[Epilogue]

Tami, now sitting cross-legged on the new black leather loveseat they'd bought when they moved to Philadelphia, was tapping away on her laptop while Eric rummaged through a box labeled "mementos."

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"That plaque the Lions gave me. I want to hang it in my new office." Eric had started summer training with the Pemberton Pioneers just yesterday. A few unpacked boxes still lined the living room, study, and basement of their new town house. This place reminded Tami a little of her childhood home, the parsonage in which she had grown up, except that it was three stories instead of two, and she had a Jacuzzi soaking tub in the master bathroom.

"Tami," Eric said.

She looked up from her Braemore files.

He was holding something in his hand, some plastic looking thing. "You kept this?" he asked.

She squinted her eyes and saw that it was the plastic ring from the Cracker Jack box. "Of course I kept it," she said.

He grinned. "I had no idea you were so romantic."

"Well you're the romantic idiot who gave it to me," she said, closing the screen of her laptop and setting it on the coffee table.

Eric came and sat beside her on the couch, stretched his arm out across the back of the love seat, and faced her. "Gracie's asleep," he murmured.

"What are you suggesting?" she asked with a smile.

"Well, that ring just reminded me of something."

"Yeah. What's that?" Tami asked.

"The best blow job of my life. But I bet you could still top it."

Tami took his dark green Pioneers cap off his head and smacked him with it. "Not in response to that pathetic pick-up line, I can't."

He grabbed the hat out of her hand. "Hey, I got something neat in the mail today," he said.

"We're already getting real mail here? We haven't even finished unpacking."

"It was an invitation from Jack, to the baptism of his and Gabriela's…what is this?"

Tami ruminated. "This would be their fifth kid now."

"Yeah, to the baptism of their fifth kid. Now that we're in Philly, we could actually go this time. How long a drive is it to New York?"

"Not long," she said. "And it would be great to see him again. What's it been? Ten years since he visited us?"

"Yeah, not since we were in Fort Worth."

"I wonder whatever happened to Kimberley," Tami mused. "I wish I'd stayed in touch. I can't believe you were better about staying in touch with your friends than I was with mine."

"Well, what coach doesn't want to stay in touch with a former professional football player?"

Jack had been drafted after his junior year of college and played for two years on the Arizona Cardinals before getting injured and cut. He took a year to do some soul searching after that, during which time he went on a missions trip to Puerto Rico and met his wife. He finished college, then law school, and was now a New York circuit court judge – not quite the ex-Jesuit Kimberley had joked he would one day be.

Tami leaned in and kissed him. Then she jerked her head toward the hallway.

"What?" he asked. "You got some kind of tick?"

"Damnit, Eric, do you want the best blow job of your life or not?"

He laughed, grabbed her hand, yanked her from the couch, and smacked her butt with his cap as she went tearing down the hall.

[A few years later...]

Settling into Philadelphia was an adjustment for both Tami and Eric, especially Eric, but he did well with the Pioneers. Gracie took to metropolitan life like a fish to water, and she was now in third grade. Tami had just picked her up from after-school care and pulled the SUV into their driveway. The little girl ran ahead to the porch while her mother checked the mail. Hands full, Tami juggled until she had her key out, and eventually they made their way inside.

"Please put those clothes away you left out this morning, sweetie," she told Gracie, and then went into the kitchen and dropped the pile of mail on the counter. That was when she spied the worn postcard with a vaguely familiar looking picture of a painting. She stared at the painting for a while, trying to remember where she had seen it. She looked down at the bottom corner, where the print read, Odessa Museum of Art.

Tami smiled and flipped the postcard over. Written in her husband's small block print, in the note space as well as above and below the address, to squeeze in all the words, was the following:

Dear Tami,

Told you I'd send it to you one day. I got the job. You're looking at the new offensive coordinator of the Washington State Cougars, but I guess you know that by now. I'll probably be getting home just as you read this.

I hear WSU could use a new Dean of Admissions. There's no one I'd rather have by my side. What do you say to the left coast?

All my love,

Eric

THE END