Friendswood Read Online Free

table, but the meat tasted metallic and it had a strange hard texture. He could only eat a few bites.
    There were photos on the walls of the varsity football teams since 1940. As he looked into the stony faces of the players from 1941, a pride pressed up in his chest: honorable tradition. Pushing through those brick walls. His hand moved into a fist, the muscles in his legs tightening. And there was 1980, he and Avery in the front row. They’d shared a flinty nostalgia for Coach Rowan, who’d made them run so far they vomited; who made them play fully suited up in 110 degrees; who had a habit of saying, “Go down there and hit those monsters hard.” Coach liked to use apointer decorated with Indian feathers when he narrated plays in the field house, and he drank large, powdered protein drinks the color of celery. Hal had been a good player, and missed his lighter, firmer body, those cut muscles and the litheness that came from weights and drills that made him feel like an alley cat. So he made cracks about getting fat, though he wasn’t really, just middle-aged soft. But he’d never been as good a player as his son was.
    Hal felt closest to his son when he sat in the stands, watching a game. Cully, beneath the gladiator shoulder pads and blue-and-white helmet, could swivel his hips and cut a corner with a grace Hal had never had. He felt this was somehow his son’s true self, the way he caught the ball to his heart and ran past the thicket of other players, the green space widening behind him, the way he leaped over the goal line, the applause a huge cosmic radio, just about to announce something big. And here it was, another season, and Cully had already been catching miracle passes during two-a-days.
    Driving to his next appointment, late because of construction on 243, he heard a clattering song on the car stereo that made him tighten his fingers around the steering wheel. It was a song that reminded him of last year and the drives on which he’d caught himself singing along to the line about running away. Hal thought of that mobile home in League City he’d gone to each week last winter—painted purple inside, the threadbare couch, the chair sprouting stuffing. The affair only lasted seven weeks, but it had nearly killed him. Dawn had long, too-thin legs, and when he pulled away from kissing her, she had a wry tightness in her mouth that reminded him of what he was doing. Now that he really needed a clean slate, the memories kept crudding it up: Dawn’s tan, skinny legs wrapped around his waist, and the tiny shoes she wore, and the way he’d come home and feel sad at the sight of Darlene, her face in a nimbus of blue TV light, her grin set like a tiger’s. He had to stop himself, because too much thinking along these lines took him to places that deviled him. To pray was more rational—it put things in their places; it put God back in charge.“Stop me from worrying,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he felt a wave of warmth for Darlene again, the feeling he had looking at her in her baggy shirt and jeans, the pretty angles of her eyes. And he saw Cully sitting next to her at the dinner table, their identical noses and triangular chins.
    Darlene said if only he could learn how to relax, they would be happier together. “I don’t mind picking up after you or the snoring,” she said. “Just the bad moods.”
    â€œAnd the drinking.”
    â€œWell, yes, but that’s all done with, right?”
    Sometimes after work she rubbed at the knots in his shoulders, and whenever she did that, he felt held by her in this life, purposeful and safe, the way he’d felt years and years ago in the old house in the country, when his dad still had some kindness in him and before his mother started looking so scared.
    Hal forced a smile and walked out to the front of the drive to meet the couple who wanted to see a Tudor monstrosity, all gray