built around that friggin' game.'
After he had gone to UCLA on a scholarship, there had been plenty of talk about Troy's NFL prospects. Last fall, there had been the visits from the scouts. The people from the Atlanta Falcons had taken the whole family to dinner at the Biltmore. The Eagles flew in to woo Barbara's only son. The Broncos came and talked about the wonders of playing in Denver, and the San Diego Chargers visited the modest Loensch home in Northridge twice.
It seemed as though a pro career for Troy was just a matter of waiting for the formalities of the NFL draft in April.
Then, in the blink of an eye, things changed.
'Everything I did for those past eight friggin' years, built around that friggin' game. Now I don't have that friggin' game. The whole course of my life has changed.'
'Whose fault is that?' Carl asked angrily.
They both knew.
The way the course of Carl Loensch's life was irrevocably altered in Kuwait was out of his control, but Troy had done this to himself.
If he could take it back, he would.
In retrospect, it was an inconsequential remark, but it pissed Troy off big-time.
Lots of punches get thrown in locker rooms. Lots of punches get thrown in locker rooms with minimal consequences. The coaches rant, but hands are reluctantly shaken and incidents are forgotten. This time, however, there was a dislocated jaw and permanent nerve damage.
No amount of anger management counseling could take back the punch that Troy wished he had never thrown.
No charges were filed, and nothing hit the papers about the star wide receiver's indiscretion, but the word got around. The NFL scouts never said anything, but that is the point. They said nothing. They stopped calling. The draft came and went.
'You had that one offer…' Barbara said, her voice shaking a little.
'The CFL?' Troy replied as though his mother had just cursed at him. The goddamn CFL?'
The Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League called, but Troy refused even to consider the humiliation of playing in a second-tier league.
'So you're too good for Canada, and you go out and throw your life away by goin' into the military?' Carl said disgustedly.
Troy almost reminded his father that he himself had once made this same life choice over his father's objections. Once Carl had made the decision to become part of the toughest of the tough and join the Marines, there was nothing that his father could say.
Troy almost mentioned this, but he knew that it need not be said.
'Why don't you just get a regular job?' Carl asked.
'It's the Air Force, Dad. It's Officer Training School. It's not like I'm joining the Army to be cannon fodder somewhere. This is something that when I get out, y'know, my job prospects are a whole lot better after being an officer… you know that… you always say that the best hires you've ever made were former officers.'
'Yeah, I know,' Carl said reluctantly.
The whole family just stood in silence. The venting was over. There was nothing more that could be said.
Chapter 2
'Maybe we should just… y'know… get married,' Troy Loensch suggested.
'That was the lamest proposal I could ever imagine!' Cassie Kilmer said with mock disgust that hid the real disappointment.
It was a warm Southern California afternoon, and neither of them had any classes. Cassie had suggested that they just go take a long drive down the coast and jump into the surf for a while.
'We've been talking about it since before—' Troy began.
'We've been talking about it since before you decided that you were going to take off and leave me for four years.' Cassie laughed, finishing his sentence.
'You're the only one who supported my decision at all.'
'I supported your decision, big guy, because I thought it was the right thing for you at this point in your life.'
'So, does that mean you don't wanna get married?'
'No, it just means that I don't wanna get married before you go off for four years to fly jets or whatever you do in the Air Force.'
'I thought you've been saying that you thought this was the right thing for me to do with my life?'
'Yeah,' Cassie said. 'I think it's the right thing for you to do at this place in your life, but it isn't the right thing for our lives… right now.'
Cassie and Troy were at a crossroads in their intertwined lives. In a matter of weeks, they would both graduate from UCLA and step into a distinctly different phase in which their lives would no longer be intertwined. They had long since considered themselves a couple, and with that, there had been a comfortableness and talk of commitment, of permanence and of marriage. Yet, as much as these things were a topic of many conversations, they remained just that. Each knew that with graduation, their lives would change, and both of them wondered whether there would be a place in those changed lives for the comfortableness they had enjoyed, and the permanence they had once craved.
'Does that mean…?' Troy asked as he stopped at a red light, pushed up his sunglasses, and looked at Cassie.
'That you wanna, y'know… does this mean you wanna break up?'
'No, big guy, I don't wanna break up with you… It's just that I want to marry a guy and be with a guy…. I want to not have you gone or out of town for the first four years I'm married to you. We talked about getting married when we both thought you'd sign with some franchise or other… y'know… and we'd be together somewhere.'
'Lotsa guys in the Air Force are married—'
'I sure as hell don't wanna be living in some barracks somewhere.'
'We shoulda talked about this before you talked me into joining up.'
'I didn't talk you into joining up,' Cassie said crossly. 'You talked you into it. You wanted to have some purpose in life, some big way for you to shine like the star you've always been… I just agreed with you.'
Troy pulled the car into the parking lot at Huntington State Beach, and they both got out. He looked at Cassie as she took off her sunglasses and marveled at the way her tan torso slithered out of her T-shirt.
'What are you staring at, big guy,' Cassie asked as Troy admired her body in the skimpy, coral-colored two- piece. Even after knowing her for nearly three years and sleeping with her for almost as long, he just couldn't keep his eyes off that body.
'You're really awesome.' He smiled.
'Don't you forget it, big guy.' She winked, playfully snapping at him with her beach towel.
She allowed him to grab her and relished the feel of those wide receiver arms as he wide-received her.
As she rewarded his bear hug with a wet and passionate kiss, she thought about how much she would miss him. She resented not having tried harder to talk him out of joining the Air Force, but she realized that it would have been impossible. She knew, as he did, that it was a decision toward which the momentum of his life had propelled him. She also admitted to herself that it was something that could not be altered without a change in his essence that neither of them could accept.
She wondered — as she imagined that he was wondering too — how the relationship they shared would look as it emerged from those four years.
