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.