The One & Only: A Novel (3 page)

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.

When I called Lucy out on the unsentimental swap, she looked sheepish, a rare emotion for her. “We have far better pictures together. Like that one,” she said, pointing to a shot of the two of us, arm in arm, sporting buns and voluminous yellow tutus from our first ballet recital. “Besides,” she said, “don’t you hate the way they used us as props like that?”

By
they
I knew she meant my mother and her parents, all Walker grads and close friends during their school days. My father had even adopted the Broncos, because Williams, his alma mater, didn’t have much of a football team. As Lucy reassembled the frame, our photo on top again, she said, “I will never foist that rah-rah crap onto Caroline.
Don’t you ever feel … brainwashed? Just sick of it all? The same thing—year in and year out?”

“No,” I said, thinking that summed it up, really. Lucy was absolutely correct in saying that our mothers used us as yet another way to highlight their love for Walker—right along with the flags and banners that they raised over their front porches on game day. But I could never understand why she had always seemed to resent our shared heritage, the way our friend Aubrey seemed to resent the red hair and freckles she inherited from her father’s side, and Pastor Wilson’s sons balked at Bible camp. Football was
our
religion, the very fabric of our hometown and state, and praying for the Broncos should have been effortless for her, a joyous experience from her sweet box seats on the fifty-yard line. She cared about her father’s team, of course, hoping that they’d win, disappointed when they didn’t. But she never truly devoted herself to it. Never became one of the faithful.

Coach Carr once explained it this way: I was born on February 22, 1980, within the very hour that the U.S. Olympic hockey team defeated the Soviet Union in the semifinals of the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, in the game dubbed the Miracle on Ice. It would have been more fitting if it had been an epic football game, Coach said, but the fact that it is widely considered one of the greatest moments in sports still seemed noteworthy—a foreshadowing of my destiny. And then there was Lucy, born in March, on the night J.R. was shot on
Dallas
, the greatest prime-time soap of all time. In other words, Lucy emerged into the world on a rare night when nobody in Texas was thinking much about sports. I told Coach it would have been a better analogy if Lucy had become an actress instead of the owner of the only upscale clothing boutique in Walker. But still, his point was funny.

In any event, maybe Lucy was right about our mothers’ attempt to brainwash us. But right out of the gate, I willingly drank the Kool-Aid. As a little girl, I dressed up as a Walker cheerleader virtually every Halloween (except for the few times that I donned pads and a helmet and went as a player). I painted my face with little horseshoes before
games, belting out our fight song after every touchdown. I collected autographs and hung team posters in my room with hearts around the cute players just as Lucy did with Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio.

As I grew older, my obsession only became more intense and focused. I pored over Walker media guides, studying details of every player, learning their numbers and positions, hometowns and majors, heights and weights. I memorized useless trivia and endless stats and scores, rattling off players’ rushing and receiving yards, sacks and interceptions, to anyone who’d listen, including some of Walker’s biggest boosters, who could never get enough of my party trick at the Carrs’ social gatherings.

“Ask her about the Texas game on Thanksgiving ’seventy-eight,” Coach Carr would say, grinning, as I regaled them with the epic battle that predated my birth. Play by play, I knew it all.

By the time I got to junior high, I was a serious student of the game, subscribing to
The Sporting News
, traveling to any road game that didn’t require a flight, and hanging around the fields after my own school day ended. I became a fixture at practice, an honorary mascot of sorts, and did my best to make myself useful, lest someone decide to send me home. Some days, I’d help the equipment managers pass out Gatorade, or collect balls that were kicked over the chain-link fence separating our main practice field from the wheat fields beyond. Other times I’d man the cumbersome video camera or fold towels or time sprints using the stopwatch Coach Carr gave me for my twelfth birthday. But mostly I’d just sit in the stands, watch, and listen. Get my fix. Feed my addiction. Quite simply, I was in love with football, every aspect of it. The smell of the freshly cut grass, the sight of the tight huddle against a backdrop of postcard-blue sky, the sound of the quarterback bellowing out the plays I knew by heart, one even named Shea 80 after me and my year of birth—a play action screen to the fullback. Most of all, I loved the inspiring sight of Coach Carr pacing the sidelines with his clipboard and whistle, throwing out his trademark quips and colorful colloquialisms, often under his breath, cracking
everyone up even when he wasn’t trying to be funny. Asking linebackers not to take the scenic route to the ball. Telling receivers to pretend that they were going after a Happy Meal, maybe they’d catch it. Informing the line that they looked like dying calves in a hailstorm. And reminding our quarterback that, in the words of one of his own coaching heroes, Darrell Royal, only three things could happen when he threw the ball, and two of them weren’t good.

In high school, I grew tall, pretty, and slightly less tomboyish, getting something of my own life apart from Walker. Lucy led the charge for those four years, our priorities more in sync than they’d been in junior high. She was a cheerleader while I played soccer and ran track, but we hung with the same crowd, took the same classes, and both went a little boy crazy. The most popular girl in our class, Lucy had her pick of any guy from any clique, but she tended to reject those who were too impressed with her famous father, passing them off to me. For two years, we dated best friends, both baseball players named Scott, and the four of us became inseparable (until our joint breakup, when Lucy declared us Scott-free). Even amid all the boisterous normalcy of adolescence, though, I remained dedicated to the game of football, working as the sports editor of our paper. I covered our high school’s poorly coached and perpetually losing team, but also convinced our journalism teacher to let me write pieces on Walker—straight reporting of the games as well as lengthy features. I was the only high school reporter with press credentials and direct access to Coach Carr, peppering my pieces with insider nuggets on projected lineups or next year’s recruiting class. Lucy often tagged along on my assignments, even though the details bored her, explaining that it was the only real way to spend quality time with her dad.

When it came time to apply to college, there was never a question where I’d go, even when my grades slipped to a low B average. My parents pretended to be concerned, reminding me that Walker was practically Ivy League when it came to academic standards, but I knew that, short of a felony, it would only take one thirty-second phone call from our closest family friend to get me in. Fortunately, I didn’t have
to resort to that, at least as far as I knew, my admissions essay about my passion for Walker football overshadowing my lackluster transcript. There was even a handwritten note on my acceptance letter that said:
Go Broncos!

Then there was Lucy, who didn’t even
apply
to Walker, not even as a backstop. I was shocked at her decision to go to the University of Texas, our blood rival, and remember asking her how she could be so unsentimental. “I mean … you’re Coach Carr’s
daughter
!”

“It’s precisely
because
I’m Coach Carr’s daughter,” she tried to explain. “It’s like I don’t even have a say in the matter. You do.”

“Well, clearly you do, too,” I retorted. “You’re going to UT.”

“Oh, Lord. Get
over
it already,” she said, explaining for the fiftieth time that she’d picked her school because she wanted a break from our town. She said not everything revolved around football in Austin. She called it
refreshing.

I told her I was over it, but I wasn’t really. Nor would I ever understand how she could have made such a traitorous choice—both to abandon me for four years and, more important, to align herself with our archenemy. Coach Carr was supportive, insisting that he wanted Lucy to live her life, but he also warned her that he better never hear the words
Hook ’em
,
Horns
from his daughter’s lips, or see her make that dreaded hand signal. And orange and white were banned colors in his zip code. Lucy said the rules were easy, but one day when we were both home from school for the weekend, she forgot to change out of a Texas T-shirt, a fairly harmless infraction but for the fact that we’d just lost to them the week before. I winced when I saw it, but it was her mother who made her change before her father came home. He had a thick skin—you couldn’t coach without one—but sometimes little things set him off. A stupid call on his radio show. (“Well, Jim from North County, maybe you should come down and call some plays next week?”) Or an insensitive question from the press. (“Am I disappointed? We lost on a fluke play and a phantom clip and our quarterback left the field on a damn stretcher. Nah, I’m not disappointed. I’m
elated.”) And anytime he had to question someone’s loyalty. (“You’re either in or out. No fair-weather fans allowed.”)