The One & Only(5)
When I could no longer bear the silence, I cleared my throat and imitated what I had heard others say between the ceremony and burial. That the service was really nice. That Lucy did a great job with the eulogy.
“Yeah. She sure did. I’m proud of her.” His voice cracked, and, for a few seconds, I held my breath and looked away, terrified that he was finally going to break down.
But when he spoke again, I realized it was all in my head. He was still composed, in complete control. “Lawton said you helped Lucy write it?”
“I just helped a little,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. They were all Lucy’s ideas and feelings, of course, but I had rewritten and rearranged whole sections because she said her own words didn’t sufficiently honor her mother.
“Please make it better,” she had pleaded until I broke out my highlighter and red pen. Lucy was probably smarter than I was and had always done better in school, but writing was my thing.
Coach gave me a look that said he didn’t quite believe me. “Well. I think Connie would have been pleased.”
I caught that he said would have—instead of was—a clue that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure about God these days either, and I felt a stab of despair followed by a more dire emptiness. At that moment, I desperately wanted Coach Carr to have real, enduring faith, although I wasn’t sure why that mattered to me so much.
As we turned out of the cemetery onto Baines Avenue, the main thoroughfare bisecting Walker from east to west, I worked up the courage to speak again. “Coach Carr?”
“Yeah, girl?” he asked, waiting.
“Could you … uh … put on your seat belt?”
It was the first time I had ever told him what to do—unless you count “pass the salt”—and I added a please to soften it.
He smiled his easy smile, crinkle lines appearing around his eyes as he strapped the belt over his shoulder. “There. We good now?”
“Yes,” I replied, one syllable closer to absolutely nothing left to say.
“All righty then,” he said, his voice changing again, only this time in the opposite direction—loud, normal, almost cheerful. It suddenly became clear to me what he was doing. He was faking it, trying to put me at ease, which made me feel even guiltier for being in the car, next to him. In her place. He finished his sentence with “Should we talk Signing Day?”
He was referring, of course, to the big day last week, always the first Wednesday in February, and the first day that a high school senior could sign a binding letter of intent, committing to play for a particular college or university. It was one of the most important days of the year in Texas. This year, Walker had made a big splash by landing one of the top recruits in the country, Reggie Rhodes, an explosive, game-breaking tailback from Louisville, beating out Texas, Alabama, and Ohio State. It was impossible to be too excited about the news, given Mrs. Carr’s death the very same week, but it was something of a salve, and Coach’s mention of football now filled me with relief.
“Sure,” I said, feeling my shoulders relax a little as I glanced at him.
He reached out and turned on the radio, bypassing his usual country stations and punching the dial up to AM 1310, The Ticket, tuning in to an animated conversation about Rhodes and how disappointed everyone was in Austin. “Bronco fans are already rubbing their hands together for the first Saturday in December, when they will have the chance to avenge last season’s bitterly close loss to the Longhorns,” Bob Sturm mused.
“Sure hope so,” Coach talked back to the radio.
“With Rhodes on the field and Mrs. Carr up there on our case … we can’t lose.”
“Yeah. It’s the least the big guy upstairs can do for us,” he said, as I pictured Mrs. Carr, waving her teal pom-poms up in heaven.
The first photograph ever taken of Lucy and me together features the two of us lying side by side in a playpen, staring up at the ceiling with cross-eyed, blank baby expressions. We can’t be any older than two or three months, just two blobs—one with blond fuzz and blue eyes turned red by the flash (Lucy), the other with a thatch of dark hair and eyes (me). We were wearing matching onesies with the vintage Walker logo, a cursive W ensconced in a horseshoe. I couldn’t find the negative, and the only surviving copy was yellowed and ribbed from the sticky pages of one of my mother’s cheap albums that predated acid-free scrapbooking. So I carefully excavated it, took it to a specialty photography store, and had it restored, then framed—one for me, one for Lucy. I put mine on the mantel over the faux fireplace in my apartment, along with a handful of other momentous photos, and gave Lucy hers for her thirtieth birthday, a few weeks after mine. For a year or so, she kept hers in an equally prominent spot in the family room of the three-bedroom bungalow she and Neil had bought together. But I recently noticed that the frame had been demoted to a dresser in her guest bedroom and, more troublesome, our photo replaced by a professional shot of Caroline, standing alongside a white picket fence, wearing a pink monogrammed sundress.