Free Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl

Carl was a theologian and a scholar, and he had helped Tommy at a time when the younger man needed sage advice. Tommy came to believe he’d met Carl at the gas station that day for a reason. It was Carl who told Tommy it would be all right to walk away from football—much to the consternation of Ham Jeffers, the multibillionaire team owner. Carl had encouraged Tommy to do what he needed to do, which was not play a sport where he could kill a fellow human being.
    Before the accident, Tommy had taken the sport he played seriously. Afterward, it seemed meaningless. How could he say, “A man is dead, but we scored two more touchdowns than the other team, so it was worth it” ?
    Ham Jeffers thought Tommy should be able to shake it off. “Get it through your thick skull,” he shouted at Tommy. “It was an accident!”
    Carl told Tommy it was indeed an accident, but it was also a turning point, a crossroads. There was a reason it happened, or at least a way to give it a reason. Carl didn’t try to soothe him with pat answers.
    “You may never know why God allowed it,” he told Tommy, “but maybe God wants you to ask that question. If life has meaning, then death has meaning, even if it seems senseless to you at the moment.”
    Tommy was still asking. In the meantime, to make sure it would never happen again, he took the necessary steps. On a personal level, he’d walked off the field in the first quarter of the next game he played before he hurt somebody else, and because he knew he didn’t belong there anymore. He’d always played with an equation in mind: (mass x velocity) = force , and the greater force prevailed. Some players hit the brakes in the split second before impact. Tommy accelerated. After the accident, he found himself shying away from hits and decelerating. His heart was no longer in it.
    The other thing he knew he had to do was open a fitness center to train athletes and teach them how to be strong. He took full responsibility for the consequences of his actions, but he also knew that Dwight Sykes, although a gifted natural athlete with blinding speed, had also been lazy. He rarely used the weight room and spent his off-seasons pursuing television acting opportunities and chasing girls. If Sykes had been stronger, he might have been able to take the hit Tommy delivered.
    The fitness center was a way to make everybody who used it stronger. It wasn’t something Tommy wanted to do with the rest of his life, but it was what he needed to set in place before transitioning to the next thing.

     
    The morning sun was still rising in the east when Tommy pulled up to Carl’s home and found his friend working in his garden, ripping out his withered tomato plants. Carl had lived alone ever since losing his wife to breast cancer. Tommy tried to set him up on dates whenever he met single women of an appropriate age, but Carl never called the numbers Tommy gave him.
    Carl got to his feet when he saw Tommy and held his muddy hands out to his sides in a gesture that said, To what do I owe the pleasure? He had a salt-and-pepper beard, full-faced but closely trimmed, and was bald on top.
    “What are you doing?” Tommy asked him. “Planting season is spring.”
    “A friend from Holland brought me some bulbs,” Carl said. “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”
    They moved to the porch, where Tommy took a seat in an Adirondack chair while Carl went inside. He came back a little later with two steaming mugs.
    Carl sat down heavily in the chair next to Tommy. “Wow,” he said, rubbing his back. “I can’t bend over like I used to. Or more accurately, I can’t stand up again like I used to. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
    “Research, actually,” Tommy said. “Did you hear about Bull’s Rock Hill?”
    “Just a little bit on the radio,” Carl said.
    “I’m sort of involved,” Tommy said. “I told you about my buddy Liam, right?”
    “The skinny kid?” Carl said.
    Tommy nodded. “They found