“No, but before he retired, he was the warehouse supervisor at the store in Las Cruces,” I say proudly. “He’s the hardest working guy I’ve ever known. And my hero.” I feel Bruce's eyes on me. “But would it matter if he were wealthy? You’re not doing too bad for yourself.”
“I learned a long time ago what it’s like to sacrifice.”
I could clap back and make him eat his words, but I don’t. I toggle the joystick and push a huge mound of snow out of his winding driveway until he stops me at what must be his lawn. I throw the machine into reverse over the path I just cleared.
“Liesel told me some about your wife. I’m sorry,” I say. “That must have been hard.”
“Hard?” Bruce echoes in disbelief. “You have no idea.” He pauses long enough for me to plow another strip across his driveway and another. “It was so much more than hard. It was …” He pauses. “It was anhonor. It was a privilege to get to help her, to get toserveher every day until she took her last breath. You can’t know what that’s like.”
The heavy emotion in his voice squeezes some of the air out of my lungs, and I’m reminded of a brutal playoff loss when I was twelve. I came home to one of my mom’s parties, like usual. I wanted to throw my glove—I wanted tobreaksomething after how badly my team played—but the nervousness on her face made me pull myself together.
“So?” she asked.
“You win some, you lose some,” I shrugged, stuffing down my indignation and turning my showmanship up to eleven. “But you should have seen Braden tonight. He was a beast on the mound, wasn’t he, Dad?”
“He was on fire. If everyone on the team had played as well as you two, you’d have a championship trophy.”
I told Mom a couple of stories, giving her the few highlights and some dramatic lowlights, but no matter how hard I tried, my heart wasn’t in it.
My mom reacted the way she always did—elation, frustration, and everything in between. And in the end, I braced myself for her inevitable question: “So, is it cake time?”
I’d never told her this, but Ihatedeating cake when I lost. Big losses took my appetite with them—still do.
So I braced myself for her to ask the same question she’d asked dozens of times in the past. But she surprised me.
“I gotta say,” she said. “I know we always eat cake after your games, but I want to … smash it more than I want to eat it. I can keep a piece aside for you, but?—”
“Let’s smash it,” my dad and I said it in unison.
The three of us went into the tiny apartment kitchen, and instead of cutting the beautifully decorated cake she spent hours on— a cake in the shape of a baseball, complete with stitching—she slapped it.
A glob of frosting exploded on her face, and I started laughing so hard, snot bubbled from my nose. And that made my parents crack up. Dad took the next swing, smashing his fist down on it. And then it was my turn.
I punched the edible baseball player on top of the cake. My fist sunk into the thick frosting in the most satisfying way, so I punched it again, and soon, they both joined in. My parents and I pulverized that thing, and by the end, we were laughing so hard, we were in tears. We licked the cake from our hands, and Dad sent us both to hit the showers while he cleaned it up.
That was the start of a new tradition: winners eat the cake, losers beat the cake.
Bruce doesn’t think I know anything about sacrifice.
He doesn’t know my family.
“I told you to stay away from her, Coop,” Bruce says. “I can’t understand why a guy as smart as you would do something so stupid.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re not the only person who knows what it’s like to sacrifice for someone you love.”
“You don’t love my daughter.”
“No, we’re not there yet, but I care about her, Bruce. I care about her more than I’ve cared about anyone outside ofmyparents. Ever.”
“If you really cared about her, you’d leave her to find someone worthy of her.”
I laugh and flex out my fingers. The cold is already making them stiff, even through the gloves. “Who? Who could be worthy of someone like Liesel? Do you think there’s a guy out there who wakes up thinking of ways to make her laugh more than I do? Do you think there’s a guy who looks at her broken pieces and wants to help her put them back together more than me? Do you really believe there’s a man who loves the things she loves more than I do but whom she can’t steamroll with her intelligence?”
“She’s way smarter than you.”
“No argument here. But I’m just overconfident enough to challenge her, anyway. And she likes that. She doesn’t want a guy who worships at her altar. She wants someone she can tease. Someone she can laugh with and cry with and dream with. Someone who isn’t intimidated by her intensely overbearing family. If you know a guy who can do that better than me, I’ll step aside.” Bruce doesn’t answer. “I know I’ll never be good enough for her. Why should that stop me from trying?”
Bruce’s jaw grinds like he’s chewing boulders. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say in eight years.”
