“You did good out there,” he said, straightening and reaching for Benji’s outstretched hand.
Benji nodded and glanced up at Boone, sliding his glasses up his nose, though they were so dirty, Boone didn’t think it made much of a difference.
“Here, let me clean those.” He grabbed the glasses and walked over to the bench along the side of his boathouse. There was a bunch of cloths underneath. Once he rinsed the glasses over the side of the dock and cleaned them as best he could, he handed them back to Benji.
“Should we clean our fish?”
With a wide smile, Benji nodded, and the two of them got busy. It didn’t take Boone long, as he’d been cleaning his own fish since he was Benji’s age, but the bass and all those bones were proving difficult for his son.
“You want some help?” he asked.
Benji moved aside with a nod and sighed. “I’m not doing good.”
“Don’t worry about it. Bass are hard to clean, even for adults. Lots of bones.”
Boone finished the job, and once he hosed down the dock and locked up the boathouse, he grabbed the cooler and headed for the house. Boone ordered Benji into the shower, plugged in his phone, and headed for his own bathroom. Once he was clean, Benji joined him downstairs.
Boone prepared the fish while Benji sat on the island and washed their potatoes. There was salad already prepared in the fridge, so once they were done on the grill, dinner could be served.
Boone was just reaching for a cold beer when Benji hopped off the island. “Daddy, how old were you when you played football?”
Surprised, he glanced at his son and took a swig of beer. “Probably around your age, I guess.”
“Did you like it? Like right away?”
“Ball?” He nodded. “Yeah. I did. Not as much as hockey.”
“Is hockey fun?”
“I think it is.” Boone considered his son. Benji had never been particularly enthused about athletics. He’d rather snuggle up on the sofa with a book on pyramids or outer space, so Boone had never pushed it. He figured if his son was going to play hockey or baseball or football, it was going to be because he wanted to. Not because his father wanted it.
Boone wasn’t his old man.
“Are you thinking you’d like to play?” he asked, watching his son carefully. They were on the deck, and the fish and potatoes were foiled up and cooking on the grill.
Benji shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Something was up. Boone knelt down so he was face-to-face with his kid. “What’s going on, bud?”
Benji kicked at an invisible rock and took his time answering. “This boy Liam I met at the park asked me why I wasn’t playing summer football, and I told him I don’t like it all that much. I like hockey better. He says I’m a scaredy cat and that I’d never be as good as you anyway and that I’m a sissy with glasses and I’d suck at hockey because I can’t see anything.”
Benji’s chin trembled a bit, and he glanced away, sniffling and shoving up his glasses. Red-hot anger flushed Boone up but good, and he had to take a moment. The kid Liam was just a kid, with a streak of bully in him that one day would be his downfall. It wasn’t as if Boone could get up in his face and tell him off.
But he could take the time and do this right with Benji.
“Come here,” he said gently, pulling his boy onto his lap. “First of all, this kid Liam is probably insecure about himself, so he takes it out on other kids to make himself feel better.”
Benji nodded. “He’s mean to everyone.”
“Maybe he’s got stuff going on at home you don’t about. Stuff that makes him sad and insecure. Or maybe he’s just a bully. Whatever the reason, Benji, you’re gonna run into a lot of Liams in your life. You’re better off to ignore them and don’t engage. Got that?”
Benji nodded.
“And whether you play hockey or baseball or football is up to you. There’s no point playing for anyone other than yourself. And if you don’t have that love, if you’d rather go to science camp or the library or dance class—”
“Boys don’t dance,” Benji interrupted with a frown.
Boone chuckled. “Yeah, they do. Blue’s got a bunch of them she teaches at her studio. It’s not a boy or girl thing, son. It’s a what-makes-you-happy thing.”
“I guess,” Benji replied slowly. “But I don’t want to dance.”
“That’s fine.”
“And I know you love football, and you’re like the bestest quarterback that ever lived, everyone says so, but I don’t want to play football either.”
“That’s fine too. And just so you know, I’m not the best quarterback that ever lived. That title would go to a guy named Nameth.”
“I think I want to play hockey,” Benji said. “Tawny is signing up too. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to see, like, the puck and stuff because of my glasses.”
“Plenty of kids play with glasses.”
“Do they?” A smile lit up Benji’s face. The kind of smile that made mush of Boone’s heart.
“Sure do. And you know what we’re going to do first thing tomorrow?”
Benji shook his head and waited.
“We’re going to get you signed up for hockey.” He jumped to his feet and headed back to the grill, happy at the thought of being a hockey dad. “Maybe I’ll coach.”
“You will?”
He nodded. “Yeah. We’re here to stay, bud. It’s time I found something to do besides cut the grass and work out and throw the ball around.” Hearing the words out loud made him wince a bit. He needed a goal. A purpose. But what? Football had been his life for so long, and he’d taken it all the way to the NFL. Right out the gate, he’d been big news and had made more money in his short career than a lot of guys did over a much longer span.
He’d left the game because he didn’t love it the way he should, and because his Dad…
“Aren’t you ever going to play football again?”
Shaking the ghosts of the past from his mind, he slowly shook his head. That thought had been at the back of his mind for a few weeks—ever since the last conversation he’d had with his agent.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. An image of Poppy drifted in front of his eyes, and his gut tightened when he thought of all the things they’d done in the dark. He glanced over Benji’s head, out at the lake, and then to the property he owned. The place he called home.
His life was here now.
It was damn time he started living it.
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday afternoon brought wind, rain, and more customers than Poppy expected. It seemed as if everyone in Crystal Lake had a party to attend and needed a hostess gift, or an anniversary dinner or birthday celebration on the books. It was good for business, but by three o’clock, she was nearly run off her feet.
She’d just spent fifteen minutes chatting with Audrey Baker because, for the life of her, the woman could not pick out a card to go with the gift she’d bought for her niece. First, she’d gone for naughty, then, after a lot of hemming and hawing, Audrey put it back and decided nice was better. In the end, she went with an artistic homemade card that was blank inside. Poppy just hoped the woman got her words right when she signed it or she’d be back.