To his surprise, Cal liked Wendy’s mom a lot, even though Mayor Gracie wasn’t the type of woman anybody ever figured a legend like Bobby Tom would marry. He’d always hung around with gorgeous bombshells, while Gracie was pretty much a cute BB. She sure was nice, though. Straightforward and genuinely caring about people. Sort of like the Professor, although she didn’t have the Professor’s habit of fading out in the middle of a conversation to ponder some theory only she and a dozen other people on the planet could possibly understand.
“Gracie and I sure had ourselves some fun designing the new addition on the house.” Bobby Tom grinned and pushed his Stetson back on his head. Cal decided Bobby Tom could give Ethan a few lessons when it came to being movie-star handsome, although B.T. had more character lines in his face than the reverend. Still, he was a good-looking son of a gun.
“And did she tell you about the brick street I bought from that town in West Texas? Gracie found out they were tearing it up to put in asphalt, so I went over there and made a deal with them for it. Nothin’ like used brick for beauty. Be sure you take a look at the back of the house and see what we did with it.”
Bobby Tom went on about antique brick and wide-plank flooring as if they were the most important things in the world, while the baby nestled blissfully in the crook of his arm sucking her fists and making goo-goo eyes at her adoring papa. Cal felt as if he were suffocating to death.
Just two hours earlier, Cal had overheard a conversation the great wide receiver was having with Phoebe Calebow, the Stars’ owner, about breast-feeding! It seemed B.T. wasn’t sure Gracie was doing it right. He didn’t think she was taking it seriously enough. Bobby Tom, who’d never taken anything but football seriously, had acted as if breast-feeding a baby was the most important topic in the world!
Even now, the memory made Cal start to sweat. All this time Cal had figured Bobby Tom was just putting on a front, pretending everything was wonderful in his life, but now he knew Bobby Tom believed it. He didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong. The fact that the greatest wide-out in the history of pro ball had turned into a man who was centering his life around a wife and a baby and wideplank flooring was horrifying! Never in a million years would Cal have thought that the legendary Bobby Tom Denton could have forgotten who he was, but that’s exactly what had happened.
To his relief, Gracie came up and drew Bobby Tom away. Just before they walked off, Cal saw the look of utter contentment on his face as he gazed down at his wife, and it felt like a kick delivered to his very own stomach.
He finished off his beer and tried to tell himself he’d never once looked at the Professor like that, but the thing was, he couldn’t be sure. The Professor’d been turning him inside out lately, and who knew what kind of goofy expression he had on his face when he was near her.
If only she hadn’t told him she loved him, he might not feel so panicky. Why did she have to say those words? At first when she’d said them, he’d felt kind of good about it. There was something satisfying about winning the approval of a woman as smart and funny and sweet as the Professor. But that insanity had vanished when he’d hit Telarosa and run head-on into Bobby Tom Denton’s life after football.
Bobby Tom might be happy with all this permanency crap, but Cal knew he couldn’t ever be. There was nothing waiting for him on the other side of playing ball, no charity foundation to run, no honest work he could care about, nothing that would let him hold up his head like a man should. And that, he admitted to himself, was the crux of it.
How could a man be a man without honest work? Bobby Tom had the Denton Foundation, but Cal didn’t have B.T.’s talent for making money multiply. Instead, he pretty much let it sit around in a few accounts here and there and pick up interest. Cal didn’t have any worthy life waiting for him on the other side of the goal line. All the other side of the goal line held for him was exactly nothing.
It also held Jane, and yesterday afternoon when he’d said good-bye to her, he’d known she was no longer thinking about the short term like he was. She was thinking about wide-plank flooring and monogrammed bath towels and where they should settle down when they were old. But he wasn’t even close to being ready for that, and he didn’t want her telling him she loved him! Next thing, she’d be asking him to look at paint chips and pick out wall-to-wall carpeting. Now that she’d said the words, she was going to expect him to do something about it, and he wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Not when the only worthy work he knew how to do was throw a football. Not now when he was facing the toughest season of his life.