Donté Stallworth continues to be the man in the second half, gaining almost 150 yards and a TD, while Baskett does not even get a decent ball thrown to him and fails to record a single catch. I’m not all that upset about this, because a funny thing happens at the end of the game.
When the Eagles win 24–10, we all stand to sing the Eagles fight song together like we always do whenever the Birds win a regular season game. My brother throws his arms around Ronnie and me and says, “Come on, Dad.” My dad is a little drunk from all the beer and so happy about the Eagles victory—and the fact that McNabb threw for more than 300 yards—that he lines up with us and throws his arm around my shoulders, which shocks me at first, not because I don’t like being touched, but because my father has not put his arm around me in many years. The weight and warmth of his arm makes me feel good, and as we sing the fight song and do the chant afterward, I catch my mother looking at us from the kitchen, where she is washing dishes. She smiles at me even though she is crying again, and I wonder why as I sing and spell and chant.
Jake asks Ronnie if he needs a ride home, and my best friend says, “No, thanks. Hank Baskett is walking me home.”
“I am?” I say, because Hank Baskett is the name Ronnie and Jake called me all throughout the game—so I know he really means me.
“Yep,” he says, and we grab the football on the way out.
When we get to Knight’s Park, we throw the football back and forth, standing only twenty feet away from each other because Ronnie has a weak arm, and after a few catches my best friend asks me what I think about Tiffany.
“Nothing,” I say. “I don’t think anything about her at all. Why?”
“Veronica told me that Tiffany follows you when you run. True?”
I catch a wobbly pass, say, “Yeah. It’s sort of weird. She knows my schedule and everything,” and throw a perfect spiral just over Ronnie’s right shoulder so he can catch it on the run.
He doesn’t turn.
He doesn’t run.
The ball goes over his head.
Ronnie retrieves the ball, jogs back into his range, and says, “Tiffany is a little odd. Do you understand what I mean by odd, Pat?”
I catch his even more wobbly pass just before it reaches my right kneecap, and say, “I guess.” I understand that Tiffany is different from most girls, but I also understand what it is like to be separated from your spouse, which is something Ronnie does not understand. So I ask, “Odd how? Odd like me?”
His face drops, and then he says, “No. I didn’t mean … It’s just that Tiffany is seeing a therapist—”
“So am I.”
“I know, but—”
“So seeing a therapist makes me odd?”
“No. Just listen to me for a second. I’m trying to be your friend. Okay?”
I look down at the grass as Ronnie walks over to me. I don’t really want to hear Ronnie talk his way out of this one, because Ronnie is the only friend I have, now that I am out of the bad place, and we have had such a great day, and the Eagles have won, and my father put his arm around me, and—
“I know Tiffany and you went out to dinner, which is great. You both could probably use a friend who understands loss.”
I don’t like the way he collectively uses the word “loss,” as if I have lost Nikki—as in forever—because I am still riding out apart time and I have not lost her yet. But I don’t say anything, and let him continue.
“Listen,” Ronnie says. “I want to tell you why Tiffany was fired from her job.”
“That’s none of my business.”
“It is if you are going to have dinners with her. Listen, you need to know that …”
Ronnie tells me what he believes is the story of how Tiffany lost her job, but the way he tells it proves he is biased. He tells it just like Dr. Timbers would, stating what he would call “facts,” with no regard for what was going on in Tiffany’s head. He tells me what coworkers wrote in their reports, he tells me what her boss told her parents and what the therapist has since said to Veronica—who is Tiffany’s designated support buddy and therefore has weekly phone conversations with Tiffany’s therapist—but he never once tells me what Tiffany thinks or what is going on in her heart: the awful feelings, the conflicting impulses, the needs, the desperation, everything that makes her different from Ronnie and Veronica, who have each other and their daughter, Emily, and a good income and a house and everything else that keeps people from calling them “odd.” What amazes me is that Ronnie is telling me all this in a friendly manner, as if he is trying to save me from Tiffany’s ways, as if he knows more about these sorts of things than I do, as if I had not spent the last few months in a mental institution. He does not understand Tiffany, and he sure as hell doesn’t understand me, but I do not hold it against Ronnie, because I am practicing being kind rather than right, so Nikki will be able to love me again when apart time is over.