But I remembered my mother's fragile body in my arms. Her life had been hard. She deserved to be happy. She had tried her best. I leaned across the tub and gently twisted the faucet, so the water stopped running. My fingers brushed against the dwindling stream. The water, I discovered, was ice cold.
“It doesn't matter,” Anya sighed. “He's not coming back.” With a slight inclination of her head, she indicated a corner of the sink. In a little pool of moisture, a perfect circle against the pink enamel—there was her wedding ring.
Chapter Eighteen
Landon
September 13th
I'd never been angry like this before, not that I could remember. I'd been mad when we'd lost the championship to the Baylor friggin Bears in the fourth quarter last fall. I'd been mad the first time Zora cheated on me, and mad at myself for taking her back. I got mad thinking about a dozen tiny slights, a dozen skirmishes in games—but not like this. My whole body felt amped up, just the way juicers described life after taking a steroid cocktail. But I didn't feel capable and strong, like those dudes. I just felt helpless.
I'd heard in the locker room.
I'd started at the familiar pain, then remembered to roll my eyes as a wet towel slapped against my bare ass. A post-game snap was SOP for a Longhorn who'd made a winning play, so I knew not to get too twisted—but to this day, I have to confess that I hate that tradition. It was always the dirtiest dirt bags who could be counted on to target another man's junk when we should have been celebrating.
“That was a bitching last play, your majesty,” crowed Dixon, one of our fullest fullbacks. “I thought for sure that 22 was ‘bouta kill you dead. You're a fucking snake in the grass, Landy. Faster than fucking Forrest Gump.” Dix hooted and hollered at his own joke, and I took the opportunity to angle myself away from his towel. I slid the jeans up over my hips, already feeling the spots along my body that'd be sore by sun-up.
The team was prattling on at full-steam about the after party when I heard my phone go, which was already weird. Since the break with Denny and Z, I'd been getting way fewer calls than before. The Pastor had even lapsed a little from his weekly check-in (Sundays, at 3pm). I hadn't spoken to Pop man to man hardly at all since his wedding day. Half of me figured he was tripping on marital bliss, so had less need for his collegiate son—and the other half was content without an explanation. I felt bad about this, but there was also something nice about feeling like he and I were headed off to lead our separate lives in peace.
The number on the screen, so grudgingly entered at my step-mother's request (step-mother; still sounded weird...) was Ash's. In fact, Ashleigh Bennett. She wasn't Doll anymore. I'd finally gotten it through my thick skull at the wedding reception, watching her go all doe-eyed and cutesy with her ancient date. Ash was a pretty young thing with a bright future, and whatever thing it was that moved between us was impossible to act on. Had always been impossible to act on.
And I couldn't continue to put her on a pedestal in my mind and hate her in close proximity, because it: A) just plain wasn't fair and, B) was fucking with my mind. Besides, Clay had promised to introduce me to the Alpha Kappa crowd at the next mixer, and I had high hopes for some new pootie tang. There were lots of pretty faces at UT, and I was the fuckin’ Longhorns quarterback. Not that I could get too serious about anyone, as I was fixing to make a scout connect any day now. Anyways.
“Hey,” I said into the phone, trying—no, not even trying—to sound breezy and cool. It occurred to me that she might've just watched the game in a bar, and could be calling to congratulate me. But then, that was ridiculous. Ash was under twenty-one in a college town, and had also never demonstrated an interest in football. Plus, she'd never called me before—it was then that I realized something might be wrong.
“Landon,” she rasped, and her voice proved my second theory. I held up a hand to the noisy locker room crew and made my way out into the cement-lined hallway, head ducked in the direction away from the press.
“What? What is it?” I strained to hear the sounds in her background, but all I got was silence. She was speaking softly. “Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“No. No, everything is not okay. Where the fuck is the Pastor?” She seemed to spit out the name. I'd never heard Ash talk like this, with this callow edge in her voice. It rankled me.
“I don't know,” I started, trying to put on my most soothing voice. “I haven't heard from him in a week or more. Will you tell me what's wrong? You sound upset.”
There was silence on the line for a second, in which I thought I could hear her thinking. Deciding whether or not to believe me. Deciding whether or not to clue me in. Some belligerent ESPN reporter took the opportunity to ping a paper football in my direction, grinning like a maniac when I turned around. I frowned. The press could wait.
“He hit my mom,” she said, finally. “I came home today and the house was trashed, and half of her face was knocked in. Four stitches. We just left the ER.” She sounded so tired. So sad. The anger started there, as I felt my jaw set. And the worst thing? It didn't take me more than a second to believe her.
“I need to know if he's ever done something like this before,” she continued. Some of my teammates were emerging from the locker room now, gussied up like show ponies. The press queue seemed to rev at each entrance. I wandered further down the hallway. “Landon? Please.”
“A long time ago,” I heard myself say, without having planned or prepared to speak. The anger began to mingle with worry, and doubt, and an alien feeling: guilt. And I was guilty. I was a participant. I had known, all this time, that he was capable of cruelty. For he'd been cruel to my mother. He'd been cruel to me.
“When my mother was alive, they had fights sometimes.” I felt my fists clench and unclench. I was going to lose her forever. This was how it was going to happen. “Well, we all had fights. He got back from his tour and was just so different. When he got mad, he'd slap her sometimes. If I got in the way, he'd get me.” I tried not to imagine Ashleigh's face as she processed this. I'd never told anyone any of this before. Not Zora, not Denny, not Clay.
“Oh, Jesus,” she breathed. I took the non-screaming as an invitation to continue.
“When she died, that was when he got really religious. Leased the property in the city. Started drumming up 'religious support.' He told me that he was a changed man. He asked me to forgive him for all of his bullshit. And Ash, I really did believe he'd changed. Nothing's happened in years.” I wanted to pull her into me, across the telephone line. I wished I could rest my fingers in her hair. “I truly, truly did believe it. I figured he deserved a second chance, you know? He is my Dad.”
The line fell silent. Behind me, the locker room procession had basically ended. The stadium would be half-near empty by now, the boys well on their way to getting wrecked at any of a dozen post-game parties. None of that sounded appealing to me, now.
“I'm so sorry.” And thank God the press had retreated, 'cause for just the third time in a decade I felt tears bubbling up in my throat. But it was too hard to think about our whole miserable family history without remembering...her. “I'm so sorry,” I repeated again, desperation and anger and grief all souping together, drowning out what remained of my post-game adrenaline. “I'm so sorry,” I chanted a final time.