Tucker would have hated this match-up.
Seattle versus New England. ‘Are you kidding me,’ he would have said. Coast to coast. So predictable and cliché. But nevertheless, he would have purchased my plane ticket out of San Diego, California, just so I would be forced to fly my miserable carcass home to Lennox, South Dakota, for this one day a year.
Genie Tran |Rawr
We didn’t even get together at Christmas — my family was too dysfunctional for that. But for Tucker, football was his religion and the Super Bowl was the holiest day of the year. Even though the rest of us barely knew the difference between a Hail Mary pass and a blitz, we couldn’t help but succumb to Tucker’s adamant demand that every year we all be home on Super Bowl Sunday and pretend to be a happy family for one day. We could go back to hating each other’s guts afterwards, he would say. And for Tuck, we did it every year.
As I stepped up to the magenta door of my parent’s sunflower yellow house, I forced myself to breathe and quiet the voice in my head who kept repeating how I shouldn’t have come. I reached up to knock on the door, purposefully avoiding the door knocker in the shape of a lamb with John 3:16 etched in the cross that oddly appeared to be stabbing the lamb in the back. Tuck made fun of it all the time. My mother insisted the lamb was just sitting in front of the cross, but really, neither of us could believe someone even made door knockers like that in the first place.
I heard shuffling footsteps on the other side of the door before it slowly opened.
“Uh, Gramps. Hi. I didn’t know you would be here,” I said.
“More like being held prisoner here. It’s good to see you Talli. Come on inside.”
Twelve years ago, Gramps was the only one who kept a cool head after my mother and father found out Tucker and his girlfriend, Kim, had gone to Sioux Falls to get an abortion.
My father was furious, not only that his 17-year-old son had premarital sex, but that they chose to not keep the baby, which was a sin against God and everything they believed in. My father was kicked off the church board and asked to resign as the worship pastor. His music teaching position at Augustana College was under review, but they decided it would be unjust to punish him for his son’s actions.
My parents kicked Tucker out of the house, and Gramps took him in. I found myself at Gramps’ house more than at my parents, even though I was still a freshman in high school at the time.
Even after all of that, Tucker still managed to walk uninvited into our parent’s house on Super Bowl Sunday every year, until it became something my parents finally accepted as the day we could set aside all the tension and make it our family day. It was all an act, but it became so normal we almost all believed we were a family for eight hours a year.
“The doc says I need a caretaker now, and so your mom moved my things here before I could say, ‘Dear God, put me in a nursing home.’ Teresa! Talli’s here!” Gramps called into the house.
My mother timidly stepped out of the kitchen in one of her Sunday dresses. “Hello, Tallia.”
“I brought potato salad,” I said, and handed her the plastic container of store-bought potato salad.
“Thank you, that was very generous. Your father is already in the family room with the game on. You are a little late.”
“My flight landed later than I expected,” I told her.
That was a lie. I had stopped by the cemetery before convincing myself to come over.
I crossed the threshold to the family room and saw the thinning back of my father’s hair before I noticed the game on the flat-screen.
“I see you got rid of that clunky box of a TV,” I said before sitting down on the couch, leaving a space between us. Not that I could have sat next to him anyways. In the middle of the couch rested a green and white football jersey with the number 9 printed on the chest. Tuck’s old high school jersey. “What the hell is that doing here?”
“I don’t appreciate your language,” my father said.
“Oh God, Dad. Are you really going to do this? Today?” I grabbed the jersey and stood to walk away.
“Put that back right now!” he yelled.
“Why, Dad? What’s the purpose of having it there? Does it make you feel less guilty? Like you can make up for the years you rejected him and tore our family apart? He’s gone, Dad. You can’t fix it anymore.” I continued walking away.
“I do feel guilty,” he said with a trembling voice. I stopped. “Ever since he died I’ve torn myself up wishing I could call him — wishing I would have let him stay all those years ago. I wish this would have never happened. But it did and I don’t have him. And I don’t even really have my daughter,” He stared at me, then pointed at the jersey. “But that, that is all I have left and you can at least give me that.”
I stood there for a minute. Methodically, I walked back to the couch and placed the jersey between us. My mother and Gramps, who had migrated to the family room at the noise, both made sobbing sounds behind me. The announcers from the game were getting excited over an interception. We both stared at the screen, but I wasn’t really watching it. Tuck would have been sitting at the edge of the couch making a huge fuss over the play.
While one of the teams was on fourth down, I reached over and grabbed my father’s hand, resting them on Tuck’s jersey.
“You still have me, Dad.”