You & Me

My thoughts crashed like derailing trains. I paced in my kitchen, my fingers laced so tight behind my head my knuckles pulled out my hair.

Emmet’s five syringes and the aluminum-wrapped rectangle lay on the kitchen island, in front of the bananas and a loaf of bread.

Normal things. Our life had been normal. We’d been normal. We’d been doing well, even. Hadn’t Emmet said good night, Dad with a smile last night? Hadn’t we lingered in the hallway outside our bedroom doors to talk for a few minutes more before we turned in?

How had I missed this?

I racked my brain for signs, moments that I’d missed. No, nothing.

If Emmet and I weren’t talking, if he was still sullen and hiding in his room all the time, I’d believe it, but now? We watched movies and he sat at the kitchen table when he did homework and he taught me how to play video games. We swam in Landon’s pool and he fell asleep on my shoulder and we talked to each other. We were father and son again, goddamn it.

Visions snapped, rubber bands in my mind: Emmet in his room, shooting up alone. In the mornings before school, or late at night after we’d parted ways. In his bathroom. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen his arms. The pool, Landon’s house. I raked through my memories but couldn’t remember anything unusual about my son’s arms or elbows. He was hiding it, then. His feet, his ankles. Between his toes. Behind his knees. So many places to hide track marks.

I crouched on my heels, my head between my knees as I tried to breathe. Panic strangled me. I couldn’t drag in oxygen. My eyes were burning, my ears were roaring. I grabbed the wall, the floor, anything to keep me from collapsing. Emmet, my Emmet.

The front door opened. I clenched shut my eyes and pushed to my feet. “Da-ad!” Emmet called. I heard him dump his duffel in the living room and kick off his sandals. “I’m home!”

This was supposed to be our “Dad and Em” night.

“In here,” I choked out. I breathed in. Held my breath and opened my eyes as Emmet walked into the kitchen.

He was smiling. My son was smiling, happy to see me, happy to be home. Maybe for the last time.

My heart snapped in half as his gaze dropped from me to the kitchen island, and to the syringes and the drugs I’d taken from his room.

First came the shock, blitzing across his face. Confusion followed, twisting into disbelief, then anger. No, not anger. Fury. “You were in my room?”

He wasn’t denying they were his. Wasn’t claiming elves or magic had put those syringes there. “Yes, Emmet, I was in your room. I was doing your laundry, Jesus. Not performing a cell search.” I was shaking, my lungs aching like someone was tearing fistfuls of tissue through my back. “What is this?”

“It’s not your business,” Emmet growled. He turned his back on me like he was going to walk out of this kitchen.

“Don’t walk away from me, Emmet!” My voice rose. He stilled, fists clenched so hard his forearms trembled. “This is my business! Everything you do is my business! I’m your father!”

“Since when?” Emmet spun.

“I’ve always been your father!”

“No! You’re only my dad when you want to be!” he bellowed “Only when it’s convenient for you! Only after you became friends with Bowen’s dad and decided you were gonna try and be cool, huh? You didn’t care about being my dad until it worked for you! You don’t care about me! You never have!”

Here it is, here’s how my son can destroy me. He can take my heart and slam it into the ground. These were the thoughts I hadn’t allowed myself to wonder, not even in the darkness, not even in my nightmares. These were the words I feared Emmet would say, the rage I was too terrified to see in his eyes.

“I love you, Em—”

“No, you don’t! You abandoned me! You both did!”

“What are you—”

“You didn’t want anything to do with me until I was good enough!” Tears shimmered in his eyes as his face purpled. “Just like her! Neither of you wanted me!”

“Emmet, you’re my son—”

“No!” He spun, swept the bananas and the bread from the island. They flew like missiles across the kitchen and slammed into the wall.

I stepped into the trajectory of the bananas. I wasn’t backing down from him. Not now, not ever. I took another step toward my son. “I love you. I have always loved you, Em, and I am not going to stand by and watch you destroy yourself.”

He snarled at me, feral, teeth bared, eyes wild. “You don’t have the right to come at me now, after everything, and try and dictate to me—”

“I am not letting you throw your life away—” I spoke over him, my voice rising. I kept walking to him like I was approaching a wild animal.

“You haven’t given a shit about me for years!”

“That’s not true. I love you—” We were face-to-face, shouting at the top of our lungs.

“Fuck you! You don’t love me!” Tears streamed down my son’s cheeks. He was roaring, gasping, sobbing, all at once.

“I do! And I am not going to lose you like I lost your mother! Your mother killed herself on this shit!” I picked up the aluminum-wrapped box and hurled it across the kitchen, just like Emmet had hurled the bananas. It hit the drywall, and I heard glass break.

My words echoed in the sudden silence.

All the color drained from Emmet’s face. His tears were still flowing, waterfalls cascading from his eyes. “What?”

Fuck. I’d sworn to myself that I would take that secret to the grave, that I’d never tell Emmet the truth about Riley’s death.

A year ago, I told him she died in a car accident.

I found her in her car in our driveway with a needle still stuck in her arm. When the paramedics arrived, she had no pulse. Wasn’t breathing. They’d pumped her with naloxone and transported her. I’d followed, screaming the whole way, absolutely screaming, beating on my steering wheel, slapping the leather, shouting her name as I roared why why why. I drove onto the curb, parked in a flower bed, tore into the emergency room. A security guard had to hold me back from following the paramedics. One of them was on top of Riley, straddling her, pumping her chest as the other forced air into her lungs with a mask.

Twenty minutes later, the doctor came out and told me there was nothing they could do. She was gone. Heroin, they said. Most likely laced with fentanyl. They were seeing an uptick of overdoses recently.

I had to say goodbye to Riley, to my wife, who had kept so many secrets from me, who had carved me deeper and deeper out of her world until we had a whole canyon between us, who had turned to drugs to escape her reality… and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even suspected. We were living such isolated, separated lives that I never thought for a moment that she had been using.

Microdosing, the autopsy said. So many, many injection sites. Up her arms and down her thighs and behind her knees and between all her toes. She’d used the veins under her armpits and behind her hairline, too. One in her temple behind her hair. Whenever she started shooting up, she’d started small, chasing mini highs and blurring the edges of her world.

The one truth of an addict is what you start with will never be enough. She’d done a little bit more every time until the day she went too far, until she took a hit before leaving to pick up Emmet from his first varsity football practice and never came back from that final, fatal rush.

I stared into Emmet’s overflowing eyes. He was quaking, his lips parted, snot pouring from his nose. Fear had replaced the rage in his eyes, and he was pleading at me silently, begging no, please, no with his gaze.

“I’m sorry. Em, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you—”

“Tell me what?” he shouted. His face twisted, a sob breaking free as he buckled and curled over his stomach. “Tell me what?”

“Your mom was addicted to heroin.” My words were whispers. “She overdosed in the driveway of our old house.”

Emmet crumbled, collapsing like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He fell forward, his hands slapping against the oven and tearing a cupboard door from its hinges as he hit his knees. Mixing bowls rolled across the tile. A bag of flour fell from the open cupboard and burst on the floor. He keened, wailing into his palms as he rocked back and forth.

I slid on my knees through the mess until I was beside him, my body pressed all the way against his. I wrapped him in my arms and pulled him against me like he was a little boy.

He buried his face in the center of my chest and screamed. His fingers dug into my shirt over my ribs and squeezed the fabric in his fists until I heard it tear. “Why?” he sobbed. “Why?”

I’d asked myself the same question a thousand times a day, every day. Why, why, why? Why had she done it? Why had she started using? Why didn’t she talk to me instead of turning to the worst possible escape? If she was so miserable, we could have figured out another way. Any other way.

Why hadn’t I seen the signs? Why hadn’t I noticed what was happening?

Why had I thought it was okay to drift through life, accepting that she and I didn’t talk, that we didn’t address the despair between us, that we allowed ourselves to get that lost?

The night she’d dumped my pork in the sink was a night I should have put my foot down. I should have noticed the thinness of her wrists, the hollows under her eyes, the loose sweater that hung off her frame. I should have said, we have to talk and this can’t go on, not walked away from her and let the silence fester.

I should have done so many things differently.

We were both miserable. We were both depressed. We were both running in different ways. I drifted, untethered to life, believing my worth was in the paycheck I brought home. She tried to fill an emptiness inside of her and instead dumped poison into that hole.

I don’t think she wanted to die. I think, maybe, she’d finally started to want to live. She had those divorce papers. She had been thinking about her future.

I wished to God she got to live it.

We should have separated. We should have called it quits years ago. Maybe we never should have married. We were kids that didn’t know up from down, left from right, living in rootless dreams and a world without consequence. She got pregnant, and we tried to do the right thing for our baby—for Emmet—but maybe the right thing would have been anything other than what we did do.

We tried. We tried for him. Ultimately, we failed, but we tried.

I tried to give Emmet what answers I could as I held him. I stroked his back and ran my fingers through his hair as I told him about how unhappy we’d been, individually and together, and how she took that unhappiness and made a fatal choice. How I was sorry, I was so sorry that I didn’t know, that I didn’t save her. And how, even if she wasn’t happy with me, she was always happy with Emmet.

“She loved you,” I breathed into his hair. “She loved you, Emmet. You were the best thing in her life.”

My shirt, my skin, absorbed his tears. My body would always collect and cradle his tears. My arms would shelter him forever.

Emmet’s sobs slowed and shifted into whimpering gasps, fractured animal noises of pain and heartache. He lay curled in a ball half in and half out of my lap, his knees splayed in the spilled flour, his face pushed against my shoulder. We were leaning against the oven, my cheek resting on his hair.

“Mom didn’t even come to my games the second half of freshman year.” Emmet sniffed. “She just stopped showing up. I thought…”

Riley, goddamn it. You loved Emmet more than life itself. Why did you let that shit make you forget that? I had to take a breath, calm myself down. It wasn’t her. It was her addiction. That’s all there was left in her mind by the end.

“I thought if I made varsity, she’d come back.” Emmet’s voice was like a lost little boy’s. “That’s why I worked my ass off to make varsity my sophomore year.”

His first varsity practice sophomore year was the day Riley died. Days later, he’d been kicked back down to junior varsity. I buried my face in his hair.

“I hoped you would come back, too.”

“What?” I pulled back just enough to look down at him.

Devastation wreaked my son. His eyes were sunken oceans, his skin blotchy and blooming with misery. Snot and tears soaked his face, his neck, the front of his T-shirt. “You didn’t want me. We used to be so close, Dad, but then you disappeared.” His lip quivered, and fresh tears spilled over his eyelashes. “I thought you didn’t like me anymore. I didn’t know what I did wrong or how to make you like me again. I just fucking missed you, Dad. I wanted you to see me play. I wanted to give you a ball after one of my games, like all the other kids got to give to their fathers. I wanted you back so fucking much—”

He sank his face into my chest again.

I wanted to tear myself to shreds, split myself down to elements and atoms so I could prove to Emmet that he was a part of me, that he always would be, that I loved him from the moment I heard his heartbeat. That I fell in love with him when I saw the shape of his nose on the sonogram, and again the first time I felt him kick through Riley’s belly. When the doctor placed him in my arms—wriggling, screaming, still messy with afterbirth—I’d started crying as I looked at his squished little face and his clenched eyes and his pummeling fists. I spent the next twelve hours watching him breathe, running my fingers over his nose and his forehead and his perfect, tiny fingers. He was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life, and to this day, he still was. He was my son.

“I love you, Emmet. I love you, and I will always love you.” His breath hitched against me, and his fingers dug into my mangled shirt. “Do you remember when we used to watch cartoons and eat pancakes together? I used to count down the days all week until I got to spend every minute with you.”

“Remember when you used to do those funny voices?”

I reached for my best Australian accent. I was rusty, and it was more of a farce than true Crocodile Dundee. “Right, I definitely do. Gotta watch you, make sure you brush all those teeth, even the molars back there.”

He barked out a single, tragic laugh. “Do you remember when we used to draw together?”

My throat clenched. I had to force the words out. “Drawing together is my most favorite memory of us, Em. Hands down, my most favorite.”

His chin quivered. “Why did you disappear?”

“I thought… you didn’t need me anymore. You were playing football, and you had your mother, and I was no good at sports. You were so busy that we lost our cartoons, and then we lost our drawing time, and… you’d moved on, and I—” I didn’t know how to find a place in his life. “I thought I was doing the right thing by giving you space to grow up.”

That would be the biggest regret of my life. It hollowed out my bones, made me feel small, a failure as a man and a father.

“If I could go back in time, Em, I would. I’d change everything, and I’d be there every day with you. I can’t change the past, but I am trying to be a better father now. I started volunteering this year because I was desperate to find a way to reconnect with you. I missed you, and I wanted to rebuild a fraction of what we used to have. I think we found something good together?”

I looked at him, hoping for any kind of acknowledgement, something to tell me that what we’d shared over the past couple months meant the world to him, too.

He nodded.

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m your father, and I will always love you. Okay?”

Again, he nodded.

Time for another reckoning. “Now—” I tried to calm my panicked heart. I sniffed, breathed in, held it. “Tell me the truth. What are you using? What was in that packet?”

“It’s not drugs.” His shoulders slumped. He dropped his chin to his tear-soaked chest. “It’s testosterone. I was juicing.”

“You’re using steroids?”

“I was.” He looked at me, forlorn and bleak. “When I got dropped from varsity, I thought I was the biggest fucking failure on the planet. Mom was gone, you were gone. The only guy who seemed to care about me was Bowen, but I only saw him on Thursdays. If I could get back on varsity, I thought maybe things would get better. Maybe Bowen would stick around.” He hung his head. “I started doping sophomore year. I cycled a few times. I just wanted someone to notice me. But I stopped taking it, Dad, I swear.”

“When did you stop?”

“Summer. Before football camp, after Coach told me I would be pulled back up to varsity. It didn’t feel right to keep taking it. Bowen and I were legit friends by then, and I realized how much he’d hate what I’d done.” His face twisted again, and he fell forward, hanging his head between his knees. “Jesus, Dad, I’m a fucking fraud. Everything about me is fake. I juiced to get on varsity. Everything I’ve done this season has been fake.”

“You’re not a fraud.” I counted back the months. Football camp began at the beginning of August, which meant it had been at least three months since his last injection. I knew enough, thanks to the Low Testosterone money-grabbing spam emails that cluttered my inbox, to know that testosterone worked hard and worked fast. If Emmet was telling me the truth, the testosterone he’d injected should be long gone. “Everything you’ve done this season hasn’t been because of steroids. You’re a great player without doping, Em.”

He shrugged. He wouldn’t look at me.

I raised his head, my hands holding his chin up. “It ends today. I think I broke your vial, so it’s gone. Never buy that shit again. Never inject a steroid again. Okay?”

He nodded. Exhaled hard. I saw relief in his eyes, a weariness lifting. He’d held this secret tight inside of him, but now it was free.

“I’m taking you to your doctor in the morning. We’re going to make sure you’re all right. We’re going to get blood work done, and whatever else we need. I will not take any risks with your health or your life. Okay?”

Another nod. These weren’t questions. I was informing him of our next steps.

This next one was going to really hurt. “And you need to talk to Bowen. You need to tell your team captain, and your best friend, what you did.”

Fear roared into his gaze. Every muscle in his body tensed. He started trembling again. His eyes begged me, pleaded with me.

“You admire Bowen because of the kind of leader he is. Isn’t that what you told me earlier this season?” Fresh tears dripped over my fingers where I held his face. “He says everyone has to have integrity, right? You made a mistake, Em, when you started using steroids, but the bigger mistake you can still make is not owning up to it. You have to tell Bowen.”

He cried quietly as he slumped against the oven, hiccupping sobs and ragged sniffles filling the space between us. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I know I do. Fuck, I’ve hated keeping this from him.”

“No one knew? No one at all?”

“No.” He rubbed his hand across his nose, wiped his snot down the side of his shorts. “Do you think he’ll hate me?”

“No, I don’t think he’ll hate you.”

Silence stretched. Emmet was off in his own world, lost in his own thoughts. “Dad?” His voice croaked, almost cracked. “Can you tell me about Mom? About how she died?”

I hesitated. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Please? I want to know the truth.”

In my closet, all the way in the back, behind boxes of old tax returns, birth certificates, and medical records, I’d hidden a manila envelope. Inside were the last bits of Riley I had. I went and found it, brought it back to the kitchen.

I sank beside Emmet and laid my palm over the center. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I cracked the seal and dumped the papers on my lap. There was a smaller envelope inside, taped shut, Scene Photos scrawled across the front in the detective’s handwriting. I took it and set it to my side. “These are not for you. Never look at these photos.”

They weren’t for me, either. I needed to throw them away. Burn them. If I could, I’d obliterate that afternoon from my memories, pluck those sights from the folds and crevices of my brain.

When I found Riley, she was still and cold, her head flopped to one side, skin a grayish, ghostly pale. I never needed to see the photos of her car with her drug paraphernalia scattered on the floorboards, or the emergency room bay where they’d pronounced her dead, or her body, ravaged and destroyed by her addiction, again.

I handed Emmet the autopsy report and let him read through the findings. Overdose. Heroin and fentanyl. Evidence of multi-year addiction. Track marks hidden all over her body. Significantly underweight.

Both the emergency room doctor and the medical examiner told me I needed to be checked out. No one knew how long she’d been using, and if she’d been sharing needles, then she could have picked up something and passed it to me. I had physicals every month, had enough blood drawn to keep a vampire fat and happy. A year after Riley’s death, my doctor declared me out of the woods.

I gave Emmet the police report. I’d thought, after Riley died, there would be more than a fifteen-minute interview with a detective and a half-page summary of her death. I’d thought there would be an investigation, a case opened, the police attempting to run down who sold her the heroin. I thought they’d treat her death like it was a wrong that had to be righted.

I’d seen far too much TV. A dead drug user was nothing more than paperwork to the police. If she’d lived, they could have questioned her, threatened her with an arrest and with jail time if she didn’t flip on her dealers. Dead? She was nothing. I’d raged at the detective and demanded he do his job, that he find out who killed my son’s mother.

“Her addiction killed her, sir,” he’d told me. “And it killed her long before this happened.”

That was the truest thing anyone ever said about Riley’s death. Not that the Lord works in mysterious ways, or that she hadbeen called up to His side early, or that she was in a better place now, away from this hard and tragic world.

Riley—the woman I’d known, the woman I’d loved, the woman I’d created Emmet with—died sometime after she started using. Everything wonderful about her, from her diamond-sharp mind to her dry wit to her passion as a mother and the way she used to make Emmet laugh and clap his hands, and how she was his first true love—all of it, all her sparkle, all her magic, her soul, everything that made her her, was long gone, ages before her body gave out.

“There’s something else, Em.” This would be difficult to hear. “She spent a lot of money. She opened up credit cards and took out personal loans. She liquefied our savings and our investment accounts. She left us in so much debt I had to sell the old house to pay it off. I know you didn’t want to move.”

He hadn’t wanted to move, but I couldn’t stay there. Not where Riley had died in the driveway. One afternoon’s memory had eclipsed all the Saturday morning cartoons, all of our drawings in the kitchen, and every night I’d spent in Emmet’s room sketching him in his crib.

“And the reason we live here—” Here, in this tiny townhome, far across town from our old neighborhood. “—is because it’s what I can afford on half a month’s pay. I’m putting half of everything I make into a savings account so I can rebuild your college fund.”

Riley hadn’t only stolen money from Emmet. She’d reached forward in time and yanked away his future, ripped the rug from beneath his feet before he even knew he was standing on it. More than his college tuition, though, she’d stolen herself out of his life. She’d taken away the proud mother that was supposed to dance with him at his wedding and the joyous grandmother who was supposed to rock his children in her arms. She—her addiction—had taken so much from him, and I was desperately trying to give him back what I could.

“Dad… You kept all of this shit a secret? For over a year? Have you told anyone else?”

“No.”

My son enveloped me in a massive, almost brutal hug. When he spoke, his voice was muffled. “I’m sorry, Dad, I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“I’ve been such an asshole. I blamed you—”

I pulled him back and looked him in his eyes. “Stop. I don’t blame you for anything. Not one thing. What matters now is you and me, okay? How we get through this together.”

He sniffled and smashed a tear on his chin with the back of his hand. He nodded.

“Things have to change between us. Your mom and I didn’t talk like we needed to. We kept too many things to ourselves. We kept our hurts and our secrets inside us. Your mother’s ended up killing her. You and I can’t end up that way.” The little vial of steroids I’d broken was case in point of the direction Emmet and I had been going. “We have to be more open with each other.”

My heart kicked. Today, this moment, wasn’t the time to tell Emmet I’d fallen in love with Landon. One shock to the system was more than enough for the day, the week, probably the rest of the year.

Emmet and I needed to absorb all of this. Things had been said. Truths had been shared. I was still reeling from when Emmet said he remembered drawing together.

“Tell me about college. Why don’t you want to talk about your future?”

He went still, almost like a statue, where he sat on the floor. Hunched forward, knees bent, legs spread, elbows hooked around his thighs. Flour dusted over his forearms, clung in thick chunks to his athletic shorts and the wet front of his T-shirt. He worked his jaw back and forth. I waited.

He seemed to come to a decision when he stood. I thought we were going to get off the ground and go sit at the table, have a conversation like adults, but—

He turned his back and walked out of the kitchen. His feet thundered up the stairs.

I was too stunned to call after him. After that, all that, he walked out? I sank into one of the kitchen chairs. Flour stuck to my face and had mashed beneath my fingernails. What now? You opened up, and he still walked away—

“Dad?”

Emmet was back. He hovered in the kitchen doorway, holding a pile of old spiral notebooks and a ratty textbook in his hands. It looked like the pile I’d seen hidden under his bed.

“I want to show you something.” He set his notebooks on the kitchen table and slid the textbook to the side. Human Anatomy scrawled across the front. Emmet had picked it up from the library at a book sale for 99 cents. The price tag was still stuck in the corner. He handed one of his notebooks to me. I flipped the top open. “I want to be like you,” he said softly.

On the first page, he’d sketched in pencil a perfect reproduction of a human hand grasping a football. On the next, the same hand was throwing a football, the wrist twisted, the fingers barely grazing the leather. And the next page, the same drawing, but this time, the hand was only bones, perfect bones, as if the drawing were an X-ray. It was a diagram, I realized. An anatomical diagram of a pass.

Every notebook was full of anatomical drawings. Hands and feet, arms and legs. Football players in motion on the field. His teammates at rest and standing on the sideline or sitting on the bench. One player being worked on at the athletic trainers’ table. Every drawing was photorealistic, as if Emmet had taken reality and stamped a moment in time onto the page.

There were pictures of Bowen, too. Bowen hurtling the football downfield, Bowen smiling, Bowen laughing. Bowen staring up from the page, one half of his face his own, the other cut away to reveal the skull underneath. It would be creepy if it wasn’t anatomically perfect. He’d drawn Bowen as Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in football gear: arms and legs extended, half of him clothed and fleshed, half of him skeletal with an overlay of muscles.

Emmet’s fingernails dug into the back of his chair. He gnawed on his lip, watched me flip the pages of his notebooks. He hadn’t said a word.

“Jesus. Em, these are—”

I couldn’t even begin to find the words. My son was the most perfect artist I’d seen in my life.

“Remember when you said you liked biology more than physics when you were in high school? And I said I wanted to take anatomy next year?” He pushed the anatomy textbook to me. “I want to be a medical illustrator. That’s what I want, Dad.”

He flipped the pages of the frayed textbook, opening to a drawing of a leg cut away to reveal the muscles and veins. “I want to draw surgical diagrams and work on forensics and help with research projects. Did you know medical illustrators are working on 3-D printing tech now? Illustrators are helping design actual organs.”

I’d never heard of a medical illustrator, but Emmet obviously had. He was clearly, deeply passionate about this. “How do you become one?”

“I need to double major in biology and art. A pre-med and art double major would be better. After undergrad, I need to get a master’s degree. There are only three schools that offer a master’s in medical illustration. But the programs, Dad, they’re so cool. You take art classes and med school classes together. Gross anatomy with dissections of cadavers, and then you draw it all out. Instead of learning to perform surgery, you learn how to draw a heart or the inside of a lung. And when you’re in school, you can help out with real forensic cases and surgeries and—” His lips clamped shut. A flush bloomed on his cheeks. “It sounds really cool. Really, really cool.”

I hadn’t heard Emmet say that many words in a row in a long time. “You know so much about this.” I pointed to his notebooks, and a drawing of one of his teammate’s stretches. The player was photorealistic, except for his leg, which had been stripped to show the major muscles and ligaments from hip to ankle. “You look like you’re halfway to being a medical illustrator already.”

“I only draw from reference pictures right now. I want to learn from the real thing. Real human models. Real dissections.” His confidence, so bright and bursting a moment before, sagged, deflating like a sputtering balloon “But, Dad… If I do a double major, I don’t think I’ll have time to play football in college. If you play for a college, they don’t really encourage you to go for, like, a real major. Most guys end up in general studies, which is…”

General studies was my major. It was a catchall for someone who had changed their major so many times, there wasn’t any way to cobble together a focus out of their years in college. I’d been lucky to graduate at all. I’d finally focused that last semester because Emmet was on the way.

“I wasn’t going to play football anymore after high school.” Emmet looked at me like I was going to protest, tell him no son of mine was quitting Texas’s religion.

“I think that’s smart of you. You’re right: a double major will be a ton of work. Luckily, you have your mother’s brilliant mind, so you’re going to do just fine in college and in grad school. Sadly, you have my social skills, so you might struggle everywhere else.”

He rolled his eyes and then sank into his kitchen chair. He picked at the corner of the table. “Is it okay if I only play in high school? You just got into it, you know? When I made varsity again.” His lips twisted, and his forehead furrowed into a frown.

“I got into it because I want to spend time with you. Honestly? I only care about the game when you’re in it. All I know about football is linebackers and the blocks and plays that you make.” I laid my hand over his. “I’m so proud of you. You have your shit together, for the most part—” I arched my eyebrows at the broken vial of steroids wrapped in aluminum foil. “I’m a grown-ass man and I’m still trying to find all of my shit.” We shared a fragile smile. “You are going to be amazing, Em. I’m in awe of your talent. It’s breathtaking, it really is.”

He was embarrassed by my praise. He fidgeted, and his flush was back. “Do you think, maybe, we could draw again together sometime?”

“Of course we can. Of course.”

I’d have to pull out my old sketchbooks and show him all the drawings I’d done of him as a baby. In his crib, on his belly, teething and drooling on his favorite toy. Smiling up at me as I held his hands and we took his first steps. His baby laugh, when just the smile on my face was enough to make him shriek with joy. I’d have to show him the sketches I’d done recently, too. Him on the field. Him making plays. Him smiling with Bowen.

Emmet stacked his notebooks and squared them against the table’s edge. He put his hands in his lap and curled forward. “We need to go to Bowen’s house now, don’t we?”

I nodded. “Yes, we do. Let me text Landon and tell him we’re coming.”