You & Me

I texted Landon on the drive in to my office Friday morning. What time does Bethany arrive today?

I pick her up from the airport at 2 p.m.

That’s a lot of time before the game.

We used to go get a late lunch together but I don’t see that happening. I’ll go straight to the stadium from the airport.

I’ll meet you there at 3 p.m.

I arrived shortly after Landon and Bethany. His car engine was still ticking away the heat as I hurried past and tugged my booster T-shirt over my head.

He was already on the field and dragging out the electrical cord from the tunnel. A slender, delicate blonde hovered behind him. She kept trying to reach in to take the tail end of the cord and straighten out the kinks, and she held the roll of industrial-strength duct tape that had nearly pulled my fingerprints off my skin like she was ready to use it. If she did, she’d probably tape herself to the ground.

“Landon!” I waved and jogged down to the field. I smiled and thrust out my hand as I strode up. “Hi, ma’am.” I pushed a little drawl into my voice. Every Texan can. We grow up big and loud, and our vowels slide around sometimes, whether we want them to or not.

Bethany was even tinier up close than she’d been half a stadium away. Waifish, with large, loose blonde curls framing a stunningly beautiful face. Button nose, bowed lips. Eyes a shade of blue I’d rarely seen, and so wide they looked like a man could fall right in. She came up to my chest, to Landon’s chest, and if she was over a hundred pounds, I was the King of Texas.

She was gorgeous. My mind slapped down images of her and Landon as a couple. They would have been breathtaking together, prom king and queen level royalty. No wonder they’d made Bowen. Any genetic combination between Landon and Bethany had to be gold-plated.

But there was a brittleness between them, the air like glass about to shatter. Landon had been avoiding her gaze and avoiding her reach and trying to edge away from her the whole time I’d been in the stadium. Bethany stared at his back with aching eyes.

I stopped beside Landon and gave him a one-armed side squeeze, then let my hand linger on his shoulder. His muscles were like springs compressed to bare metal. I stood beside him—a little too close, a little too familiar—and waited for Bethany to shake my hand.

“You must be Bethany. I’m Luke. I’ve heard a ton about you.” I gave her my Texan half-smile, complete with the head tilt downward. Boys in Texas practice that until they can pretend they look half as cool as Clint Eastwood.

Bethany’s eyes darted between me and Landon and back. Beneath my palm, Landon started to tremble.

Both of Bethany’s hands went to her purse strap. “Luke!” she said warmly, a smile brightening up her expression. “So nice to make your acquaintance. Landon and I have been so busy that we haven’t had a chance to talk much these days, but I’m sure he would have told me all about you if we had.”

“He has been busy.” My hand brushed once across Landon’s back and then dropped. “I don’t even know when he has time to sleep, what with being a Super Dad and all.”

Landon blushed and fiddled with the electrical cord. A man can always fiddle with something to avoid a conversation, or a woman’s gaze, and he was doing a master’s-level fiddle as he stared at the concrete.

“Landon is a Super Dad.” Bethany’s smile was fragile. “I wish he could have been a father to more children.”

All the air sucked out of the stadium.

“Uh, Bethany, may I escort you into the bleachers?” I gestured to the on-field stadium entrance. “You have your pick of seats at the moment. Let’s find you the best so you can cheer on Bowen.”

She nodded graciously. Before she went up into the bleachers, she turned to Landon. “I’ll see you Sunday? Or will Bowen be taking me to the airport?”

“We’ll take you together, Bethy.”

Another nod, and then she climbed the bleachers. She knew where she was going better than I did. I didn’t have the first clue where the best seats in the stands were, but she wove her way to the dead center, lower deck, fifty-yard line, right in front of where Bowen and the team would be.

I asked if she wanted anything—a soda, a Gatorade, one of the snack packs the boosters hoarded—or if she was cold or needed a jacket. I could scrounge one from my truck if she needed it. But she shook her head and seemed intent on staring a hole in the sky, so I decided to let her be.

Her hand wrapped around my wrist as I turned to go. “Luke?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Landon is staying with you this weekend?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She took a deep breath, dragging in more air than I thought she could hold inside her. She nodded, first to herself and then to me. “Is he happy?”

I stilled. My heart hammered so hard I thought she’d be able to feel my pulse galloping against her fingertips. “I hope so,” I answered honestly. All I had to go on was what Landon had said. He seemed happy most of the time. He seemed happy when we hung out and when he was with Bowen. “I’m going to do what I can to make sure that stays that way.”

I knew how she’d take my words, and everything I’d done since I’d marched up to Landon. She nodded slowly and then pulled herself together, placing her purse in her lap as she smoothed her dress around her legs and tucked the delicate floral fabric under her thighs. She plucked a pair of sunglasses from her bag and slid them on.

She had an hour to go before the pregame started, but she was settled in and ready. And done with me.

I headed back for Landon, who had laid out the electrical cord but then had disappeared. I found him slumped against the wall deep within the tunnel, arms crossed over his chest, chin down, heel of one boot resting on the toe of his other.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said. There was caution in his voice, and his expression was a tangle of wariness and worry.

I leaned beside him. My hands made a diamond behind my back as I braced myself. “I know.”

“She’s going to think we’re together.”

I shrugged. My stomach did a flip-flop. “If that helps you and gets her off your back a bit, I don’t mind the white lie.”

A minute passed. I heard cars arriving in the athletic lot. Doors slamming. The sound of teens laughing. “Did she say anything?” Landon asked.

“She wanted to know if you were happy. I told her I was doing everything I could to make sure you were.”

His face was bisected by the half-light falling through the tunnel. I couldn’t decipher the look in his eyes, couldn’t parse the meaning of shadow and sunlight playing in his gaze. Too many emotions were swirling there. Wonder and hope, fear and a curl of sorrow. Resignation. The hint of something else, what almost looked like a settling, a decision made. I had no idea what decision, but Landon, who was a master at covering up the deepest parts of himself, seemed to smooth everything with one deep breath. He blinked, and the turmoil I’d glimpsed vanished.

He smiled and held out the duct tape. “Want to tape down or tear strips?”

Tearing off the strips sucked. “I’ll tear.” By the end of the season, I wasn’t going to have any skin left on my fingers.

We chatted as we taped the cord down and got started on our pregame routine. Our workweeks, our coworkers, how Bowen’s essay was coming, and my and Emmet’s shared dishwashing on Wednesday. It was easy falling into conversation with Landon, and into the rhythm of our work. We moved together like an oiled machine, anticipating each other’s needs. He was there when I stumbled with an overfull water jug, and I was there when the dolly slipped and the backup ice coolers nearly spilled.

I jogged up to the concession stand before we had to mess with that hideous inflatable to say hello to Annie and grab Landon a Diet Dr. Pepper. When we retreated to our skywalk after kickoff, I passed it to him, and he looked at me like I’d given him a solid gold bar, not just a plastic bottle of caffeine and food coloring.

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Not as much as I would have liked.” He drank quickly, like maybe all that was keeping him on his feet was fake sugar.

According to Landon, this week’s game was supposed to be a breeze. The other high school was struggling to rebuild, he said, after sweeping clean the coaches and losing most of their top talent a few years back. There just hadn’t been enough kids coming up through their district to compete against the talent other districts’ could field. Kids like Bowen, or like Emmet, two top-tier players who’d ended up on the same team during the same two years.

If all went right, Landon said, and if our team continued to play at the level they were at, and if no one got hurt, Last Waters had a chance at the state title. A good chance.

They hadn’t made it through the playoffs the year before. Bowen had been the backup quarterback who took over after the senior starter was injured. He won every game he started, until a nail-biting heartbreak in the second round of playoffs. It was the defense, Landon said, that couldn’t hang on. They lost too many points, and Bowen couldn’t make them all back after the defense collapsed.

Now the team was Bowen’s—and Emmet’s—and this was their year.

Even I could tell tonight’s game was different from last week. Bowen wasn’t pressured when he dropped back to pass. The defense couldn’t break through the line to reach him. Whatever Emmet and Bowen had figured out on Sunday, they’d fixed it. The offense was like a brick wall, and Bowen could fling the football wherever he wanted.

Emmet played relaxed, letting the other team advance before his defense stopped them cold and forced a punt. On the sideline, he and Bowen were loose and limber, smiling with their teammates and the coaches. I even thought I saw him look up at the skywalk.

After the half, Emmet and Bowen were pulled, and the second-string players took the field. They coached their backups, calling out adjustments and reviewing plays.

Landon and I slacked off watching the game and started chatting again. The rest of the third and the fourth were a blur, a mess of passes and tackles and blown whistles. My focus shifted between Emmet and Landon.

When the game ended, Landon slipped away to find Bowen. They had a brief, intense conversation while I started hauling away water jugs. Bethany watched not ten feet away, standing at the edge of the bleachers above the fifty-yard line. If I reached up, I could give her a high five.

I lost Landon after that, between the crush of the team heading down the tunnel into the athletic center and the back-and-forth of the post-game cleanup. Bethany had disappeared, too, but I spotted Annie and the moms in the stands. I hopped the railing and helped them clean up, waiting for Landon to reappear. He didn’t.

“So, you met Bethany?” Annie asked. I trailed her with a fluttering plastic bag that was almost as tall as I was. Annie pitched empty cans of Mountain Dew and crumpled candy wrappers into the sack as I tried to maneuver to catch her wild tosses. She wasn’t leading the WNBA anytime soon. “Something happened there. She’s been coming down for three years, and things have been mostly fine between them. But since the spring game, they’ve both been like scared dogs circling each other.” She tossed a half-full bottle of Coke underhand at my head.

I batted the soda into the trash bag. “I think she tried to get back together with him.”

“That ain’t gonna happen.” Annie laughed. “Look, I love Landon, but I could never love a man more than I love my own self-respect. Get on up, girl. Go find yourself a new life.”

“Have you met someone Landon’s dated?” I didn’t know where the question came from or why it burst out of my mouth. I wanted to take it back. “Sorry, ignore me. I know Landon keeps his private life private.”

Annie pursed her lips as she reached for a Doritos bag crumpled beneath a bleacher. Her chunky football earrings swung around her tanned neck. “Landon’s never brought a guy around,” she said carefully. “He doesn’t date much. I don’t think he’s ever found a man who fits with him in all the right ways.” She turned to me and held my stare as she tossed her trash into my bag. “He’s a special guy, and he needs someone equally special to be with.”

“No argument from me.”

Annie laughed, though I didn’t get the joke. She stepped over two bleachers, her long legs gleaming under the stadium lights. She was a beautiful woman, and I should have been noticing that. I should have been paying attention to her vivaciousness and her kindness to her friends and to me. I admired those traits, and I adored strong women. I should like Annie. But as my eyes traveled down those long legs, nothing stirred.

We finished our section and followed the other moms out of the stadium. They hurled their sacks of trash into the dumpster, each of them getting a kick out of how far they could fling their sack. Annie said, “Don’t let me down now, Luke,” and gestured for me to hurl ours. Marianne’s bag beat mine by a solid thunk.

My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and saw I had texts from both Landon and, shockingly, Emmet.

Dad, there’s a post-game party I’m going to go to. Is that cool?

He wouldn’t have asked or bothered to tell me before. Now that we were approaching something that resembled a father-son relationship, I was being told things.

Maybe I didn’t want to know. My own high school years were a blur of hormones and bad decisions. I was a rebel without a cause, an artist craving agony and angst. I partied and drank and smoked pot, and I thought I was the shit. All one hundred pounds of me, dressed in black with my dyed hair swinging in my eyes. Be home by 2 a.m. I texted back. And be safe. Text me if things get weird or…

It’s cool, Dad. Nothing like that. I’ll be home by two.

Fingers crossed. I checked Landon’s text. I’m by your truck. Sorry, I slipped out with Bowen, and then I helped out in the athletic center.

I’m on my way.

He was leaning against my tailgate with a duffel slung over his shoulder. He had his arms crossed again and was peering up at the moon, and the tension from before was back. His shoulders were hunched, and his jaw was set, a harsh right angle of skin against the dark sky, highlighted beneath the orange sodium lights of the parking lot.

“Hey.” I slid beside him, mirroring his pose. “You all right?” I wasn’t certain, but that disappearing act he’d pulled after the game seemed like trouble.

“Bethany cornered me. She had too much time to think before the game.”

“What’d she say?”

“She wanted to talk about our sealing.”

“Your ceiling? Did you leave something horrible up there before you left Utah? I would think four years would be time enough to talk about something like that.”

He laughed, though it faded fast. “No, our sealing in the temple. It’s a Mormon thing.” A sigh blew out of him. “Mormons have a ceremony called a celestial marriage. It’s a ‘for all time’ kind of deal. When you marry, you’re married here on Earth and in the afterlife. Husband and wife forever.”

“She thinks y’all are still married forever?”

“We are, supposedly. She never filed for a dissolution of our sealing. A civil divorce doesn’t automatically cancel your celestial marriage. She’s refused to dissolve it for years. I asked her about it again over summer, and she said she wanted to talk first.”

“About?” I brushed my shoulder against his as I shifted.

He was quiet. He leaned in until we were pressed together from shoulder to elbow to hip. “Tonight, she wanted to talk about you and me. Did I think this was something serious, or…”

“I didn’t create a huge problem for you, did I? If I did, I can go fix it. I can tell her I was just joking—”

“No, it’s okay. I told her the truth. You and I just met. We’re still figuring things out.” He quirked a tiny smile my way. “That is true.”

I turned to face him, hooking my elbow over my truck’s tailgate. We were sharing the same amount of space we’d shared at the bar. My whole tailgate stretched on either side of us. “This sealing matters to you, doesn’t it?”

“It didn’t use to, especially right after we divorced. I was declared an apostate, and it was easy to turn my back on everything I used to believe.”

“But now?”

I waited as Landon gathered his thoughts. “I want to use all of my heart, might, mind, and strength to do good and to be a good man,” he finally said. “A good father to Bowen. Eventually—hopefully—a good partner or husband to another good man.”

The words were an echo of Mormon doctrine that I’d looked up on Google. Mormons were to serve God with all of their heart, might, mind, and strength. “Well, congrats, ’cause you’re knocking that one out of the ballpark. You’re not just good, you’re great.”

His eyes were wide open, refracting the stadium lights until they shimmered. “I try.”

“You succeed. All we’ve got to do now is find you a good man.”

Landon laughed my favorite laugh: head tipped back, eyes squeezed shut, the sound so warm it wrapped me up.

I smiled. “Are you ready to get out of here?”