The One & Only: A Novel (5 page)

But football could only distract me from the grief and the guilt so much, and in the aftermath of Mrs. Carr’s death, I found myself reflecting on my own life in a way that I had previously avoided. I couldn’t fight the knot of dissatisfaction with the status quo, all the things that had always felt comfortable, good enough. My unexceptional relationship with Miller. My crappy car and apartment, which I refused to see as measuring sticks of anyone’s life, let alone my own, but clearly more appropriate for a girl in her twenties than for a woman approaching her mid-thirties. At least I had a decent wardrobe, clothes all chosen by Lucy and purchased at a deep discount from her shop, but most hung in my closet with no occasion to wear them. They were way too nice for my job at Walker—which was something else I started to think about. I was the assistant sports information director, which meant I worked behind the scenes in the athletic department, attending endless games and matches, recording stats, and reporting them to the media. It was the only real job I’d ever had since my student intern days working in the same office, and the one thing I had always taken pride in—really the sole source of my identity. But suddenly even the job I loved seemed small and unimportant, especially all the parts that didn’t involve football. I knew that it was a reach to say I was following my passion—an argument I tried to make to justify my meager salary. Yes, football was my passion, and Walker my home, but deep down I knew that I was there because it felt safe and easy—not because it was exactly right.

I knew that I really should have been
writing
about sports—which
had been my plan when I majored in journalism. Yet somehow, that dream had never materialized. I’m not sure why, but probably because it would have required leaving the cocoon of Walker University. Leaving Coach Carr. And that was the final—and perhaps biggest—thing I had to confront in the weeks after Mrs. Carr died.

It was hard to say when my infatuation really began, because from a very young age, I adored Coach Carr. I put him on a pedestal the way a lot of little girls do with their fathers—the way I might have done with my own dad if my earliest memories weren’t of him and my mother fighting. My mother’s voice was always the one I heard in the middle of the night, but it was those angry accusations that formed my first impressions of my father:
cheating
,
lying son-of-a-bitch.
I was too young to understand anything about infidelity or affairs, but would later piece together the sordid chronology. Namely, that my parents met when my mom was fresh out of college, employed by a brokerage firm in Dallas, and my dad was an investment banker, in town working on a deal. They were an unlikely match, but she fell hard and fast for the hotshot Wall Streeter with slicked-back hair and custom pin-striped suits, and he was equally dazzled by the sassy, bodacious girl he called his “yellow rose of Texas.” The only problem with their passionate, long-distance, whirlwind romance that yielded the surprise of me (my mother maintains it was an accident, but I’ve always had my doubts) was that my father was already married with another baby on the way.
Oops.
My mother won the pregnant-lady showdown, lassoing my dad, even getting him to relocate from New York to Texas after her three-month trial run in Manhattan proved “too overwhelming” for her. (Fortunately my mother brought a box of Dallas dirt with her to the Upper East Side hospital where I was born, putting it under the delivery table so that, quite technically, I’d be born on Texas soil.)

For a few years after their move back to Dallas, my parents were happy, at least according to my mother. Until, in the ultimate case of
what goes around comes around
, he did it again, cheating on my mother with his first wife, ultimately choosing her and my half sister, Bronwyn.
Divorce always hurts, but it stung especially hard to lose like that, to another little girl exactly my age who openly viewed my early childhood as nothing more than a nuisance and an interruption of her own sacred autobiography. When we were kids, Bronwyn told the story every chance she got, how
her
father came to his senses and begged
her
mother to take him back after his disastrously poor judgment with
my
mother. And then, the part of the fairy tale she loved the most: how she walked into the brownstone on Madison Avenue, following rose petals up three flights of stairs into a posh pink bedroom, eyeing the canopy bed with its custom linens as my father anointed it her new bedroom.

“With you or Mom?” Bronwyn allegedly asked as they stood behind her, beaming, hands lovingly clasped.

“With both of us,” they announced. “We’re getting married.
Again.
”

As lore has it, the three of them then scooped up the petals and tossed them around the room, promptly commencing planning for a wedding in Tuscany that I was forced to attend. It was an ass-backwards, twisted version of Cinderella—and Bronwyn never seemed to grasp that I was an innocent party in my dad’s first affair. That I had suffered her exact fate, only with no happy ending.

But the worst part of the divorce wasn’t losing my dad; it was how my mother completely fell apart in the aftermath of Astrid and Bronwyn’s victory tour. I can still remember coming home from school to find her in bed, blinds drawn, the room reeking of cigarette smoke. Jerry Springer would be blaring on television, as if my mother’s only solace was listening to people who had more depressing lives than her own. Years later, I discovered that she had suffered something of a nervous breakdown, one that required a Connie Carr intervention followed by a six-week stay at a treatment center masquerading as a five-star spa in Austin.

At the time, I only knew what Mrs. Carr had told me: that my mother was sick and needed to go away for a little while to get better,
and that Lucy and I were going to share a bedroom and be like real sisters. I missed my mother, but was relieved to be in a happy home where there was always someone to play with and grown-ups acted like grown-ups. I loved how orderly everything was—supper served promptly at seven, prayers said aloud at night, beds made every morning. I loved the way Mrs. Carr was always in a good mood, singing in her sweet, high soprano while she did housework. Most of all, I loved how football imbued everyday life, elevating the ordinary, making everything feel important and vivid. I was already a big football fan, but it was during that time that I really learned the ins and outs of the game, going to practice with Coach, watching games with him, studying his play diagrams, even learning to draw the Xs and Os of the easier ones myself: the end-around, the Hail Mary, the blitz, the triple option.

As time passed, and my mother returned to her old self, my childhood adoration of Coach Carr morphed into a different kind of reverence. I still mostly saw him as Lucy’s dad and a close family friend, really the only man in my life, except for my mom’s occasional boyfriend. But at times, especially during the football season, my affection for him verged on hero worship.

When I got to college, I was shocked to discover that Coach Carr had groupies—some of them
my
age. Girls would talk about how hot he was and literally tremble when he passed us on campus, swooning as he stopped to ask me how everything was going and if I’d heard from Lucy. Although he seemed not to notice the adulation, their giddiness still annoyed me. I chalked it up to the usual disdain I felt for silly sorority girls, but, deep down, I think I felt a little territorial about my longtime idol.

After graduation, when I went to work for my alma mater, I no longer gave the subject much thought. I took for granted that Coach was the sun, and that everyone else, myself included, orbited around him. It’s just the way it was in Walker, Texas.

Then, about three years ago,
Sports Illustrated
did a big cover story on Coach Carr titled “The Little School That Could: How Walker
Runs With—and Beats—the Big Dogs of College Football.” In the piece, Alex Wolff talked about our quiet and quaint campus, our small and homogenous student body. Considering that we had the fourth smallest student body of any Division I school—ahead of only Tulsa, Rice, and Wake Forest, none of which were synonymous with football—Wolff marveled at our ability to land players from lower-income areas around the country, given our high academic standards, preppy students, and location in a sleepy town with more churches than bars, halfway between Waco and Dallas. He threw out some of the usual theories about our huge endowment, state-of-the-art facilities, and idyllic red-brick campus, but ultimately chalked it up to Coach Carr’s charisma and recruiting “wizardry.”

I knew from watching Coach in action that he actually embraced our Achilles’ heel, finding a way to spin the negative into a positive with parents of his recruits, especially the mothers, who in most cases made the final decisions about where their sons would play. It was a central part of his pitch. After charming everyone in the living room—and often the entire neighborhood—he’d explain, usually once the kid was out of earshot, that there was plenty of fun to be had, but not so much that a kid could get himself in trouble. He’d then highlight Walker’s staggeringly high graduation rate and the fact that it was virtually unheard of for any of his players to end up on
SportsCenter
for anything other than football. In Coach’s entire tenure as head coach, there’d been no scandals—only a smattering of honor code violations, a couple of pranks gone wrong, and a few DUIs. Walker was a squeaky-clean program where Coach Carr turned good kids into even better men. And he did all of this while winning, season after glorious season. As Wolff so eloquently explained:
If a kid signs with Walker, odds are he is going to leave with a diploma, some bowl-game hardware, and more than a fair look from scouts, an irresistible combination from Clive Carr, the beloved coach straight out of central casting. The Knute Rockne of our generation, as rugged as Clint Eastwood, eloquent as Perry Mason, and handsome as George Clooney.

I remember reading that paragraph, then staring down at the photos
of Coach Carr—a candid shot of him standing stoically on the sidelines with his headset and hat, and another more styled, staged portrait of him on the Magnolia Quad—and thought,
Oh
,
please.

Everything Wolff wrote was true, but I still felt a familiar stab of annoyance that I had to share my idol,
my
coach, with the masses. I remember rolling my eyes, then shoving that magazine into a drawer, along with coupons and paper clips and wedding invitations I’d forgotten to RSVP to.

Right before I slammed the drawer shut, I spotted Miller’s number on a cocktail napkin that he’d given me the week before, on
another
drunken night out. I’d blown him off after Lucy labeled him a loser, and I decided she was probably right. But that morning, right after I ate a bowl of grits and a greasy biscuit, I picked up the phone and called him. He answered on the first ring, we went out that night, and we’d been dating ever since.

Only now, with Mrs. Carr’s death as a wake-up call, I realized just how stuck I’d become, how much of a rut I was in. Something really had to be done. I had to find a way to mix things up. Move forward.

I was thinking about all of this one afternoon as I took a long walk around the Walker grounds. Although I was on campus virtually every day including the weekends, I typically only passed between my office in the old field house and the student union center, where I picked up my lunch. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had strolled without purpose, maybe since I had been a student myself a dozen years before. I did an entire loop around the tree-lined grounds, from Wait Chapel on the quad, down to the dorms, over to the science and business centers on the banks of the Brazos River, then past the pillared mansions on Greek Row. I walked and walked, thinking about Mrs. Carr and Coach and Miller, my job and my life.

Then, right when I got back to my office, I saw a note on my desk:
Coach Carr would like to see you.
I stared at it for a few nervous seconds, wondering what he wanted. Likely he just wanted to talk about the small feature Lucy had asked me to write on her mother’s life for our
hometown paper. I had given Coach a very polished draft a few days ago, with a note that said,
Let me know what you think. Happy to make any changes.
That had to be why he wanted to see me, I decided, as I got up and made my way to the other end of the field house, out the back door, and across the parking lot to the modern, gleaming new football complex. Crossing the marble lobby, I took the spiral staircase up three flights, admiring the shrine to the Broncos, glass cases filled with trophies and banners and photos, then entered the security code to open the doors leading to the coaches’ wing.

When I arrived at the huge corner office, I found Mrs. Heflin, Coach’s longtime secretary and gatekeeper, manning her post. “Go on in, hon,” she said, jovial as ever.

I glanced uneasily at the closed door, usually a sign that he didn’t want to be disturbed.

“Don’t worry. He’s expecting you,” Mrs. Heflin said.

I nodded, but still knocked quietly, tensing as I heard his familiar bellow to come in. I pushed the door open to find Coach sitting at his desk, listening to Trace Adkins’s “This Ain’t No Love Song.”

“Come on in, girl!” he said, looking up from a depth chart, the starting players listed at the top, the secondary players’ names handwritten below. “Have a seat.”

I sat on the brown leather sofa facing his desk and glanced around at all the framed photos, newspaper articles, and inspirational messages decorating his office. I never got tired of looking at them.

“Morning,” he said, as Brad Paisley started singing “She’s Everything.” I loved Coach’s taste in music, and loved that he still listened to the radio rather than the iPod filled with country songs that Lucy had recently given him, explaining that he liked being surprised by what came on next.

“Good morning,” I said, avoiding his eyes as Brad sang,
She’s everything to me.