Page 68 of Just a Football Star

“You’re driving back? By yourself?”

I shrug. “I’ve got my car here, and it’s not driving itself.” I fasten on a smile. “I’ll be fine. I like road trips.”

She widens the door. “Well, let me pack up some things for you to take. You need travel snacks, don’t you? Come on in a minute. I won’t keep you long.”

“It’s really not—” I stop myself. Stella has been kind to me since day one, and I’m putting her in the lurch by giving Jerry back to her.

Jerry is on his two hind legs, his front paws resting on my thighs. I bend to scrub his face with both of my hands. “Jerry, you’re breaking my heart here.” I glance back at Stella. “I knew this was going to be hard, but I didn’t think it would feel like this.” Why is it so hard to say goodbye to a dog?

She gives me a knowing look and gestures for me to follow her into the kitchen. “I bet Alec is sad to see you go, too. Probably even more than Jerry.”

I scoff. “He knew I was leaving soon, anyway. I need to find another job…one that fits in better with my plans to go to physical therapy school.”

Stella pulls out a kitchen chair for me, then begins taking food out of the refrigerator and cupboards. She asks me questions about where I plan to attend and why I’m going into physical therapy.

“One of the frustrations with my training career was having to hand off the severely injured or rehabilitating athletes to the PTs,” I say. “I think a whole mind-body approach, spanning a person’s lifetime through health as well as when injuries occur, is fascinating. Basically, I want to stick with my patients, so combining my experience and degrees would be ideal.”

“Well, I think you’ve done a great service to all those athletes, but you need to do what’s right for you.” Stella smiles brightly as Jerry crawls back into my lap and settles down onto it with a sigh.

“I wish I knew what that was.” I slide my fingers in Jerry’s hair, memorizing its softness.

“You will. It’ll come to you.” She slices long carrots into shorter sticks. “I don’t think I really knew for sure that I was meant to be a teacher until I was already doing my student teaching and one of the kids bit me.”

“Bit you?” A laugh breaks free from my throat. “And that made you want to be a teacher?”

Stella renders a light laugh. “The actual biting, no. But what happened after? That’s what sealed the deal for me.”

“I’m dying to know what happened.”

“She was a second grader. She’d been on edge all day, looking like a pot about to boil over. Just seething. I don’t even remember what I asked her to do that put her over the edge, but she marched right up to me, grabbed my arm, and bit me.” Stella shakes her head, and adds the carrot sticks to a sandwich bag. “It took me a few seconds, but then I started to laugh.”

“Laugh?”

Stella shakes her head, her silver bob not moving. “Oh, not in an obvious way, but I did have a hard time controlling myself. Of course I couldn’t let her see me laughing. But I pulled her out into the hallway and we sat down on the floor and talked. I never did find out what was going on inside of that little girl that needed to come out in the form of biting, but holding space for her pain, not judging it, not telling it to go away and be unheard and unseen?” Stella snaps her fingers. “That was the connection spot. After a little while, we could talk about why we don’t bite and some other things to do besides biting.” Stella whisks her fingertips under her eyes and sighs. “Anyway. Something in my heart started loving her fiercely that day. I knew if I could do that for more kids, I’d feel good about my life.”

I nod my head. “Sounds fulfilling. And it also sounds like you handled it well.”

“You know,” Stella says. “I think sometimes adults do the same thing. Hurt people hurt other people. That’s all there is to it.” She washes and dries a couple of apples. “Now we don’t have to just stand there while others are hurting us. We have to protect ourselves. But truly? Holding space for people. Letting them be. Supporting them and loving them. It’s my favorite thing to do. It’s what my nephews have needed the most from me.”

I feel a shift in my chest when she mentions the Tates, and realize I really want to talk about them—about one of them in particular.

“They haven’t exactly had it easy, have they?” I say.

“They really have not. Their mother, Celine, my sister-in-law, is coming around. She’s showing up more in the boys’ lives, trying to make amends.” Stella sets a grocery bag of snacks on the table and sits down across from me. “See, she talks about it openly now, but she suffered from depression for many years. The poor woman. She did her best. She knows that sometimes it wasn’t enough, and so I, and other family, would step in. My own kids were mostly grown by then, so I had the time. My husband died at a young age, so those boys helped me just as much as I helped them. Probably more. It filled me with a lot of joy to have those exuberant boys in my life in the summers.”

“What was Alec like? Before the injury?” I ask.

“He was…” Stella beams, looking past me at a memory. “…undaunted in the very best way. As a kid, he bled football, it was everything to him. But there was a joyfulness there. Like he couldn’t wait to get on the field. Half the things he said to me during the summers had to do with football. Did I hear about so and so on such and such a team getting traded.” She rolls her eyes. “And who did I think would go against a certain team for the playoffs—that were months away, mind you.”

“I can totally see him doing that,” I say with a giggle.

“I had no clue what he was talking about at first. But he taught me. And sometimes I’d drive into Denver to go to his games when he was in high school. He lived and breathed football. But he was also gentle in a lot of ways. He was completely bonded to Milo. They were inseparable, but he was protective of him. Alec’s always been determined. It’s always mind over matter for him. He used to be a little more lighthearted. I’ve seen bits and pieces of that coming up to the surface again recently.” The look she gives me is searching.

“He told me about the incident last year.” I swallow hard. “The DUI.”

“That was surprising to all of us.”

“It’s especially hard for me because my brother was hit by a drunk driver.” At Stella’s widened stare, I lightly touch her arm. “Don’t worry, he’s okay now. But it was scary for a while.”

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