The One & Only: A Novel (44 page)

We kissed and kissed until we finally separated, his hands still tangled up in my hair, our faces so close that his features were blurry.

“Damn,” he said, catching his breath.

“I know,” I said, staring into his eyes.

“Crazy,” he said. “That was some
crazy
stuff right here.”

I laughed because it was so him to call a first kiss “some crazy stuff,” and because I knew exactly what he meant. He laughed with me, then led me by the hand over to the leather sofa that I’d sat on for years. Only never like this. Never with my legs thrown across his, my arm
around his neck. Never this relaxed, this close. I glanced around his office, taking in all his clippings and photos and plaques, as if seeing them for the first time. Everything seemed different now, elevated. My eyes rested on one framed quote hanging on the wall behind us that read:

A GOOD COACH MAKES HIS PLAYERS SEE WHAT THEY CAN BE, RATHER THAN WHAT THEY ARE.

The quote felt true for me, too, as I thought of how much he had changed
me
in the past few months, encouraging me to leave the Walker cocoon, begin a new career, end a relationship, then another. Now here we were, seemingly in the same spot, just where we had begun. Yet we weren’t the same. Nothing was.

“I’m proud of you, girl,” he said, kissing my forehead.

“Why’s that?” I asked, wondering if he could read my mind.

“For handling your business,” he said, his breath in my hair. “For being strong.”

He was talking about Ryan now, so I said, “I couldn’t have been strong without you.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “You got us here.”

I smiled, accepting part of the credit, but thinking that a lot of things had had to happen, some of them really bad—like Ryan grabbing me and Connie
dying.
But I pushed those things away and said, “You helped me. You’ve
always
helped me. You have no idea how much …”

He touched my cheek and smiled at me. “I’d do anything for you, girl. You know that.”

I nodded—because I
did
know that—then I put my head on his shoulder, trying to place what made our first kiss different from all of my other first kisses. The answer was seemingly obvious—I was in love. Maybe for the first time; maybe just more than before. But there was something else, too. Something else that made our moment different, special. It meant more because we felt like a team. Not in a cheesy
Go-Walker way but in the ultimate I-have-your-back way. There was none of the emotional negotiation that so often comes with a first kiss. No wondering what it meant, what would happen next, who had the upper hand. Instead, our kiss came from a sacred understanding of where we had been and where we were headed. We both wanted this. We both were committed to making it happen, and I felt certain that neither of us would enter into a situation so fraught with controversy and potential hurt feelings unless we were damn near
positive
that this was what we wanted. But we still had one major little blond obstacle.

“We have to tell Lucy,” I blurted out, breaking the tranquil spell. “We have to tell her before she finds out. She deserves to know. It isn’t right to keep a secret like this from her.”

“I know,” he said. “When do we do that? … I gotta hit the road soon here.”

I knew he was talking about recruiting, that he only had two weeks until the next dead period, when coaches couldn’t communicate with recruits. “Where are you going?” I asked, avoiding the hard topic for a few seconds more.

“Chicago and Pittsburgh,” he said. “Naperville and New Kensington, to be exact. Two quick trips to visit two quarterbacks. Up and back … And a couple day trips in Texas.”

“When do you leave?” I said.

“Chicago on Friday. Pittsburgh next week. In and out … Why? Do you want to join me?”

I smiled and said, “I wish.” Then I remembered Lucy’s tree-trimming invitation and asked him if he planned to be there.

“Yes. Why? You don’t think we should tell her then, do you?”

“No. That will be emotional enough,” I said, knowing how much Lucy dreaded all the Christmas traditions without her mother. “Maybe we should wait until after the holidays?”

“And after the game?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling a rush of cowardly relief. “Maybe so. We just have to be really careful in the meantime.”

“I agree. Because this has to come from us.”

“
Both
of us,” I said, thinking that it wasn’t fair to give him the task—and I wasn’t sure I could handle it alone.

“Yes. When the time is right, we just have to do it,” he said in his intense, coaching voice. “Man up and do it.”

T
wo nights later, I was at Lucy’s house, doing everything I could to avoid eye contact with Coach while he did the same with me. We had not seen each other since the night in his office but had talked every few hours. I’d even fallen asleep the night before while talking to him on the phone.

“Oh, I love this one! It’s Blitzen!” Lucy said now, holding up a frosted glass reindeer as we all assembled in her family room to decorate her tree.

“Dude,” Lawton said, as Lucy passed it off to him with a directive to hang it somewhere near the front. “How the hell do you know that it’s
Blitzen
? I’m getting a Prancer vibe.”

“It’s not Rudolph,” Caroline sagely pointed out. “See? No red nose.”

“Right,” Lawton said, addressing Caroline, while Coach kept his
nose to the grindstone, supergluing a broken Bronco ornament. “But it could be any one of them but Rudolph. How does she know that it’s
Blitzen
?”

I had been wondering the same thing, figuring there was something I had missed in reindeer lore, as Lucy smiled faintly and said, “Mom told me it was Blitzen. A long time ago.”

“Well, how did
she
know?” Lawton said.

“She knew her reindeer, Lawton,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “Now get him up there … And take this one, too.” She handed him a wooden oar with
LAKE LBJ
painted on the side and told him it could go toward the back.

One at a time, Lucy unwrapped ornaments from the cardboard compartments nestled in large green plastic bins, then passed them off to Caroline, Lawton, Coach, and me, while Neil, who had strung the tiny white lights earlier in the day, focused on careful placement of the generic gold and red balls. Lucy made it seem as if her ornament allocation was random, but I knew better, and quickly caught on that she gave the sturdiest and most garish ones to Caroline, so that they couldn’t be broken and would be too low to see. She gave all those with a boyish theme (planes, trains, and automobiles; soldiers, elves, and masculine-looking snowmen and reindeer) to Lawton. And she gave anything Walker or football-related—which felt like every other ornament—to Coach and me. Additionally, Coach was in charge of all Santa Clauses, whether whimsical or dignified.

We took our assignments seriously, hoping that our branch selection would meet with her approval. For the most part, we didn’t let her down, though she’d occasionally look up, frown, and point out an unpleasing concentration of one color or theme. “Disperse those elves, would you, Lawton? They look too … 
busy
all clumped together right there,” she’d say before returning her gaze to the bins, half of which came from her basement, the other half from her parents’ attic, having given her father permission to forgo his own tree this year.

“It’s looking good, y’all!” Lucy said at one point, and we all agreed
that the tree was beautiful. That you couldn’t even tell it was artificial, necessitated by Neil’s evergreen allergy, unless you stopped to consider that no real trees were this full and symmetrical.

“Do you remember this one?” she said to Lawton, holding up a delicate painted ornament of a little girl pushing a cart full of toys. It looked Germanic and old, or at least old-fashioned, perhaps because the girl resembled Shirley Temple with her big eyes, ruby mouth, and fat sausage ringlets.

“Yep,” Lawton said. “I always liked her … But I could never figure out why an angel would be bringing toys.”

“She’s not an
angel
,” Lucy scoffed with faux indignation, as if Lawton had dubbed her a hooker. “She’s just a
girl.
And that’s her
shopping cart.
”

“The
hell
,” Lawton said, pointing and peering through his long bangs in dire need of a cut. “See that. It’s called a
halo.
”

“You think
hell
and
halo
belong together?” I quipped, trying as hard as I could to be natural, light, festive, lest I give myself away. I had
still
not so much as glanced at Coach but was aware of his every move, and felt an electric current whenever he came near me.

Lawton laughed and said, “Hell, yeah, they do.”

Lucy stared down at the girl-angel in disbelief. “Well, son of a gun. You’re
right
!” she said with a little laugh. “But are you sure it’s not a tiara?”

“It’s a halo, dammit,” Lawton said.

Caroline giddily covered her mouth, thrilled with all the swearwords, as Lucy squinted further. “Well. Now I love her even more. She’s an angelic little shopper!”

“Just like you, Luce,” Coach Carr said, putting a hook on a snowman ornament. “I bet there’s some Channel and Vespucci buried somewhere in that cart.”

Everyone laughed at his joke, knowing that he was intentionally butchering Chanel and Versace, as I turned to Lucy and asked where the angel came from. I knew that she was eager to share any story related
to her mother, and it was
my
job, I decided, to give her ample opportunity.

“Mom got it when she lived in Austria,” Lucy said. “When she was a little girl. It was one of her favorites. Right, Dad?”

“That’s right,” he said, although we all knew that Lucy was the authority on family heirlooms, and that he was likely just agreeing with her.

Caroline lunged for it while Lucy admonished her to be careful and said that she was going to hang this one because it was “very breakable and very, very special.” She placed the angel near the top of the tree in the glow of a white light, then gave her cart a little push, watching it swing for a few seconds before returning to her bins.

And so it went, Lucy unveiling ornament after ornament, tweaking our placement, telling stories about her mother. I never would have predicted it, especially based on her mood around Thanksgiving, but she seemed to be genuinely happy, no trace of melancholy despite the intense sights, scents, and sounds of Christmases past pummeling us with the reminder that something
—someone
—was missing. Harry Connick, Jr., was crooning in the background. The aroma of snicker-doodles, Mrs. Carr’s specialty, wafted from the kitchen. It was even turning blustery outside, wind beating at the windowpanes, which Lucy mused her mother would have loved. In fact, her mood was so unexpectedly
stable
that I started to suspect her little white pills were involved, or at least an extra kick in her eggnog. Then again, maybe she had simply reached another small turning point in her grief. Maybe time really did heal all wounds.

Just a few minutes later, however, I landed upon another theory—that it was only a very convincing con job—when I heard Lucy say to Caroline, “Honey, isn’t this a magical night?”

Caroline said it was, taking another cookie from the snowflake plate while Lucy fired off a frantic few digital photos, close-ups of her daughter’s profile, her own eyes glistening with a faraway sadness. Of
course
she wasn’t feeling any better, not on the very first Christmas
without her mother. She was simply doing her best to head-fake her daughter, put up a brave front, follow the advice her mother would have given her:
Make things perfect for your family
,
never mind your own feelings.
Her mood was as contrived as their fake tree, but still artful and beautiful in its own way. Later, when she and Neil were alone in their bedroom, I suspected that the tears would flow, but, for now, she had embraced her solemn duty to diligently construct and create memories for Caroline. I felt my heart fill with admiration for her and wondered if I could be so strong in her shoes. I didn’t think so, but I suspected that motherhood has a way of bolstering your emotional reserves.

We all kept working until we neared the bottoms of the bins, where only the scruffy, trivial, recently acquired ornaments that Lucy humorously dubbed
nouveau accoutrements
remained.

“Time for the star. Neil, go get the stepladder.” She clapped twice as Caroline said, “Chop! Chop!”

“
Wow.
Did you hear that, guys? Chop,
chop
? See how my wife’s rubbing off on our child?” Neil announced to no one in particular. He clearly loved their mother-daughter sass, proud of the bossy women in his life, and he dutifully retrieved the ladder, setting it up as close to the tree as the branches would allow. He climbed three steps, then said, “Caroline, would you like to do the honors?”

She nodded and eagerly scrambled up the ladder, then swiped the star from her father and fearlessly reached for the top of the nine-foot tree.