Trophy Son(15)

Panos and Mom were closer than me and Mom. They got to spend a lot of time together since Dad was always with me pushing tennis. Panos was great at breaking tension and he knew how to make Mom happy. He pressed his hands over her ears and pulled her forehead in for a kiss, then he smacked her bottom on the way to the refrigerator.

“What’s doin’, mama-san?” he said.

I laughed. He had a great older-brother style.

“Your brother and I are talking about Gabe’s proposal.”

“Yes, the decent proposal.” He drank milk from the carton directly.

I hated when he did that. No one else in the family did that. “Christ, Panos. Get a glass. Disgusting.”

He had more from the carton and made sure some dripped down his chin. “Pretty boy,” he said to me.

Mom took the opportunity. “Why don’t you boys talk for a while.” She left the room.

Panos waited until we couldn’t hear her steps. “What did she tell you?”

“Take the deal.” If I really wanted to talk about Liz, Panos was the only choice, but I didn’t want to put into words the details of what I had seen. The humiliation and the actual hurt were worse than silent suffering. She was just another thing I couldn’t talk about with anyone.

“Yeah.” He put the milk away. “She has to. You know that, right?”

I wasn’t ready to concede that. “Aren’t you ever pissed at Mom? Disappointed?” Better just to talk about tennis, Mom and Dad. What used to cause choking claustrophobia now felt like a safe place compared to the acute crisis of Liz.

Panos sat at the breakfast table across from me. He had no idea that anything else was consuming my thoughts. He couldn’t have. Tennis was plenty to explain any upset I showed. He loved Mom and he loved me. He reached over the table and put his hand on my upper arm. “Mom tries. She does things, things behind the scenes, more than you know. It’s not easy. It puts some of the heat on her but it takes some off you. Nobody can change Dad. All anyone can do is try to soften things a little.”

I nodded.

“I’ll tell you a little secret.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll find out soon enough anyway. She enrolled in classes to get a degree in child psychology.”

“That’s good. That’ll give her some independence, something outside the house,” I said.

“It’s a way for her to take some power back. With you.”

I knew what he meant. It wasn’t power back from me. It was power back from Dad regarding me. “You think it’s about my childhood or her own?” I was still struggling to parallel-process my flash fire with Liz and the slow burn of tennis.

“Both. You’re definitely a lot of it. She loves you, she cares. She’s trying to figure out a way. She used to be more of a match for Dad but when one person in a relationship takes charge more often that becomes a pattern, then the pattern creates roles for the people in the relationship and over years people move deeper into their roles. It’s not that she’s been beaten down, really. But she allowed this to be her role.” Panos shrugged. “Beneath all that, she’s in your corner. She wants what’s best for you. Right now she thinks that’s tennis.”

“I guess so.” I looked at Panos then out the kitchen window. “So of course I’m going to take the deal.”

“Of course,” he said. “And it was never a deal anyway. Maybe Gabe thought so, but I bet he’s too smart for that. It was always an ultimatum. A softened ultimatum.”

“One year.”

“Right.”

“Do you think I can stop after one year if I want?”

“You’d have to put up a major stink.”

“I might.” Although the one-year bargain was less important to me than it was before the Saturday football game. I might want to bury my head even longer than that.

“You might.” He nodded. “Anton, taking it one year at a time is a good approach. It’s a good way to think about it.” He was deciding whether or not to tell me his next thought. He decided yes. “There’s something you should also get used to. I used to think you’d have to play until you lost. Until your ranking got so low and hopeless, but that won’t be the end. Dad knows what a great player you are, he’s seen it. We all have. You’ll play until you play your best, then your best will win and you can’t stop until your best can’t win anymore. You’re going to be playing tennis for a long time.”

“Unless I go nuclear.”

Panos nodded. “You could. And you’d still have a brother in your life. But that’s all.”

I filled my lungs and exhaled all of it through my teeth. “One year at a time,” I said.

“Can you do it?”

“I just might be able to trick myself into doing it.”

Two hours later Dad got home. He announced he had hired a sports psychologist and I had an appointment the next morning.





CHAPTER

11

The next morning I woke to my mother sitting on the side of my bed, staring into my blinking eyes as I focused and tried to distinguish dream from day. “Mom?”

Her hand was resting on my chest over my heart. “Good morning.”

I pushed myself up so that I was leaning back on my elbows. “What’s up?”