Page 223 of The Sweetest Return

Pops picked up pound cake. “Your mama loves a line.”

“She’s good at them.”

“Been practicing on me forty years.”

I drank the tea.

“The other part is Mani.”

“What about her?”

I looked down at my tea. “If I take this, football gets hungry again. Film before sunrise. Practice. Road games. Calls at midnight. I know what that world can take when you let it.”

Pops waited.

“I just got her back. I don’t want to turn into the man who expects everything else to move around the game because football says jump.”

“Then don’t.”

I looked up.

“You know what that man looks like now,” he said. “More important, you know what it cost. You don’t have to stay away from football to prove you learned something. Walk back in there different.”

“That sounds easy when you say it.”

“Most hard things do.”

He nodded toward the old landscaping sign on the wall.

“You see that?”

“Every time I'm in here.”

“That started with one truck. Then it grew. Growth changed what your mama and I had to carry, how much time I had, how much responsibility came home with me. We had to learn new ways to stay married every time life changed.”

My eyes moved from the sign back to him.

“You and Imani got work to do. Fine. Do it. You take the job, don't expect her to read your mind when you're tired or gone. She travels, she can't decide your silence means the same thing it meant eight years ago. You both know what hurt already.”

He tapped the table.

“Use what you learned.”

Something in me loosened.

Pops stood and took his coffee with him, because apparently his stomach had given up years ago.

At the doorway he looked back.

“And Dre?”

“Yeah?”

“If you take that job, don't walk into that building trying to prove your knee didn't beat you.”

I swallowed.

“Walk in there to teach those young men how not to let the game take more from them than it gives.”