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He clinked his mug against mine.
“Well, cheers.”
“Easy for you to say.”
We both drank.
There were only half a dozen customers at the bar. All guys. They’d made Ted Skyler the moment he walked in. I had called him from the car after I’d seen theTribune,then driven around a little more before arriving at the decision that drinking with my ex was better than drinking alone. There had been a time when we’d only spoken to each other through our lawyers. My position had softened, at least slightly, over time. He wasn’t a better person now. But he hadn’t gotten any worse, either.
Low bar,I thought.
We’d married in his second year with the Wolves. It had been treated in San Francisco like a royal fairy tale, a Wolf marrying the team’s star quarterback. The marriage had lasted until his fifth year. He swore he still loved me. It just turned out that before very long he liked the sports anchor at one of the local network affiliates more.
He was thirty-seven and still looked remarkably like the golden boy he’d been at USC. Somebody had once written that when Ted Skyler walked into a room, all the women—and half the guys—wanted him.
“I didn’t ask for this,” I said.
“Nobody knows that better than I do,” he said. “You spent your whole life running away from the team. Even when you were married to me.”
“It had nothing to do with the team. Everything to do with them. And being afraid I’d turn into them.”
He checked his own phone. I didn’t know if he was seeing anyone at the moment. But the night was young. And he was still Touchdown Ted Skyler. God’s gift.
All you had to do was ask him.
“You are going to do this, right?” he said.
“No.”
He had the mug halfway to his lips.
“You’re joking.”
I didn’t say anything, just gave him a look he probably felt he knew as well as he did the deferred money he had coming to him when he retired.
“Okay. You’re not joking.”
“I had spent most of the day talking myself into it,” I said. “That somehow I owed it to Dad to honor his dying wish, or whatever you want to call it, and make things right between us even though he’s gone.”
I drank more beer.
“Then I saw that headline and I knew I was kidding myself. That I couldn’t hold on to the life I’ve made for myself and go back to the life of being a Wolf.”
“She Wolf,” he said.
“Don’t start with me.”
He waved at the bartender, who came over and took Ted’s order for a Scotch. I didn’t say anything, but almost by reflex he said, “I’ve got a driver.”
“Of course you do.”
“This is some serious shit here. I need a real drink.”
He waited until the bartender came back with a glass of Johnnie Walker. He told me he’d read once that Joe Namath used to drink Johnnie Walker.
He toasted me, drank, and said, “You have to do this.”
“Why? Because you think I’d give you a better chance of holding on to your job?”
