The Journey Collection

by Lisa Bilbrey

  Travis laughed and picked up one of the large rocks they had been gathering to place around the hole they had dug.

  An hour later, they had finished their task and headed inside to cleanup. Once he was in the guest bathroom, Travis turned on the shower so the water could start warming up and then slipped off his dirty T-shirt. He tossed it onto the counter, followed by his black cotton shorts. He had just hooked his fingers into the waistband of his boxers when the door started to open. Out of instinct, he reached back and grabbed a towel, trying to cover himself up. When Penelope poked her head inside, he sighed and dropped the towel onto the counter.

  “You scared the shit out of me, baby,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, sorry.” But the snicker lacing her words betrayed her and Travis knew she was lying. “I thought maybe you might need a hand — or two.”

  “Hmm,” Travis said, grabbing her arm and pulling her into the bathroom with him. Pressing his wife against the door and causing it to slam shut, he leaned down and placed his lips against the side of her neck. “Will you wash my back for me?”

  “Yes,” she breathed, arching her body toward him.

  Moaning, he spun around and walked her into the shower. The warm water cascaded over the two of them, soaking them in an instant.

  “Travis, I’m still dressed!” Penelope squealed.

  “Well, I’ll take care of that.”

  He began to remove her clothes, throwing them on the floor without care.

  ~*~*~*~

  Half an hour later, Travis and Penelope stumbled out of their bedroom, both wearing dry clothes and with goofy grins plastered on their faces. With their fingers entwined, they joined Wanda, Sherman, and Max in the back yard. Sherman and Max were standing in front of the grill, preparing some hamburgers and hotdogs while Wanda watched in amusement.

  “How was your shower?” Wanda asked. The smirk on her lips made it clear that she knew there had been more to their shower than just cleaning.

  Feeling his ears burn from embarrassment, Travis cleared his throat and simply said, “Refreshing.”

  Wanda burst out laughing, causing Penelope to begin giggling. With a roll of his eyes, Travis ignored them both and walked over to his son and father-in-law.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Papa said I could help with the burgers,” Max explained, smiling.

  “Make sure you cook mine extra good. Last time I let you help, they were still mooing,” Travis teased.

  “Whatever, Dad,” Max scoffed, as Sherman chuckled. “At least I didn’t give Mom food poisoning from undercooking eggs.”

  Travis opened his mouth to defend himself, but promptly closed it again. “Touché.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Turning back to his grandfather, Max said, “How long until the grill will be ready?”

  “A little while,” Sherman replied. “We have to wait until the coals are hot enough. Charcoal is the only way to make a decent burger, if you ask me.”

  Nodding as if his grandfather’s way of thinking made perfect sense, Max turned and looked at Travis. “Want to play catch?”

  “Of course.”

  Max smiled as he turned and ran into the house to get his football. A few minutes later, he came rushing back out, telling Travis to go long. As his son requested, Travis ran to the edge of the yard and caught the ball that Max threw. He gripped it with both hands, remembering how it had felt the first time he held a ball like this; five years old and barely able to get two hands on it. Now, he was playing catch for the hundredth time with his son. He never got tired of moments like these — not ever.

  Bringing his arm back, Travis threw the ball back to Max, smiling with pride when the boy caught it. He was a natural, but even more important, he had a love of the game that rivaled Travis’s. For the next hour, they tossed the ball back and forth. When the new school year started, Travis knew that there was a good chance Max would be the quarterback for the seventh grade football team. A part of him wondered if the people of Clarendon would assume that the reason Max was the quarterback was because Travis was the coach. Of course, that wasn’t true. Max had an amazing arm and better control of his passes than most high school players. He practiced all the time and would earn the respect of his classmates and the rest of the townspeople, but as his father and a coach, Travis worried.

  “Max, time to cook,” Sherman called.

  “Okay, Papa.” Max threw the ball back to Travis before turning and running over to where his grandfather stood with a platter full of hamburger patties and hotdog wienies.

  Travis tossed the ball into the air, allowing it to fall back into his hands as he walked over to the porch and dropped into the seat next to Penelope. She turned her chair toward him and propped her feet in his lap.

  “Comfortable?” Travis asked, wrapping his hands around her bare feet.

  “Very.” She smiled. “I would be even more comfortable, though, if you’d rub them at little.”

  “Like this?” he gripped her left foot in one hand and started tickling the sole of her foot.

  Penelope burst out laughing and screaming at the same time, trying her hardest to release her foot from his iron-tight grip. “Stop!”

  “Not like that, then?” Travis chortled, letting his fingers rest against her skin.

  “No.” She folded her arms in front of her, huffing. However, he saw the corners of her mouth struggling to lift into a smile. “Do it right!”

  “Hmm, I think you forgot the magic word,” he replied, gliding a single finger down the length of her foot.

  “Travis,” Penelope whined, struggling to pull her foot away. “Please rub my feet!”

  “Since you asked so nicely,” he snickered. Using both hands, he began to massage her feet, starting with the left one and then moving to the right.

  Penelope leaned back in her seat and moaned. “God, that feels fantastic.”

  “I’ll just give you two a moment alone,” Wanda said, standing up. “There are some things a momma shouldn’t hear her daughter say and that’s one of them.”

  Penelope laughed and watched her mother walk over to where Sherman and Max were standing. They said something to her, but she shook her head and gestured to Penelope and Travis. With a quick look over their shoulders, both Sherman and Max nodded, as if to agree with the unspoken statement from Wanda.

  “Pretty sure we’ve scarred my mother for life,” Penelope stated with a smirk.

  “You don’t sound very upset by it,” Travis mentioned, lifting an eyebrow in her direction while he continued to massage her feet.

  “I’m not. Momma acts all innocent, but let me just say that I’ve walked in on more than one embarrassing moment between my parents over the years. Heck, just last night I couldn’t sleep and thought I’d get some milk, to make me sleepy. When I walked into the kitchen, I found Momma sitting on the breakfast table with Daddy standing in front of her. I’m pretty damn sure that he had his hand up her nightgown.”

  Travis shuddered. “You didn’t think about telling me that before I ate breakfast at that table this morning?”

  Penelope laughed. “Sorry, but I was trying very hard not to think about what happened after I left.”

  With a bad taste in his mouth, Travis looked over to where his in-laws and son were standing, and tried very hard to get the images of them being intimate out of his head. He failed, and the convulsion that shot through him had Penelope laughing again.

  “I may never be able to look your father in the eye again,” Travis grumbled.

  Leaning forward, Penelope placed her hand on his arm, giving him a seductive smile. “Well, maybe later, I’ll help distract you.”

  Travis growled and reached for her, but before he could pull his wife into his lap, Max yelled, “Mom, Dad, time to eat!”

  “Oh, good, I’m starving,” Penelope gushed, scrambling to her feet and rushing down to the picnic table.

  Taking a deep breath, Travis stood up and followed her, wondering if
his wife had any idea just how much she affected him.

  By the time they had finished eating and cleaning up, the sky had turned dark. Pulling their chairs off the back porch, they settled around the fire pit, which was now providing enough heat to combat the cool, mountain air. The family turned their attention to the night sky and waited for the fireworks to begin. Max had been so excited when Sherman and Wanda explained that every Fourth of July the city would shoot off hundreds of fireworks. With their house situated at the base of Pikes Peak, they had the perfect view of the upcoming show.

  A few minutes later, the first firework shot through the air, exploding and sending hundreds of red sparkles throughout the sky.

  “Wow,” Max murmured, awestruck.

  “Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” Wanda asked.

  Max nodded and smiled, but kept his eyes locked on the sky. “Yeah. It’s beautiful. Jana would like them.”

  “She would, huh?” Wanda appeared to be struggling to keep her laughter at bay.

  Though it was dark, the glow from the fire made the redness in Max’s cheeks visible. “She loves the night sky. Says that the stars remind her of diamonds.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I think she’d like this, too.”

  “Well, maybe when you’re older, you can bring her here and we’ll show her,” Wanda suggested.

  “Yeah, someday,” Max murmured.

  Biting the inside of his lip, Travis looked over at Penelope, who was gazing at her son with tears in her eyes. Neither of them was surprised to hear their son talk about Jana with such adoration. It hadn’t been a secret that he cared for the girl, having declared at the tender age of ten that he was going to marry her. While they agreed that he was too young to know what love was, Travis suspected that Max was in love with Jana. After all, he hadn’t been much older than his son when he fell in love with Penelope.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Pigskins and Chalk Lines

  Early on the fifth of August, Travis slipped out of bed, tucking the blankets around Penelope. She moaned, reached for him, but then let her hand fall against the mattress again.

  “Clean the window good, squirrel,” she mumbled in her sleep. “No, not with your tail. Use the squeegee, that’s why I bought it, silly.”

  Stifling his laughter, Travis gathered his clothes and crept into the bathroom to get dressed. He didn’t want to wake his wife, in particular during what sounded like an interesting dream. Penelope had been so tired, yet, she had been struggling to sleep through the night. With the pressure of the baby on her bladder, Travis often found himself being awoken in the middle of the night by her huffing and waddling into the bathroom. And at twenty-three weeks, waddling was the best description Travis had for the way his wife moved.

  Though she was just over halfway through her pregnancy, Penelope had blossomed. Her stomach had popped and she looked further along than she was. Travis loved it and often found himself mesmerized by her body. Many times he had found himself lying awake at night, just watching her. With each passing moment, he found himself falling deeper in love with the woman who had owned his heart since he was just a snot-nosed teenager.

  When he thought about how much time he had missed with her and Max because of his misguided priorities, Travis cringed. He didn’t regret his life in Miami, or with the Sharks, but longed for the memories of Penelope’s pregnancy with Max, longed to have seen his son take his first steps, or even to deal with potty training. Over the past six months, he made the same vow over and over again: he wouldn’t miss any of those milestones with the new baby.

  Once he was dressed, Travis tiptoed out of the bathroom and bedroom, trying to be quiet, and closed the door behind him. When he turned around, he found Max standing at the end of the hallway, wearing a pair of maroon cotton shorts, the Broncos’ playoff shirt the cheerleaders had sold the year before, and his running shoes.

  “You’re up pretty early,” Travis said, walking past his son and heading into the kitchen.

  Max followed. “Yep. I was thinking maybe I could go to practice with you.”

  Nodding, Travis didn’t say anything as he poured himself a cup of coffee, thankful that he’d remembered to set the timer the night before. At six in the morning, he was going to need all the caffeine he could get. Today marked the start of the high school football season and the first day of practice.

  Of course, because of the recent droughts and incessant heat, none of the high school football programs in the state were able to run their program the way they had in the old days. When Travis was in high school, the football players went through two-a-days. The team would start around the same time that Travis found himself up now, but instead of one long practice, they would go at it for a few hours, take a three-hour break, and then come back in the late afternoon for more. It was grueling, but Travis had loved every moment of it.

  Now, however, the teams were forced to limit their practice to the mornings before the heat of the day set in. Travis understood why. The recent string of kids passing out or dying from heat exhaustion caused the state regulation committee to reevaluate what was in the best interest of the kids. Travis could respect that. After all, football was just a game and the main focus should be teaching them to have fun and to love playing. He wouldn’t put any of his players in danger just for the sake of the win.

  “Did you talk to Mom about it?” Travis knew better than to even consider taking the boy along with him if Penelope had refused him.

  “Last night,” Max replied.

  Leaning against the counter, he stared his son down, trying to deduce whether Max was being honest. Max seldom lied, but he was like any other kid and tended to fudge the truth a bit. He’d fib about trivial things like whether he had homework or pretend that shoving everything under his bed constituted “cleaning his room.”

  “Dad, please?” Max added, jutting out his bottom lip and pouting.

  Travis bit the inside of his cheek in an effort to keep from laughing, but the sight of his thirteen-year-old son standing in front of him, begging like a two-year-old, was amusing. With a subtle shrug of his shoulders, he said, “All right, but if I find out you’re lying, you have to paint the baby’s room all by yourself.”

  Max grinned. “Fine.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I had a banana and some yogurt,” he answered.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Taking one last sip of his coffee, Travis dumped the last few swigs from his cup into the sink and filled it with water, knowing better than to just leave it on the counter. Penelope had made it clear more than once that his habit of leaving his dirty dishes on the counter was not acceptable.

  Travis picked up his bag from next to the door and followed Max out to the Suburban. Once they were buckled in, he pulled out of the driveway and drove to the football field. He parked next to the side entrance, noting that there were already dozens of cars parked along the street. When he and Max walked into the stadium, he was surprised to see all of this year’s sophomore, junior, and senior players already dressed and waiting under the goal post. With a respectful nod in their direction, Travis headed into his office, impressed with the leadership that his returning players were already displaying.

  Dropping his bag on his desk first, he dug out the stack of physical forms that had already been turned in by his freshman and junior players. The state required that all upcoming seventh, ninth, and eleventh grade students, who were participating in any athletic activity, have a physical performed by a doctor stating that they were healthy enough to play. With the exception of a handful of freshmen who were on the fence about whether or not they wanted to play, every one of his players had already gotten their check-ups done — just another way of proving they were ready to get to work. Making a note of whose forms he still needed, Travis dropped the papers back on his desk, picked up the football that was sitting on the corner, and headed back out to the field.

  The dozen freshmen who had signed up to pla
y had joined their upperclassmen. A quick count revealed that thirty-two boys had come out for football this year; the biggest turn out they had had in the three years that Travis had been coaching the Broncos. Of course he knew they wouldn’t all stick with the program. A handful of them would either succumb to injuries or would quit outright when the workouts got hard. Then there would be the handful that wouldn’t be able to keep up their grades.

  Gripping the ball with both hands, Travis stopped at the edge of the field and looked at each boy, including Max, before speaking.

  “Time, passion, heart, and soul. I don’t ask for much from my players, but I do ask that you give me those. When we step out onto this field every Friday night, we do so with the expectations of an entire community resting on our shoulders. When you step up to the line, hundreds of eyes will be on you, ready to scrutinize every move you make. Sometimes, they’ll praise you for attacking the other team or for getting through their line. But other times, they will criticize you. They’ll call you lazy or soft, claiming that you don’t care or don’t want it enough. I’ll know that’s not true. I’ll know that every person who crosses the chalk line was there because they proved to me that they wanted it.

  “The upperclassmen know that I will push hard. I expect one-hundred and ten percent at all times. Any less and you’re wasting both my time and yours. There is nothing I ask you to do here that I haven’t done, or that I’m not willing to do now.” Pausing, Travis released a breath of air and looked at each boy again, his eyes landing on Max last. “If you push yourselves to do the best you can, at the end of the season, we’ll be winners. It doesn’t matter what the scoreboard says, or what our win-loss ratio is. All that will matter is how much of ourselves we put into this game. I’m standing here in front of you, making the commitment to put everything I have into this team. Are you willing to do the same?”

  The last word had barely left Travis’s mouth when the first of the boys stepped away from the group, moved so that he stood a few feet away from Travis, and folded him arms in front of him. It wasn’t a surprise to Travis that Aaron Johnson was the first to step up to the plate. The two-hundred and fifty pound lineman had worked harder for him than any other player. Two games into his freshman season, Aaron had broken the fifth metatarsal in his right foot, ending his season early. The break took three months to heal, and just when the boy had started to prepare for the start of the baseball season, he broke the same bone again.