As Doug looked over to the passenger seat at his only son Steve, he worried. Steve had been behaving strangely all afternoon. Something was off with the boy, something Doug didn't know how to approach.
They'd made this drive dozens of times. Their house wasn't far from the school, but Doug enjoyed taking his son to his football games. It brought him back to his younger days when he, too, had been a football star. Those days were long gone, as Doug's beer gut pointed out, but he was fine with that. Steve easily passed the torch to his boy; Steve was a natural! Why, just that morning Doug had been telling the guys at work how he was sure that Steve would go pro.
Now, however, Doug had his doubts. It was bad enough that Doug had walked in on Steve reading a 'Seventeen' magazine when he got home, but when Doug had called his boy out to leave for the game, Steve had cried.
Cried!
It wasn't just crying, either. It was sobbing. Steve had begged his father, pleaded to be let out of the game. What had gotten into the boy Doug didn't know, but whatever it was, he hadn't put up with it. He'd marched that boy out to the car double time. He'd yelled that there was no room for crying in football, that he had made a commitment to the team and couldn't let them down, that no son of his would be caught dead afraid to go play a little game.
For Steve's part, he'd put on a brave face. Even then, as they pulled into the school parking lot, Steve's red-rimmed eyes were dry, and although his hands were clenched, he didn't complain about his fate. When Doug watched him walk away from the car, however, he couldn't help notice that his boy's swagger had been replaced with a purposeful sway, a way he'd seen his wife walk every time she had screwed up her courage to face something she dreaded.
What the hell was going on?
