weeks until the next dead period, when coaches couldn’t communicate with recruits. “Where are you going?” I asked, avoiding the hard topic for a few seconds more.
“Chicago and Pittsburgh,” he said. “Naperville and New Kensington, to be exact. Two quick trips to visit two quarterbacks. Up and back … And a couple day trips in Texas.”
“When do you leave?” I said.
“Chicago on Friday. Pittsburgh next week. In and out … Why? Do you want to join me?”
I smiled and said, “I wish.” Then I remembered Lucy’s tree-trimming invitation and asked him if he planned to be there.
“Yes. Why? You don’t think we should tell her then, do you?”
“No. That will be emotional enough,” I said, knowing how much Lucy dreaded all the Christmas traditions without her mother. “Maybe we should wait until after the holidays?”
“And after the game?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a rush of cowardly relief. “Maybe so. We just have to be really careful in the meantime.”
“I agree. Because this has to come from us.”
“Both of us,” I said, thinking that it wasn’t fair to give him the task—and I wasn’t sure I could handle it alone.
“Yes. When the time is right, we just have to do it,” he said in his intense, coaching voice. “Man up and do it.”
Thirty-eight
Two nights later, I was at Lucy’s house, doing everything I could to avoid eye contact with Coach while he did the same with me. We had not seen each other since the night in his office but had talked every few hours. I’d even fallen asleep the night before while talking to him on the phone.
“Oh, I love this one! It’s Blitzen!” Lucy said now, holding up a frosted glass reindeer as we all assembled in her family room to decorate her tree.
“Dude,” Lawton said, as Lucy passed it off to him with a directive to hang it somewhere near the front. “How the hell do you know that it’s Blitzen? I’m getting a Prancer vibe.”
“It’s not Rudolph,” Caroline sagely pointed out. “See? No red nose.”
“Right,” Lawton said, addressing Caroline, while Coach kept his nose to the grindstone, supergluing a broken Bronco ornament. “But it could be any one of them but Rudolph. How does she know that it’s Blitzen?”
I had been wondering the same thing, figuring there was something I had missed in reindeer lore, as Lucy smiled faintly and said, “Mom told me it was Blitzen. A long time ago.”
“Well, how did she know?” Lawton said.
“She knew her reindeer, Lawton,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. “Now get him up there … And take this one, too.” She handed him a wooden oar with LAKE LBJ painted on the side and told him it could go toward the back.
One at a time, Lucy unwrapped ornaments from the cardboard compartments nestled in large green plastic bins, then passed them off to Caroline, Lawton, Coach, and me, while Neil, who had strung the tiny white lights earlier in the day, focused on careful placement of the generic gold and red balls. Lucy made it seem as if her ornament allocation was random, but I knew better, and quickly caught on that she gave the sturdiest and most garish ones to Caroline, so that they couldn’t be broken and would be too low to see. She gave all those with a boyish theme (planes, trains, and automobiles; soldiers, elves, and masculine-looking snowmen and reindeer) to Lawton. And she gave anything Walker or football-related—which felt like every other ornament—to Coach and me. Additionally, Coach was in charge of all Santa Clauses, whether whimsical or dignified.
We took our assignments seriously, hoping that our branch selection would meet with her approval. For the most part, we didn’t let her down, though she’d occasionally look up, frown, and point out an unpleasing concentration of one color or theme. “Disperse those elves, would you, Lawton? They look too … busy all clumped together right there,” she’d say before returning her gaze to the bins, half of which came from her basement, the other half from her parents’ attic, having given her father permission to forgo his own tree this year.
“It’s looking good, y’all!” Lucy said at one point, and we all agreed that the tree was beautiful. That you couldn’t even tell it was artificial, necessitated by Neil’s evergreen allergy, unless you stopped to consider that no real trees were this full and symmetrical.
“Do you remember this one?” she said to Lawton, holding up a delicate painted ornament of a little girl pushing a cart full