“Just ’cause my glasses are thick as Coke bottles doesn’t mean I can’t still see my little girl’s heart. I hear the way you talk to Jack … and the way you don’t talk to him. I know an unhappy marriage when I see one.”
“Come on, Daddy, you’ve been married two times, and wildly in love with both of your wives. You can’t know about …” She shrugged, uncertain of how to proceed. “Whatever it is I’m going through.”
“You think I never had my heart broken? Think again, missy. Your mama about killed me.”
“Her death broke all our hearts, Daddy. That’s not the same thing.”
He started to say something, then stopped.
She sensed that he’d been about to reveal something. “Daddy?”
He smiled, and she knew it had flown past them, whatever opportunity had almost existed. As usual, he wouldn’t say anything about Mama. “Show me one of those pretty turns Anita taught you.” He spun her around and gave her a gentle push.
She pirouetted until she was dizzy. Then, breathing hard, she slowed down. In a lazy, swirling arc, she glided across the ice.
Jack came up beside her, half skating, half walking clumsily. His breath shot out in broken, cloudy white gusts. He grabbed her hand, squeezing hard. “Is this archaic southern ritual almost over? Any more quality traditional time and I’ll probably fracture my hip.”
Elizabeth couldn’t help smiling. There were so few things Jack couldn’t do well. Frankly, it was nice to be the accomplished one. “You could stand by the fire.”
He glanced in that direction. Edward and Anita were there, cozying up to one another. “And talk to your father? No thanks. Last night he practically called me an alcoholic—while he was sucking down his fourth bourbon-and-soda.”
“He doesn’t understand what you do for a living, that’s all.”
“That’s not true. He thinks I do nothing. He thought playing football was useless; talking about football is even worse.”
Jack almost fell; Elizabeth steadied him. “It’s what we think that matters.”
“I can’t wait for you to see the interview I did. What happened was … no, wait. Let me start at the beginning. About a week ago …”
You’re missin’ out on your own life.
She wanted to listen to her husband, but her mind kept drifting back to her father’s words. It was just another of Jack’s look-at-me stories, anyway. She’d heard enough of them to last a lifetime.
Life is short, her dad had said.
She knew it was true. Every motherless child knew that.
But just now, with her husband’s voice droning on and on, she couldn’t quite grasp hold of that.
Because there was something else, equally true. When you were forty-five years old and missing out, it felt as if life were very long indeed.
In an ordinary year, the week after Christmas was quiet, even dull. A time for boxing up ornaments and taking down decorations, for eating leftover turkey sandwiches and watching old movies on television.
Elizabeth hadn’t been back in Echo Beach more than twenty-four hours when she realized that this was not going to be an ordinary year. They’d been in the Nashville airport on December 27 when Jack received the first phone call. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, hadn’t understood yet that their life had altered in the past week. While she’d been relaxing with her family in Tennessee, things in Oregon had undergone a subtle shift.
Jack was a hero again.
The Drew Grayland story had broken on the day after Christmas. The next day he’d been arrested, charged with rape. The story immediately went national. The National Enquirer ran it as a cover piece.
All across the country, people sat in bars, arguing over the case. What was date rape? When does no mean no? Can a woman “ask for it”? Do ordinary rules apply to extraordinary athletes? These questions and others were suddenly on the menus in diners all across America. Radio hosts asked their listeners for opinions; op-ed pieces popped up in newspapers from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine.
From the second Jack and Elizabeth got home, the phone never stopped ringing. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to interview Jack. He’d become a story himself. After all these years in partial obscurity, he was famous again. Not like he’d been in the past, certainly, not a household name, but somebody.
It wasn’t as if just anybody had broken the Drew Grayland story.
Oh, no. The story had been brought to America by a man who’d once been a god, then stumbled and lost his way. His reemergence into the heat of fame was a story all by itself. Aging, overweight, unhappy men from California to New York saw Jackson Shore’s return and thought: Maybe it could happen to me … maybe life could turn around in an instant.
That was the baton Jack now held: Never give up. He’d become the poster boy for redemption.
This new life of his was evident in everything he did. He walked taller, smiled brighter, slept better.