AUDIBLE
Lucas
THERE WAS NO disputing the importance of the quarterback position.
As the team’s biggest decision maker, my ability to perform timely plays and efficiently manage the game was of key importance.
And yet, as I stood in the office of Head Coach Jack Whitney, I couldn’t help but feel none of that was going to matter to him in the next few minutes. He was going to bounce me out on my ass. I wished I could say I’d fucked up, but I couldn’t.
What I had with Gillian was real, and I wasn’t going to downplay it, not even to save my position.
He stormed in right behind me, and flying past me, he sat in his chair. “Sit down!” he ordered in a terse voice.
I planted my palms on his desk, leaned over and leveled my stare at him. “I have something to say to you before you fire me.”
“I said sit down!” he bit out.
“Not until I tell you what I have to tell you,” I responded bluntly.
Surprise flashed in his eyes and he sat back, staring harder at me. “Go on.”
The challenge didn’t bother me. I was gone either way, so I might as well fight for what I wanted. “I love your daughter, and I want to be with her. I also love this team, and I want to keep my job. I will do whatever it takes to keep them both.”
He slammed his fist on his desk. “Sit down!”
I pushed off the desk and took a seat.
Coach shook his head. “Do you even know what love is?”
“I didn’t,” I said, “not until Gillian, but I do now, and I know I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”
He almost laughed. “If she’s your first, you can’t possibly know what love is.”
“That’s not true. I don’t have to ever have been in love before to know we share a connection.”
Standing up, he paced a tight line behind his desk. “You do understand your life is football now, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“And that means football always comes first.”
I said nothing. I didn’t like where this was going.
He stopped pacing and pulled his wallet from his pocket. Opening it, he pulled out a worn piece of paper. “I have a story I want to tell you about love.”
There was something in his voice that told me this wasn’t going to be good.
Leaning forward on the back of his chair, he looked at me, but I didn’t feel like he was seeing me. “Three days before Gillian was born I was at home with my wife. She was a schoolteacher and had decided to start her maternity leave early. I’d asked her to come with me to so many games, but she’d always said no, so I didn’t bother to ask for the next one. It was close to eight at night, I think, and she wanted me to take her out for fish tacos.”
My gut roiled. The fish tacos I saw him eating so many weeks ago.
He was lost to the past as he spoke. “I was tired, and had a game, so I told her no. That we would do it another time. She got angry with me and stormed off to bed. We’d been arguing a lot by the time she’d gotten pregnant with Gillian, so it was nothing out of the ordinary. I knew to leave her alone. She had a temper and needed to cool down.”
I drew in a breath, not wanting to hear the rest. I could already tell the version of the story Gillian had told me was very different.
Slowly, he unfolded only one part of the folded paper that had been curled between his fist and the chair. “So I got up the next morning, said goodbye, and left to meet the bus without bothering to try to make things right. I figured when I got back, I would bring her some flowers and she’d forgive me like she always had because by then she would have calmed down.”
A cold sweat broke out across my forehead.
Carefully, he unfolded another square. “She still had six more weeks before she was due, so I wasn’t worried about the baby. The game was in Indianapolis and when I got the call mere hours before kick-off that she’d been in a car accident just outside of Lafayette, I assumed she’d changed her mind, and had been driving down to watch me play.”
That was the story Gillian had told me.
Another piece of that paper unfolded in his hands. “My wife had died by the time I got to the hospital, but somehow Gillian had survived the accident. She’s a fighter, you know,” he said, and I thought for a moment he was going to cry his voice was so hoarse. “Anyway, when I got home with her days later, I found this note.” He held his hand up.
Feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin, I shifted in my chair.
Grabbing his reading glasses from his desk, he opened it up completely. “My Dearest Jack, I am writing this letter with so many regrets, but I can’t go on like this,” he read, and then stopped, took a deep breath, and looked at me.
I shook my head. “You don’t have to read it to me, Coach.”
“Yeah, well I wasn’t going to. I think you get the idea. She was leaving me. She wasn’t headed to Indianapolis like I had thought, but rather Louisville, where she was from. In this note,” he waved it in the air, “she told me she wanted a normal life for herself and our daughter, and that the life I was living in the NFL was anything but normal. She went on to tell me she needed someone who would put her and our daughter first, and that wasn’t me. She wrote that she wanted someone who would take her out for fish tacos whenever she wanted them.” His voice broke then and his hands shook as he set the letter down on the desk.
“Coach, I’m sorry.” It was all I could say.
Standing tall, he came around the desk and glared down at me. “Gillian is the most important thing in the world to me, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to honor her mother’s wishes. I didn’t do the greatest job in making her life normal. Football was all I knew, but Gillian is so close to having what her mother wanted for her. Don’t ruin it for her, Lucas. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can have her and have your career, because, son, ask anyone around you, it doesn’t work that way.”
“Coach,” I said, “I think you have your daughter all wrong. She doesn’t want a normal life. She loves this life.”
His eyes went wide. “She’s twenty-three. She doesn’t know what she wants. She only knows what she’s had,” he bellowed. “Of course that’s what she’d think she wants, don’t you understand that?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes, I do.”
His voice softened. “I am not going to take your position from you, Lucas, or threaten you, but I am going to ask you to listen to me.”
I nodded, not feeling an ounce of relief.
He sat in the chair beside me. “If you love Gillian like you say you do, you won’t drag her into this life. She deserves a chance at experiencing normalcy. A husband who’s home every night, a house with a white picket fence, a station wagon, a dog, a couple of kids, and fish tacos every night if she Goddamn wants them.”
That last part got me. I glanced over toward the desk and when my gaze landed on that worn piece of paper, the words, fish tacos jumped out at me.
It was then I knew he wasn’t wrong. I might not fully agree with him, but Gillian at least deserved the chance to find out for herself what it was she really wanted.
To discover if normal was for her.
And with me in her life she never would.
I knew I had to let her go.
After all, if you loved someone you set them free.