Chapter 13

Coach Taylor stands outside of Liam's door and rubs his face, the bristle of his coming black-and-gray beard rough against his palms. He didn't shave in the hospital. Tami prefers smooth cheeks most of the time, even if she finds his five o'clock shadow masculine. He'll shave tonight. He does what he can to please her. He has so many people to please. His boosters. His employers. His daughters. And now…he has a son.

Eric isn't twenty-two anymore, the way he barely was when Julie was born. He thinks time and experience and maturity should have made him a better father, the way it made him a more natural and confident coach, but he just feels tired and slightly powerless right now. He knows he said the wrong thing to Liam, that he let everything get to him - the weight of Gracie's private school tuition, of her future college tuition, of the mortgage, of the job he must hold to guarantee Liam's tuition, the weight of the self-respect he will lose if he loses this job.

It's not the first time he's done the wrong thing as a parent, let a word slip he wished he could take back. He was determined to be a better father than his own, to never cut his children down with his words, or lose his patience and rage, the way his father too often had. But no one ever told him how hard it would be, how parenting would drag all of his pettiest flaws beneath a microscope, test his patience, dredge up the natural bad inclinations he'd inherited and force him to fight them. No one ever told him about the heavy load of responsibility, about how he'd never be quite his own again.

He raises his hand and raps on the middle of the door before he remembers Liam can't hear. This is tricky because you sure don't want to just throw open the bedroom door on a teenage boy. Tami already walked in one evening when she needed to ask Liam a question about his schedule and caught him looking at porn on the computer. She said nothing, instantly turned around, closed the door, and cluttered down the stairs to the kitchen, where she promptly told Eric he had to "have a serious and thorough conversation" with the boy.

Tami prepped her husband, told him how he needed to talk about a hundred things – body image, stereotypical media portrayals of women, the history of feminism – Eric didn't know what all she said. He wasn't really listening. He just nodded. Sometime that was the best way to deal with Tami. He was a good listener most of the time. He prided himself in that. His father had never really listened to his mother, had never seen her secret pain. Eric was a different husband. But there was a point when even he had to tune out his wife.

The actual "serious and thorough conversation" did not go as Tami planned. It was considerably more concise and contained no actual back-and-forth discussion. Eric just took a deep breath, strode into the room, and got it over with quickly, like jumping into a cold pool. "You know porn isn't realistic, right?" he announced. Liam's head was bent. The boy concentrated on Eric's lips without looking into his eyes. "You can't expect real women to act like what you see in this stuff," Eric continued. "Keep it to a minimum. If you use it too much, you could develop bad habits. It might make you less disciplined. Less attentive and responsive to the needs of a real woman." Liam stood motionless. "And it really bothers some women. If you ever get yourself a serious girlfriend, you should respect her feelings about that. Because she'll be real. And real is better. You don't want to mess up real." Liam looked away. "A'ight then." Eric tapped the boy's chin to get him to read his lips again. "Don't forget to lock your door in the future." And then he left.

After that, Eric ducked into the tiny, fourth, so-called bedroom they'd turned into a library at the end of the hall and hid out there for fifteen minutes, so Tami would think the conversation was longer than it actually was. By the time he got back downstairs, she'd already crawled into bed. He liked having the master on the first floor. It put them on another level than the kids; gave them their own little realm at night. Tami was sitting up in bed, reading glasses perched on her nose, her long hair billowing over her shoulders, a book open in her hands. He didn't notice the title. He just noticed how sexy she was, even if she was only wearing an almost decade-old Lion's T-shirt. He shed his polo and pants so that he was just in an undershirt and boxers and crawled in next to her.

"How did the conversation go?" she asked.

"Perfect," he said. "He's been properly educated."

She snorted a little. "And did you talk to him about – "

"- Tami," he said firmly, "I handled it."

She looked at him skeptically and closed her book, setting it on the night stand. "We need to put filtering software on his computer."

"You can't really escape this stuff, babe." He leaned back against the headboard. "I mean, these kids have iPhones. Honestly, I don't know how they concentrate in class. Every teenage boy is walking around with an X-rated theater in his pocket. I at least had to work for my porn. I had to bike all the way down to the creek, where the Playboys were jammed in the hollowed-out tree…These kids today. They don't have to work for anything. Not even sex."

Tami slid off her reading glasses, snapped the ends shut, and laid them on the night stand next to her book. "You didn't have to work for sex. Not after you had that growth spurt and became quarterback."

"I did with you," he said somewhat petulantly. It had been a little aggravating, because, from what he'd heard, none of the other guys she'd dated had been required to work very hard at all. That's wasn't why he had dated her. They'd been friends first. He'd already been half in love with her when she was still seeing Mo. But he hadn't understood her sudden purity when she'd finally agreed to go out with him.

"Because you were the first boy I really liked, Eric. And I wanted it to be special. And you made me want to change, you know. To realize my full potential. That was you."

"Yeah. Yeah."

She snuggled up close to him and kissed the edge of his lip lightly until he smiled. "I've heard you tell your players that a goal is more meaningful and satisfying when you have to work hard to obtain it."

He kissed her forehead and said, "It was pretty satisfying when I finally did obtain it."

"The best you ever had," she said with full confidence.

"Nah."

"What?" she jerked back and glared at him.

He smirked. "Not that first time. It got better." He wiggled an eyebrow mischievously. "It's better now."

"You want sex don't you?"

Well of course he did. He couldn't remember too very many nights of their long, married life that he'd been in bed beside her and not wanted sex. But it annoyed him when she put it that way, as though that was all he was after.

When Tami was pregnant with Julie, she made them start going to church. Eric didn't mind. It's what you did in Texas. Tami thought it was important to have a community, a network when the baby was born. Besides, First Methodist had Parent's Night Out – free child care once a month. Eric had daydreamed through the sermons most of the time, going over playbooks in his mind. But he did remember one particular Father's Day sermon. The pastor had asked, "What's the best thing a man can ever do for his kids?" Because Julie had just recently come into his life and turned it upside down, his ears perked up a little, even though he expected the predictable – pray with them, bring them to church, blah, blah. But instead the pastor said simply, "Love their mother. The best thing a man can ever do for his children is to love their mother."

Loving Julie's mother was an easy thing for him to do. Showing it wasn't always as easy. He'd shown it when he'd moved to Phili for her, and that had been one of the hardest, scariest things he'd ever done in his life. He almost hadn't done it.

He wanted sex, certainly…but he wanted to love her.

"I want you," he said.

She pushed one of her legs between his and kissed a sensitive spot at the base of his neck. "Show me," she whispered.

That was two months ago. Lately, though, they haven't been having as much sex. The stress has been getting to him. He doesn't try for it as often. But that's not his concern right now. Right now, he needs to talk to Liam.

He didn't think anything could be more uncomfortable than that former "conversation" about porn, but the apology he has to make now is more daunting. The shame he feels – it's caught in his chest, like a breath that won't come out.

He grasps the door knob and rattles the door in the frame, hoping Liam is looking towards it, will see it move, or sense the vibrations. Tami suggested some kind of light doorbell or something. He's been meaning to rig something up.

As he shakes the door hard one more time, the knob slides from his hands and the door swings open. Liam stands there before him. God but that kid got tall over the summer. He's almost eye to eye with Eric.