The One & Only: A Novel (52 page)

I
ended up extending my trip and staying at my dad’s through New Year’s, filling my days and nights with classic New York distractions. I dined at fabulous restaurants, strolled through museums and art galleries, even went ice skating at Rockefeller Center. Meanwhile, I didn’t watch
SportsCenter
or read the sports page or check a single bowl score for a whole week. A personal record.

It didn’t begin to mend my broken heart—I still thought of Coach virtually nonstop—but at least it allowed me to more clearly analyze my life. Since Mrs. Carr’s funeral nearly a year ago, I had vowed to get out of my rut, shake things up. I had certainly done that. I had changed
everything.
Yet here I was, no better off, and quite possibly in the worst spot I’d ever been in. I told myself that there was nothing to regret. That sometimes you won—and sometimes you came up short. Or, in Coach Carr’s words:
Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you.

On the third day of the new year, and the afternoon of my departure, my father and I went for a long walk in Central Park, just the two of us.

As we arrived at the boat pond, he cleared his throat and said, “So. Shea. Can we please talk employment for a moment?”

“Mine or yours?” I joked, bracing myself.

He smiled. “Yours.”

“Okay,” I said, telling myself to keep an open mind. I really couldn’t afford another strategy.

“Do you think you’ll go back to work at Walker? In the athletic department?”

I shook my head, adamant. “No. That’s the only thing I’m sure about. I can’t make that my whole world anymore. As easy and tempting as it is … it would feel like going backwards.”

My dad nodded his agreement. “Do you think you want to stay in journalism?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m very good at it.”

“You’re great at it,” my dad said. “I’m so impressed with your stories, Shea.”

“Thank you … I think I’m pretty decent at it, too … I didn’t get fired for my writing. I got fired because I couldn’t be objective.”

“Okay. Right. But you could be objective in another town … covering another team. Right?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“So let me throw this out there. I know you could find your own job, and I don’t mean to imply that you can’t, but I do have two pretty high-up connections. One at ESPN, the other with the
New York Post.
I’m not sure what the position or pay would be, but I’m pretty sure I could get you some interviews.”

“And so … I’d live here?” I said. “In the city?”

“Well, for the
Post
,” he said. “And in Connecticut for ESPN. If you want a little distance from Astrid. A.k.a. Ass Face.”

I looked at him, startled, and said, “How …?”

“You let it slip once. A long time ago. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her.”

I felt my neck grow itchy and hot. “Sorry about that,” I said.

“Honestly, it’s okay. It was funny—you must say it a lot not to have caught yourself … She can be an ass, but her heart’s in the right place. Most of the time. She really likes you. Admires you, too.”

I wasn’t sure I believed that she
admired
me, but I did have the sense that there was at least a modicum of respect there. “I like her, too,” I made myself say, thinking that at least I didn’t hate her anymore. It felt like a small miracle.

“So what do you think about the jobs? Do you want me to put in some calls?”

“Maybe so,” I said, shocked that I was even entertaining a thought of leaving not only Walker but the entire state of Texas, something I could never have imagined only a few weeks ago. “I do need a job.”

“Well, I’m not worried about you finding one. And I’m sure you have plenty of contacts in Texas …”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Very few that don’t involve Coach Carr.”

“And that’s another thing …” he said.

My stomach instantly knotted.

“Can we talk about him for a second?”

I shrugged, steeling myself. “Sure.”

“Maybe I followed my heart a little too much along the way,” he said. “And your heart can definitely get you into trouble … But, if I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t have you.”

This wasn’t the angle I’d expected, and I felt confused as I said, “Are you talking about Mom?
That
was following your heart?”

“Well, sure. Of course. What else would that have been?”

“What else? Well, it could have been a cheap affair with a woman
you met on the road, then got knocked up before your wife divorced you … So you married her to do the right thing. And because Mom has a way of talking people into stuff.”

“Wow. That’s quite a sordid spin on my life. And yours.”

“Well? Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You
are
wrong, actually. Believe it or not, I really loved your mom. Fell madly in love with her. But we just couldn’t make it work. Oil and water. Square peg, round hole. So I gave up. And instead of starting over and potentially screwing up a
third
situation, I went back to take care of Bronwyn and Astrid. Tried to fix some of my scorched earth.”

It was the first time I’d seen the situation from his point of view, and also the first time I hadn’t seen it as a head-to-head competition between the respective mother-daughter teams.

“So are you comparing Coach to Mom? Or Astrid?”

“Neither,” he said. “I’m just saying … follow your heart. Even if it sometimes makes an absolute mess of your life … And, for God’s sake, you
have
to go to this bowl game. This is the girl who started making road trips with the team in the third grade.”

“Second,” I said.

“Exactly. It’d be nuts for you to miss this game.”

I nodded, knowing he was right. “Are you going?”

“If you want me to. If you need me to. But if not, I’ll just watch it at home.”

“Not really the same as being there,” I said. “The crowds … the noise … the energy. It’s
electric.
”

“Aha. You see? Listen to yourself. You’ll regret it if you don’t go. Separate your feelings about Clive and Lucy and go support your team,” he said as we approached Wollman Rink.

I nodded but couldn’t help thinking that Coach and Lucy
were
my team, at least they always had been, and, furthermore, it was absolutely impossible to separate my feelings for Coach from Walker and the biggest game of our lives. From
anything
in my life, really—which was the whole problem.

“Okay. I’ll go,” I said, glancing around the ice rink, comforted by
the thought that very few people in the crowd probably cared two licks about the Walker–Alabama game.

“Good. Great,” he said.

“But then I think I’ll come back to the city and talk to your people,” I said. “About those jobs.”

“Really?” my dad said, surprised.

“Yes. Really,” I said, thinking that this following-your-heart stuff was turning out to be pretty overrated—and that maybe it was time to try another approach.

I
t is 5:20
P
.
M
. Pacific Time, ten minutes until kickoff inside the Rose Bowl. I am in the stands with Lucy, Lawton, my mother, and Miller, who came to Pasadena without a ticket. Up until two hours ago, he had been searching for one from scalpers, but at the last minute he inherited Neil’s ticket when Caroline got a stomach bug and Lucy decided she couldn’t be left in a hotel room with a random sitter. Lucy still made him beg for it.

“This ticket’s worth all the groveling. So freakin’ sweet!” Miller shouts over the din of two manic marching bands and ninety-two thousand frenzied fans, all wearing either red or teal.

I nod in agreement. Our seats
are
insane, what you’d expect for the head coach’s family—right on the fifty-yard line, twenty-some rows back, with a sweeping view of the western hills rising above the stadium. Even the weather is scripted—warm with gentle breezes and clear skies. A perfect night for a national championship game.

Miller offers me a bite of his foot-long hot dog smothered with mustard and relish, and I shake my head, wondering how he could possibly eat at a time like this. Glancing around the stadium, I try to soak up the atmosphere, but am too gripped by fear to really appreciate the pageantry. My palms are sweaty, my stomach is queasy, and my heart is racing. Bottom line, I know that nothing about this game will be fun—and the best I can hope for is the absence of misery.

I feel Lucy tap me on the shoulder and turn to look at her in the row behind us, sandwiched between my mom and Lawton. “Will you please talk to me? I’m bored.”

“I can’t, Lucy,” I say, mystified by the mere notion of boredom with the countdown now at six minutes and twenty seconds.

“Are you getting sick, too?” she asks, adjusting the big loopy bow on her teal silk blouse. “Maybe you picked it up from Caroline?”

“No. I’m not sick. It’s just the game, Luce,” I say, trying to suppress a fresh wave of resentment, not the first since I arrived in Pasadena last night. It isn’t only that she quashed a relationship before it ever really began but that she acts as if nothing
ever
happened.

“Oh, c’mon!” she says, slapping my arm. “Have a little faith. We’re going to win! I just know we are!”

“Yeah, I have a good feeling about this, too,” Lawton says. “And would you believe it? Dad actually found a cricket out at some random park yesterday afternoon.”

I smile, picturing him with his Mason jar. “Really?”

“True story,” Lawton says, holding his fingers up in a scout’s pledge. “I was with him.”

I nod, as if reassured, even though my usual pessimism has taken root. Fortunately, I’m not the coach, because I’d likely advise my team
not to lose
, rather than
to win
, always a recipe for defeat. I try to imagine what Coach is saying now in the locker room, and although I can conjure his words and the fire in them, I’m having trouble remembering the sound of his voice. I have not heard it since the night we ended things, which feels like a lifetime ago.

“You still look like you’re going to throw up,” Lucy says to me.

“That’s because I might,” I say, as I wave to a group of former Walker colleagues sitting one section over, many of whom I chatted with last night at the hotel lobby bar. They’d all heard about me getting fired, of course, and assumed that it was because I wouldn’t write negative things about our program and the ongoing investigation.

Do you think the rumors are true?
I was asked repeatedly.
Was an official notice of inquiry coming? Would we ultimately be slapped with sanctions?

I said I didn’t know, that it often took years for these things to be resolved. I am still clinging to the hope that we’ll ultimately be cleared, at least of the big charges, and that Coach will be vindicated. I no longer hold him to mythic standards, and instead see him as a flawed man and a fallible leader. But, in an unexpected way, this only makes my faith and trust in him stronger.

“Tell Shea we’re going to win,” Lucy instructs my mother now, as if any of our predictions actually matter.

“We’re going to win!” my mother says, clapping along with our cheerleaders. She, too, has blithely ignored everything that happened before Christmas, not once mentioning Coach despite ample opportunity in our shared hotel room. The implication is that she is doing
me
a favor, instead of the other way around, which only intensifies my bitterness.

Miller informs us all that even Vegas has changed its mind, the line moving to one point in our favor after two injuries hit the Crimson Tide. You never want anyone to get seriously hurt, but well-timed minor injuries are another story, and I’m not-so-secretly grateful for the sprained wrist and hip contusion within the Alabama ranks. I’m even more grateful that I’m not up in the press box right now, pretending that this is just another day at the office.

“Did you bet on the game?” my mom asks Miller.

With a mouthful of hot dog, Miller says, “Hell, yeah, I bet on the game. Five hundred bucks. Easy money!”

My mother says, “Is it too late for me?”

“Nope.” Miller pulls his phone out of his pocket and says, “I can call my guy!”