Author's Note: FYI, you can find two of my novels, OFF TARGET and ROOTS THAT CLUTCH, at Amazon under my pen name MOLLY TAGGART.

I think the following story is probably just a one-shot, though I may take away the "complete" sign in the future and make it a series of good-byes with various individual characters, if inspiration strikes.

Saying Goodbye

Tami and Eric are serving out the rest of their school-year contracts at East Dillon High, Tami as guidance counselor and Eric as a P.E. teacher and a coach without a team. The buffer of time is helpful; it will give them the chance to sell the house, pack up, and say goodbye. That last item on the list, Eric's been avoiding. He's been going through the motions of his job as though these weren't his last days in a town where he's molded boys into men, seen himself grow into a better coach, father, and husband, and raised his second daughter from birth. Some days, though, he finds himself staring off into a corner of them gym, not noticing the kids being lazy, not barking at them to pick up the pace.

Today, there's nothing to do in his office during his football planning periods, which are the last two periods of the day. There are no Lions anymore. Normally, this time of year, he reviews the school files of kids he wants to recruit in the spring and studies game tape of potential rivals. There's no point in doing that now. So he surfs the internet for job opportunities instead, polishes his resume, calls a few coaching colleagues on the east coast, peeks in on Tami in her office, and bothers her with lewd suggestions about office sex he would never actually follow through on even if she took him up on his offer instead of shoving him out the door.

Tami hasn't stopped working. She's become like a whirlwind of productive energy, trying to do what little she can to help these kids before she leaves. Eric, on the other hand, feels like he's just treading water, passing the time, waiting for someone to throw him a life saver and drag him up on a boat that will take him in some useful direction. Tami has plans, ambitions, colleagues, connections, and a dream job awaiting her in Philadelphia. He has no idea what team he'll be coaching, and whether or not anyone will care.

Tami will still be counseling students for two hours after school today, so he heads out to the parking lot alone. As he unlocks his truck, his cell phone rings. It's that damn realtor. The woman starts prattling on about how the listing has come out and she still thinks Eric really needs to improve the landscaping a bit. "You need to call my wife about this," he says. Tami is handling all that stuff, of course. But the realtor says Tami wasn't available and prattles on.

Eric grunts intermittently as he opens the back door and throws his duffle bag on the seat. The realtor's saying something about replacing some popped window seals now. As if he's done nothing to maintain the house. He maintains. He's a maintainer. Hell, he's maintained a marriage for twenty years – even when it required compromise - the kind of compromise he didn't want to make, like leaving his home state for a new culture in a new world that doesn't have any idea how important football is. If he can maintain a marriage, he can sure as hell maintain a house. "I'll take care of it," he says, expecting the conversation to end, but it doesn't.

Why do women talk so much? Sometimes it seems to him they make a constant yapping sound in the background. It's always given him a headache. Not Tami. She can get talky, from time to time, but he likes her voice – he's heard it soft and sweet when she says she loves him, heard it strong and reassuring when she tells him what he can accomplish, heard it low and sultry when she moans for more. He's heard it shrill too, when she's upset with him over some infraction, but all in all, he likes her voice. He knows when he has to listen to her and when he can tune her out – he can tell by the way her tone shifts to that "hey, this is important now, Eric" mode. But as for the rest of womankind, he doesn't understand why they need to hurl all those words in his direction.

He grunts again as he slides into the front seat and sticks his keys into the ignition. That's when he sees Luke heading towards him, jutting his chin out in a "Can we talk?" nod. See, Luke's a fine young man. He can say that with just his chin. He doesn't need five dozen words.

"I have to go," Eric says to the realtor. "Call my wife if you need to discuss this stuff."

Eric drops his cell phone in the cup holder and slides back out of the truck. He leans against the hood while Luke stands, a back pack slung over his muscular shoulder. Eric nods, because that's all a man should have to do to say, "I'm listening."

"I'm thinking about joining the military," Luke says. "I'm not getting a football scholarship. My grades aren't quite good enough for an academic scholarship. I don't think college is in my future. This is something I can do. What do you think?"

Eric looks at this boy struggling to be a man. Luke had the highlight of his football career when the Lions won state. It was a heady moment for all of them, and Luke was soaring high, no doubt for weeks. But Eric knows the crash that comes later, the hard spiral down, the fear that you will be never feel so high again. Eric's re-lived that moment four times in his life, between the state rings he earned as a player and a coach.

Coach Taylor's seen Luke's face, though, the disappointed realization that this is the end of the glory for him, at least as far as football is concerned. The boy came so close to a dream and saw it snatched away by a friend. Luke knows football isn't his future. He knows the State Championship was the high point. What he doesn't know is that there will be greater highs that have nothing to do with football. That dizzy feeling you get when the woman you love says yes to your marriage proposal. The way your heart stops for just a second when your little baby grabs your finger for the first time. The joy that wells up inside and bursts out in laughter when your wife tells you she's pregnant again, years after you'd given up hope of another child.

Luke, Eric knows, feels like his life has peaked, when it's really only just begun. He wonders if that has anything to do with his decision to join the military, if there isn't something at best glory-seeking and at worst fatalistic in the urge.

"You're sure this is what you want?" Eric asks.

Luke nods in that determined way of his, those blue eyes hard beyond their years, masking the scared little boy somewhere inside. "I want to serve my country. Because…" He looks away for a moment, at the semi-fresh graffiti sprayed across the brick wall of the gym of East Dillon. "…That means something."

Eric could tell Luke he has other options, that college is still a possibility, that Mrs. Taylor will help him find the right one for him. He could tell him that military life is nothing like the movies. He could tell him about his own eighteen-year-old brother who came home from Vietnam in a box when Eric was just five years old, and how his parents were never quite the same after that. He could tell him a dozen different things, but he can see Luke has made up his mind. He knows Luke doesn't really want his opinion. Luke wants his approval.

"I think it's an honorable thing," Coach Taylor says, "and you'll make a fine soldier. I've often wished I'd served." It's all true, every word of it, even that last line. Though his lack of service is not something he thinks of often, when he does, he always feels it as a deficiency in himself.

Eric remembers when the Gulf War started – not the one Luke will likely go off to, but the first one, a lifetime ago. Back then, he watched two of his friends quit college and sign up. He'd proved to be a mediocre college football player, disappointing his father and himself. He knew he wasn't going pro, though his team had done well because of some of his ideas for plays, and Tami, to whom he was engaged at the time, kept telling him he could be a coach. "Yeah," he'd mutter every time she suggested it, "because those who can't do teach."

Eric thought then about doing what those two classmates had done – just signing up. He told Tami he was thinking about it one afternoon, in the off-campus, one-bedroom apartment they shared. She was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor and highlighting a passage in a psychology textbook on the wobbly coffee table they'd picked up from the Salvation Army. She said, "No. You're not, Eric." She didn't even look up from the book.

They had a huge fight, and he stormed out the door, insisting he was going straight to the recruiter. He'd really only been thinking about it until that moment. He just wanted to talk about the idea with her, to know she understood how he was feeling, but her indifferent resistance hurled him out that door. "Why can't you just support me for once?" he shouted before he walked out, as though she hadn't already supported him at dozens of football games, as though she hadn't supported him even when it was clear he wasn't going pro. It was just an easy thing to say in the heat of anger, in the heat of the self-reproach he felt because of the real dream he was not achieving.

She followed him onto the stoop, grabbed his arm, and yanked him back inside. "Don't," she said, and it wasn't a command this time, it was a plea, and not just a vocal one. Her voice choked, yes, but there was a plea also in those warm, beautiful eyes, a plea behind trapped tears.

"Tami, I have to do something."

"I'm pregnant," she said. Just like that. And his world changed. He didn't need be a hero for his country. He didn't need to be a hero on the football field. He just needed to be there.

Eric quit the team. It was too time consuming, and he knew he wasn't getting drafted by the NFL. He took on a full-time job at the college bookstore, coached pee wee, and spent two years finishing the last year of his college degree.

Luke purses his lips together and nods his head. "So you think it's a good idea?" he asks. "Becky doesn't."

"Girlfriends seldom do." Eric supposes Luke hasn't knocked Becky up, though.

"I figure I'll serve a few years, earn some money, maybe get a degree on the GI bill in agriculture. Come back to Dillon and grow the family farm."

"That sounds like a solid plan to me." Provided he doesn't end up killed.

"We're gonna miss you around here," Luke says, and Eric is suddenly reminded that he's leaving, that he's like these senior kids he's coached all year, walking off onto the blank page of the future, half afraid he's leaving the best years of his life behind. He assures these kids their futures are bright, that the best years of their lives lie ahead of them, that this end is just a beginning. Maybe he should tell himself that too.

Luke holds out his hand. Eric grasps it in his own and shakes hard. Then he pulls the boy in for a hug. Neither of them really want to let go, but they do. They do.