Birthday(7)

“Okay,” I say, and now my eyes are burning.

“Happy birthday, baby,” she says, leaning toward the camera. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” I say, feeling off-center.

And then the screen is blank.

I let the fuzzy black-and-white static fill the room as I sit back on my heels. After a bit, the tape runs out and ejects itself. I crawl forward, push the VHS back in, rewind it, and watch it again. There’s a pressure behind my eyes, a tightness in my throat, a heat climbing up my chest. I know I need to cry, and I know I’ll probably feel better if I do, but more and more lately I just can’t. More and more my feelings end up festering inside me. I can’t let go, can’t release.

I always thought boys cried less because they … we got yelled at for it, but now the tears won’t come even when I want them. I wonder if maybe I just can’t cry anymore, if maybe growing up means testosterone is running through my body like an invading army, butchering and burning everything tender.

I watch the video again and then again, my lips eventually moving in sync with Mom’s. I try to memorize everything she said, to imagine a scene of us sitting together on the balcony, talking. When the VHS ends for the fifth time, I sit and stare at nothing for a while until Dad’s voice breaks the quiet. “Dinner’s ready!” he calls.

I go into the kitchen, take one look at the overdone steak and his tired, bloodshot eyes, and don’t feel the slightest bit hungry. We eat on the couch, our plates in our laps, watching recorded SEC games in silence. Dad’s schedule always leaves him behind on watching college and professional football, and Sunday is his day to catch up. I push a glob of mashed potatoes around my plate and stare into space, away from the players on the screen.

“Oh, hey,” Dad says. “It’s your birthday. We don’t have to watch this, we can—”

“It’s fine,” I say. “How’re the Vols doing this season?”

“Pretty good all told,” Dad says, and things feel normal for just a moment. He leans back, crosses his legs, and scratches his chin thoughtfully. “I heard this game against Florida don’t end well though, but that ain’t exactly new.”

“Right,” I say.

“I still say our main rivalry’s with them and not with Alabama.”

“Yeah. How’s Isaac doing there?” I say. Eric’s oldest brother wouldn’t have been caught dead at the water park with us today even though he’s in town for the weekend, and I guess I can’t blame him. He’s a lot older.

“Great for a college freshman,” Dad says. He pretends to buff his nails on his shirt and cracks a smug smile. “Still waiting on my thank-you letter from Coach Fulmer for the work I put into that boy.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I joke.

“Right,” Dad says. He shakes his head, then looks thoughtful. “So, hey, Eric’s gonna try for junior varsity next year. He tell you that?”

“Yeah,” I say. “He did.”

“You’re still the fastest kid at that school. If we put in a little work, hit the weight room, ran some drills, I could probably get you in with him.”

I know, in my brain, that this is his way of trying to spend time with me. Football is the beating heart of our town—football scholarships get kids out of Thebes, and even players who don’t get recruited, who spend the rest of their lives stuck here, get to look back fondly on the time when they were champions.

This town expects a lot of Dad—to make these heroes, to put Thebes on the map. I never realized just how much time Dad spent coaching until I quit playing and noticed I only saw him in the morning, an hour or so at night, and half of every Sunday. Sometimes I think any of the boys on the team would be a better son than me. At least they wouldn’t be a walking disappointment. They wouldn’t remind him what he’s lost every time he looks at them.

But the more he asks me to rejoin the team the more I think I’m so tired of this conversation.

“No,” I say. “I don’t want to play football anymore, Dad.”

“Okay,” he says. He takes a long breath and runs his hand down his face. “I … sorry. Just trying to help.”

The pressure comes back to my throat.

He’s floundering too. But he’s trying. And I know he loves me and he’s all I have—besides Eric.

“I know,” I whisper.

“How was the video?” he says.

“Good,” I say. “It was good. Nice.”

“That’s good,” Dad says.

I start to say more, to tell him how even though it hurts to see her in the videos, it’s still a relief, because sometimes I stare at the ceiling at night and can’t remember exactly what she looked like in motion and alive, how she smelled, how she sounded. I want to tell him how hurting like this is better than forgetting her.

But we’ve only really talked much about her once since the funeral. I’d found her college sketchbook while we were moving and Dad had sat with me, telling me what he remembered about each of her amazingly lifelike drawings. I remember his voice trembling, and when we reached a page near the middle, there was a figure who was clearly a younger Dad seated on a log, a baseball cap high on his forehead, his eyes squinting at something off the page while he pulled on a cigarette. She’d managed to capture Dad’s thoughtfulness with nothing but a pencil, and under it she’d written, by way of a title, “My Future Husband.”