching gig straight out of college. Despite his glass case of trophies and all the state rings, he's not sure he can really succeed as a coach of deaf kids.

He could lose the job after a season or two, if he does nothing to improve matters. Franklin can get someone cheaper to lose, after all. And then how will they afford the outrageous tuition for Liam?

"They don't want you only to win games, you know," Tami told him. "That's not why they hired you. They're looking for a molder of men. They want someone who can give these boys confidence in a world where they'll always be different."

"Maybe," Eric said, "but they want me to win too. As they should."

And how did he motivate kids without locker room speeches, anyway? It was never his words, really. It was the way he said them. The voice. The tone. Could he communicate that confidence, that idealism, that pride, that desire to see them become their best - without sound?

On top of the job, he's worried about Liam, about measuring up as a father to a ready-made teenage boy. There are things he'll have to deal with that he didn't have to worry about with Julie, and he hasn't had years to work up to them. He's worried about Gracie, her future, her friendships. He's worried about finances, too, with the possibility of eight years of private school for Gracie before them, and two more college tuitions to help with.

All of these thoughts are ping-ponging through his mind as he leans in the open door frame of his daughter's bedroom and asks her what she's reading.