“Is that what happened to you?” I asked. “With Daddy, I mean.”
“It’s some of it. I’ve had regrets, but I’ve lived past them and learned to make do.”
She flattened her long-fingered hands on the table and stared down at them as if they were evidence of regret and love and something less definable, and I saw for an instant what a wild and lovely creature it was that my daddy had gentled. Then the radio crackled and she was just my mama once again.
“What I wonder, Andy,” she said, “is if making do’s a lesson you need to learn this early on.”
I broke up with Carol Ann the Wednesday before the Crescent Creek game, at lunchtime in a corner of the practice field. She accused me of using her for sex, of ruining her life. I didn’t trust myself to speak and stood with my head down, my face hot, taking her abuse, wanting to say something that would make her stop and throw her arms around me and draw me into a kiss that would set a seal on our lives; but I couldn’t pull the trigger. She ran off crying, looking for her friends, and I went off to American history, where I listened to Mrs. Kemp tell lies about South Carolina’s glorious past and doodled pictures of explosions in my notebook.
Friday night, I played the best game of my career. I played with hate and self-loathing in my heart, throwing my body around, slamming into the Crescent City corners with vicious abandon, screaming at them while they lay on the ground — I scored three times, twice on short passes and once on a fumbled kickoff, threading my way through tacklers and plowing under the last man between me and the goal with a lowered shoulder. In the locker room afterward, Coach Tuttle was inspired to curse, something he rarely did.
“Did you see Andy out there tonight?” he asked the gathered team. “That boy played some damn football! He wanted to win and he did something about it!”
The team roared their approval, sounding like dogs with their mouths full of meat, and pounded me on my pads, doing no good to my bruised and aching shoulder.
“You know what next week is?” he asked, and the team responded on cue, “Taunton Week!”
“If y’all play like Andy did tonight, and I know you can”—he paused for effect—“their mamas are gonna be wiping those Taunton boys’ asses for a month!”
Doyle and the others wanted me to party with them, but I begged off, saying I needed to ice my shoulder. At home, I told my parents that we’d won and I’d done all right.
Daddy gave me a funny look. “We listened to the game, son.”
“Okay,” I said angrily. “So I was the goddamn hero. So what?”
His face clouded, but Mama laid a hand on his arm and said I seemed tired and suggested I get some rest.
I burrowed into my room, clamped on the headphones, and listened to some of the new Green Day album, but it wasn’t mean enough to suit my mood, so I got on my computer, intending to check my e-mail — all I did was sit and stare at the blank screen. I understood that I hadn’t truly broken up with Carol Ann until that night, and the game, my show of ultra-violence, had been a severing act, a repudiation of sorts. If my shoulder hadn’t been sore, I might have hit something. I finally turned on the computer and played video games until the dregs of my anger were exhausted from splattering the blood of giant bugs across the walls of a ruined city.
The next morning I received a call from Dawn Cupertino, Doyle’s fiancée. She said she was worried about Doyle and wanted to talk. Could I come over? Dawn had been in the class ahead of ours and dropped out at sixteen to have a baby, which she lost during her first trimester. She had never returned to school, instead taking a waitress job at Frederick’s Lounge and an apartment in Crescent City, the second floor of an old frame house. She was thin and blue-eyed, a dirty blonde two years older than Doyle, almost three older than me, and had milky skin, nice legs, and a sharp mountain face that might remain pretty for three or four more years before starting to look dried-up and waspish. That would likely be fine with Dawn. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.
Though Doyle bragged on having an older woman with her own place, I thought the real reason he stuck with her was that she shared his low expectations of life but was cheerful about them. She was given to saying things like, “You better be enjoying this, babe, ’cause it’s all we’re gonna get,” and accompanying her comment with a grin, as if even the pleasure of having a beer or watching a movie was more than she could have hoped for.
That morning she met me at the door in jeans and an old sweatshirt three or four sizes too big; her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She sat on the living room sofa with her knees tucked under her, while I sat beside her, looking around at her collection of glass and porcelain trinkets, a display of old football pennants on the walls, pictures of cute kittens and cuddly dragons, her high school annual on the coffee table. It was a museum of her life up to the point that the baby had come along. Apparently nothing of note had happened since. I felt ungainly, like I was all elbows and knees, and any move I made would shatter the illusion.
Dawn put on a pot of coffee, we chatted about this and that. She said it was too bad about Carol Ann and asked how she was doing.
“She hates me,” I said. “I expect she’s finding some strength in that.”
Dawn giggled nervously, as if she didn’t get my meaning.
“What?” I said.
“It just was funny. the way you said it.” She brushed loose strands of hair back from her brow, then briefly rested her fingers on my arm and asked with exaggerated concern. “And how’re you doing?”
“Fine. What’s this about Doyle?”
She heaved a sigh. “I don’t know what’s got into him. He’s been acting all weird and. ” Her chin quivered. “You think he’s getting ready to break up with me?”
“Why would you think that?”
“He don’t seem real interested anymore.” She knuckled one eye, wiping away a trace of moisture from beside it. “Seeing how you broke up with Carol Ann, I figured he might follow suit. Doyle loves you, Andy. Sometimes I think more than he ever loved me.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“It’s true. He’s always talking about Andy this and Andy that. If you started putting on lipstick and wearing a dress, I swear he’d do it, too.” She squared her shoulders. “Maybe we should break up. I’m almost twenty. It’s about time I stopped going out with a kid.”
“Is that how you see him?”
“Don’t you? In a lot of ways Doyle’s the same ten-year-old runt who was always trying to lift up my skirt with a stick. Even after he got it lifted up proper, he treated sex like it was something neat he found behind the barn and he’s just busting to tell his friends about.”
The coffee was ready, and Dawn brought in a tray with the pot and two cups, cream and sugar. When she bent to set it on the table, the neck of her sweatshirt belled and I could see her breasts. I’d seen them plenty of times before whenever a group of us would go skinny-dipping in Crescent Creek, but they hadn’t stirred me like they did now. It had been three weeks since I’d been with Carol Ann, and I was way past horny.
I asked Dawn to fill me in on how Doyle was acting weird. She said he’d been spacey, easy to anger, and I told her it had more to do with the Taunton game than her, how he had been obsessed with Taunton ever since the linemen kicked our butts, and how it had made him extradepressed. That appeared to ease her mind, and she turned the conversation back to Carol Ann and me. I opened up to her and told her everything I’d been feeling. She took my hand and commiserated. I knew what was happening, but I didn’t allow myself to know it fully — I kept on talking and talking, confessing my fears and weaknesses, thinking about her breasts, her fresh smell, until she leaned over and kissed my cheek, at the same time guiding my hand up under her sweatshirt. She pulled back an inch or two, letting me decide, her eyes holding mine; but there was really no decision to be made.