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“…and get all the freshman girls’ names for me? I mean, I think I’ve got most of them from the coach at the middle school, but, y’know. They could be moving, or whatever, or—”
“I know, I know,” Lincoln said into his phone, pressed between his shoulder and his cheek while he finished setting up cones. “I’ll get you a list of their Cooper tests, we’ll figure out positions… uh. What else? I’ll tell them how cool you are,” he promised, half-joking.
Terry snorted, and Lincoln could practically hear her rolling her eyes. “You better.”
Usually Terry came with him to soccer tryouts in August, since she volunteered as a sort of unofficial assistant coach for the girls’ teams every once in a while, but she was busy today. “How’s the water?”
“Nice and cool,” Terry said. “It’s hot as balls out here. There’s no fish, but, like, we don’t really fish? So.”
Link smiled and wiped the sweat off his forehead as he moved the last flag to the 100-yard line. “How’s your dad?” Samantha had passed away recently, and Terry Jr. was having a rough time with it, so Terry had been spending more time with her parents.
It sounded like Terry was splashing her feet back and forth in the water while she thought. “Better, I think,” she said eventually. “At least we know heaven’s real, right? That’s what Mom said—that she’s probably in heaven with Ron and his dad… Terry Sr. Whatever. Too many Terrys.”
Lincoln heard Terry Jr. laugh softly in the background, which felt like a good sign. “Tell him I say ‘hi’,” Link said.
Terry obliged, and Link listened to the two of them chat for a while.
He was happy, too, that she was finally getting out of the house (for something other than work, anyway).
Terry would never admit it, but both she and Link had been feeling the empty nest syndrome hard since their last foster kids—these sweet little twin girls who had been with them for nearly a year—had gotten permanently adopted a couple of months ago.
Link couldn’t even remember the last time they hadn’t had any kids in the house. The silence was nice, but the way it threw off his routine was not: He was too used to cooking for four, and it wasn’t like he could just invite his dads or Terry’s parents over for dinner, since they were toddler portions.
A part of Lincoln missed having kids of his own—the same part that had since he was sixteen.
His memories of the simulation were fuzzy and distant now, but as he approached the age he’d been when he was ripped away from that life, he couldn’t help but miss the vague, abstract shapes of Chris and their children…
“Babe?”
Lincoln snapped back to himself. “Yeah?”
“Dad says ‘hey’—and good luck with tryouts.”
“Oh. Thanks,” Link said. He focused on what he did have: Terry, their parents, their friends. That was plenty family enough for him. “I mean, I’m not the one trying out for anything…”
Terry laughed at him again. “I’ll be home late. Getting dinner with Mom and Dad—but don’t sleep early. Ghostbusters 12 is on Netflix++ tonight, and I wanna make fun of it with you.”
Lincoln squinted at the parking area by the soccer field and waved as some parents started dropping off their kids for tryouts. “Sounds good,” he said, grinning against the edge of his phone. “I love you, honey. I’m, uh—I’m really glad you’re having a good day.”
“Love you, too, loser,” Terry said with a final giggle. “Break a leg,” and she hung up.
“Uh, I don’t think… alright.” He chuckled to himself at the beep, blew a kiss to his phone, and shoved it in his shorts pocket. “Oh—Hey, kids! Over here!”
—
This year’s tryouts had better turnout than they had since Lincoln first started this coaching gig.
“It’s gotta be because of the flyers I made,” he said excitedly to the girls’ head coach, bouncing on the heels of his cleats. “It’s definitely because of the flyers.”
She ignored him and kept timing the prospective varsity girls’ 40-yard dashes.
Link tried not to look bitter. His flyers were pretty great this year; he’d even gotten Hero to help with the design. He would’ve asked Taylor, but it turned out he refused to accept commission payments in anything but crypto (because it was harder to trace, he’d said).
Anyway, Hero’s soccer anime characters combined with Lincoln’s middle school scouting must’ve drawn in at least some of these kids, because the field was packed.
The boys’ tryouts had just finished up, so Link was presently trying to figure out positions for everyone.
He had varsity figured out—it was mostly returning upperclassmen and his best underclassmen, anyway—but he still had a few JV boys who needed spots. A few might have to end up as substitute players.
“Here… We can, uh,” Lincoln started, unsure.
Even after nearly a decade, he still had to fake most of his confidence as head coach. He loved his boys, and they loved him (mostly), but high schoolers were brutal, and new players were always unpredictable.
Last season, one of the JV midfielders got a hold of the ‘Pissfoot Gumtoucher’ nickname—probably from his parents or something—and Lincoln feared he might never live it down.
“We’ll do one-v-ones,” he decided eventually, checking the times and formation sketches on his clipboard, “and we’ll finish up pretty quick, okay? Michael, you’re with Theo, and…”
When Link glanced up from his notes to choose the next pair, he noticed a minivan pulling into the adjacent parking area.
Lincoln raised his eyebrows.
A tall, wiry kid with a huge duffle bag over his shoulder and one cleat on his foot tumbled out of the passenger door and broke into a sprint across the field.
Lincoln held a hand up to the other boys. “Uh? Take five, kids. Hey there! What’s going on with—”
The kid barely stopped himself in time not to collide with Link. He hunched over, hands on his knees, and breathed hard for a moment. He started to apologize, but all Lincoln could make out was a mumbled string of ‘oh, jeez’ and ‘aw, man’ and ‘why, why, why…’
“Hey, hey,” Link said, putting his hands up, “it’s alright—”
“Sorry,” the kid managed between labored breaths. “My f—uh… my ride… was late. Sorry.”
“It’s all good!” Lincoln assured him. Something he had gotten better at since working and living with kids all the time was dealing with other people’s anxiety (without blowing them off or getting anxious himself). “Let’s go sit, okay? Ava, can you watch the boys while—”
The girls’ coach cut him off with a curt nod and a beep from her stopwatch.
Link led the kid, who was still trying to lace up his other shoe, over to the bleachers to catch his breath.
He put his head in his hands and took deep breaths (which Lincoln tried to guide, to the best of his ability), until the kid said, “It’s too late, right? There’s so many guys here. I’m not making the team. There’s no way—oh, God…”
“Whoa, okay.” This kid reminded Link a little too much of his younger self. He gave him a careful pat on the shoulder. “Calm down there. It’s, um—it’s okay.”
The kid took a final breath and nodded, flexing his fingers like he was trying to steel himself for something. “Okay—whew. Okay.” He extended his hand for a handshake. “I’m Jerry.”
Lincoln beamed and gave him a good old-fashioned Wilson handshake in return. Grant hadn’t been big on it while Link was growing up, but he came around after the whole ‘going to heaven and seeing his dad again’ thing. “Coach Lincoln. Nice to meet you.”
Jerry nodded and finished tying his shoe.
“So. You’re a freshman?”
Jerry nodded again.
“Did you go to middle school in the district?” Lincoln didn’t recognize him, and that was rare, since he knew every coach and attended nearly every middle school soccer game in the suburbs of Los Angeles County.
“I moved lots of times,” Jerry said hastily. “I didn’t even wanna do soccer, but I did summer conditioning in case.”
Lincoln forced a smile. He could ignore the first half of that sentence if the kid was really that committed. “Soccer’s a great sport, you know,” Link said anyway, restraining himself from launching into a ramble.
Jerry shrugged and wrapped his arms around himself.
“Did you not make the football team or something?” Link asked with a chuckle. It would make sense; Jerry didn’t exactly have the build for it, although he did have the height and gait of a fantastic striker…
The kid thought for a moment, jostling his leg nervously. He looked out over the field, at the bleachers on the other side, and shrugged again. “Kinda. I dunno.”
Link scratched the back of his neck in thought, trying not to read too much into Jerry’s disappointed tone. “Tell you what,” Link said. “I’ve got a spot for a JV forward with your name on it.”
Jerry stammered. “Me?”
“If you want it,” Lincoln said with a firm nod, although he wasn’t quite sure why: The kid had shown up so late he’d nearly missed tryouts altogether, and Link hadn’t even seen him play once. No coach in their right mind would choose him over their sophomore and junior benchwarmers.
Still, when Jerry looked up at him anxiously, Lincoln straightened his clipboard and filled in one of the missing spots on his formation chart: Jerry . Then, he pointed over at the boys still doing one-on-one scrimmages. “Theo! Will you show Jerry here the ropes real quick?”
Theo kicked the grass and complained under his breath.
“Hey! You don’t wanna sit out the first game of the season, do you?” Link asked rhetorically.
Theo grumbled. “You wouldn’t take me out, Coach.”
Lincoln sighed. He was right. He was Link’s best defender.
“Uh,” Jerry said, glancing hesitantly back at the minivan in the parking area.
“You’ll be great, kiddo,” Lincoln said. “I mean, if you wanna do it. Just need to work on that endurance, am I right?”
Jerry took another breath. “Yeah,” he said. He turned to look down at his hands. “Yeah. Okay.”
With a small smile and a blow of his whistle, Lincoln tossed the soccer ball tucked under his arm toward Jerry. “Show me what you’ve got.”
—
The new Ghostbusters movie was, in fact, pretty awful.
Terry did have a good time laughing at the cheaply done CGI (although Lincoln didn’t think it looked that bad; it sort of reminded him of his favorite talking animal-centric films from the early 00s), but only for about half an hour.
By the time this big, poorly animated hellhound thing showed up on screen, Terry was shivering in Link’s arms, so he offered to turn off the movie.
“I’m not scared,” Terry said, tucking her head under his chin.
“Of course not,” Link agreed with a snicker. It was cute how nervous she always got during movies despite how much worse shit they’d both been through. It was fine by Link, though; he didn’t care for spooky stuff, either. Felt too realistic. “Scary doesn’t get scared,” he teased.
“Blegh,” Terry complained at the nickname.
“Aw. It’s okay, hon,” Lincoln said. “Here.” He pulled a folded weighted blanket off the back of the living room couch and tucked it around his wife’s shoulders, and then he passed her the remote to change the movie. “Pick anything you want. I’ll make tea.”
Terry’s brow furrowed in the way it did when she was trying hard not to be sappy. “Pick anything? How?” she asked instead, averting her eyes and fumbling with the TV remote through the blanket. “You fucking swaddled me, dude.”
He kissed the top of her head as he stood. “Love you, too.”
He made tea while Terry muttered some kind of improvised slam poem about her tragic blanket imprisonment and decided on a new (and equally awful looking) movie just to mute the audio.
Once the tea was done and he’d added plenty of honey to Terry’s (and extra leaves for more caffeine to his own), Lincoln leaned over the back of the couch to hand her a mug. “Hi.”
“Hey, boss,” she said, accepting it with now-freed hands. She tugged on his arm. “Come sit.”
Link did, and, with a few sips of tea, leaning up against her husband’s shoulder, Terry quickly relaxed.
She told him about the fishing trip and some annoying calls she’d gotten from her coworkers at KPSC—the old classical station, rebranded over fifteen years ago (when Terry was just an intern there) as Killer Punk Sound Collision.
After it became clear neither of them were actually going to pay attention to the movie, Lincoln told her about his day, too: soccer tryouts, his new FIFA 63 character, and an argument he’d had over the phone with his dad Grant during his drive home about whether or not Marco could finally uninstall the hand bars in the shower.
“Like, we’re not taking Harper’s rubber ducks out of the bathroom! It’s basically the same thing,” Link said with a pout. Harper was only with them for a couple months years ago, but it was still unfair to him that she hadn’t gotten to bring the toys they’d gotten her to her longer term foster home.
“I think it’s different, babe,” Terry said, “because you’re in your thirties.”
“So? Thirty-somethings still need to practice their kicks.”
Terry looked at him in disbelief. “In your dads’ shower?”
“You never know!”
Laughing, Terry looked back at the movie. “Besides, nobody else is gonna use those bars.” Her eyes drifted to the framed photos beside the TV, mostly just of the two of them together.
Lincoln sighed. Another kid could use—and had used before—Harper’s old toys. “Yeah.”
Terry’s gaze caught on a photo of them with their last foster kids, still sitting on the TV stand, waiting to be framed and already collecting dust.
Lincoln patted her back through the blanket. Link was certain Terry loved kids (and always had, which wasn’t really the case for him), although she’d never admit it in so many words.
She taught poetry classes, but only at a college because she couldn’t handle children. She volunteered to coach high school soccer on the weekends, but only to help Lincoln. She was literally a foster mom, but she’d never have kids of her own or adopt any, she always said; that was too permanent.
Link loved being a foster dad, too, and feeling like he was doing something good for kids like himself, but he did miss that permanence. Maybe it was selfish, but raising kids just to have them ripped away was far too familiar.
He’d gotten better at handling it, at being ‘professional’, but he couldn’t help his thoughts drifting back to his simulated life, anyway.
He rested his head on top of Terry’s.
“Aw, Link,” she said quietly, like she knew exactly what he was thinking. She usually did. “Hey, we could get a cat! Would that cure your baby fever?”
He sat up, face hot with jealousy. “ No cats.”
“Okay, okay, jeez!”
—
“Coach,” one of Link’s varsity wingers shouted from the sideline, “Coach, can we take a break? I’m dying.”
Lincoln checked his watch: a gift from Grant with a new face but the old leather strap of his great grandpa’s watch. “You’re not dying. It’s been ten minutes.”
The first practice of the season was two weeks later, after the freshmen had gotten the chance to adjust to high school life, and the upperclassmen had gotten the chance to develop early-onset senioritis.
“It’s, like, 140 degrees,” another kid agreed.
“Alright, don’t be dramatic, guys,” Lincoln scolded them with a little laugh. “It’s only 133. We’ll go inside and do some icebreakers in a minute.”
The two boys’ teams begrudgingly kept at their warm-up drills until Link called them into the PE building to sit, get some water, and do a little indoor exercise.
“Okay! So, uh, we’re gonna go around the circle and…”
“No!” two dozen boys complained in unison.
Lincoln wasn’t sure why kids seemed to hate introductions so much. When he first started public school, his fun fact was always, like ‘I was homeschooled’ or ‘my dads are really awesome’ or, later, ‘I was absent a lot last semester because I was busy saving the world’.
Besides, Link was always happy to get to know new players.
He listened patiently and secretly sipped coffee from his opaque water bottle (his caffeine addiction had only worsened since high school) while the boys shared their names, their positions, and all the weird ways they could bend their joints.
When the new JV forward was up—Jerry, Link remembered upon checking his clipboard—he fidgeted with his fingers and said, “Hi. I’m Jerry. I’m the, um—the forward? A fun fact about me is that I, uh… I dunno, man. My favorite food is sushi. Does that work?”
Link grinned and clapped for him, like he did for everybody, and a few other boys awkwardly followed suit. “What kind? I like the cucumber one.”
Jerry gave him a funny look. “But there’s no fish in it.”
A few other boys snickered, and Lincoln quickly realized he was being made fun of. “I don’t like raw fish. Oh—but my wife likes the…” He trailed off. Saying the name in a room full of teenage boys was not going to end well. “The sex on the beach roll,” he muttered, “from this place in Covina.”
The room erupted into laughter.
Link scolded them for being immature.
He hoped they wouldn’t pick on Terry (‘Coach Scary’, the older boys called her ever since they’d found out that nickname) or make any crude jokes about their sex life the next time she showed up to practice, but he knew they probably would. He made a mental note to warn her.
Jerry laughed along with the rest of them, although he looked more embarrassed than amused. “That’s, uh, weird,” he said quietly. “I like the California roll.”
To spare the kid any more humiliation, Lincoln just gave him a (hopefully) subtle thumbs-up and moved on. “Cole, what about you?”
“Well, you already said my name…”
—
Two days later, Lincoln was touching up the lines on the field while waiting for all his boys to get picked up from practice.
Things were already coming along nicely. Teen High’s boys’ varsity soccer team was always one of the best in the county (which Link gave himself no end of pats on the back for), but JV had been struggling ever since Ramona Middle was repurposed into an AI server farm a couple years ago and all those students got redistricted.
This year, though, there was a ton of potential on JV: Oliver (the one who could lick his own nostrils) was already a great goalie for a freshman, and Rowan (the one who also threw javelin in the spring) had an enthusiasm for soccer that Lincoln had never even seen in anyone but himself.
The most exciting thing, though, was that Jerry was shaping up to be an excellent forward.
His endurance was still far from ideal, but, last practice, Link sent him home with some written-up exercises for it, so hopefully that would resolve itself soon. Despite the reluctance and annoyance he tried to portray, Jerry already seemed committed to being a good soccer player.
It reminded Link of Terry. He smiled to himself.
The one thing that worried him about Jerry, though, wasn’t his sportsmanship; it was how late he stayed after practice.
Lincoln checked his watch again. He was supposed to meet his dads for bridge night with their new neighbors, but he wouldn’t have time to stop for groceries and drop them off at home first if Jerry didn’t get picked up soon.
For the last half an hour, Jerry had busied himself with pacing the perimeter of the field, occasionally checking his extremely outdated anagram generator or sitting idly in the grass.
He followed the sideline toward where Lincoln was painting, humming to himself.
Lincoln stopped his field striper short. “Uh! You’re gonna mess up your cleats, kiddo. The paint’s still wet.”
Jerry looked up at him, then down at his own feet, and jumped off the line. “Oh. Sorry, Coach.”
“It’s alright,” Link said, turning off the machine. “Um, are you sure your parents are coming?”
Jerry frowned. “She’ll get here at some point.”
“Okay… Well,” Lincoln said slowly, trying not to sound too accusatory (and he wasn’t; he just didn’t need his schedule thrown off any worse than it already was), “you know, I can’t leave until you leave, so.”
Jerry shook his head frantically. “I know. I’m really sorry, Coach. She’s… ugh. She’s always late , and I can’t walk there, I think, and, and—I’m sorry.”
Link nodded. Even if it was a little annoying, it wasn’t the kid’s fault. “My dads were always early to everything. When I did high school soccer, the coach would get mad because I showed up before he did.”
“Nice,” Jerry said with a forced laugh. His eyebrows lowered at something Lincoln had said, but Lincoln wasn’t sure what until Jerry asked, “Were you adopted?”
“Oh! Actually—”
“Sorry,” Jerry interrupted. “That’s a weird question. Just—because you said ‘dads’, I thought… No, does that sound homophobic? It does. Ugh, God, why would you ask somebody that, Jerry…”
“No, no, hey, it’s all good!” Lincoln assured him. “I was adopted. It’s not, like, too personal or anything.”
Jerry looked up at him. “Really?”
“Mm hm,” Link said, giving Jerry a gentle pat on the shoulder. “And I don’t think it sounds homophobic, but I’ll have to ask my dads and get back to you on that.”
Jerry laughed, embarrassed but relieved. “Thanks.”
Lincoln nodded and turned back to his field striper to put the finishing touches on the last side of the field.
“I bet it was cool to have two dads,” Jerry said, toeing the grass. “My new foster mom never lets me do anything.”
Foster mom? Link’s eyes widened. “Really? Me and my wife are—”
He was cut off by the honk of a car horn as the same minivan pulled into the parking area.
“Finally,” Jerry mumbled, adjusting the massive duffle bag slung across his back. “Bye, Coach!”
He sprinted across the field faster than Link had ever seen a kid run before, and he was gone.
—
As usual, Lincoln and his dad Grant absolutely smoked the neighbors in bridge.
They were a couple around his dads’ age who had just become the newest residents in Mrs. Thompson’s old house. Marco had taken turns teaming up with both of them, and the two of them even played a round together, but there was no stopping the Wilson train.
Speaking of trains, Lincoln was rearranging Marco’s model trains in the recently refinished basement. “It’s more efficient this way,” he explained, inching a track piece just a bit farther to the left with his pinky finger.
Marco was usually just as stubborn as Link, but never when it came to his family, so he just said, “Sure, Linky.”
The neighbors had left a couple hours ago, and Terry had the night show on Wednesdays, so Lincoln was hanging around until the banana bread his dads had in the oven upstairs was finished so he could bring home a slice for her.
“Don’t spread them out any more,” Grant grumbled, his face in his hand, “please,” he added after a delay.
“It’s a Z scale!” Marco argued, gesturing around the small corner of the basement (that was otherwise a game room) occupied by the trains. “They’re tiny.”
“Yeah, so they get lost, and I keep stepping on them.”
Lincoln carried on adjusting the tracks. “It’s a Z scale,” he reiterated, “so your turn radius needs to be wider here. It’s too sharp.”
Marco nodded in a way that was only a little bit patronizing. “I see.”
“Okay, fine. Just please don’t make a loop around my couch,” Grant said with a nervous laugh.
Smiling to himself, Link thought back to playing trains with some of the older foster kids he’d had over the years. Xavier was the oldest, at nine, and he had liked Lincoln’s G gauge trains, but he’d also broken a couple of them and, despite Link and Terry’s protestations, got moved to another house soon after—for ‘aggressive behavior’.
Lincoln’s kids had liked trains, too, he was pretty sure. He distantly remembered them building a track around the couch and Chris complaining about it, just like this.
He absentmindedly rubbed his thumb over the top of a tiny boxcar.
Marco knelt beside him. “What’s going on with you lately, Link? Ow—bad idea,” he said when his knees popped audibly, and he sat instead.
“Huh? Nothing,” Lincoln lied, poking around at the model billboards. “I’m good. Just… thinking about banana bread.”
“Sure,” Marco agreed with a wavering smile.
“You know, Link,” Grant said, his slippers loud against the basement floor as he paced around behind them, “it’s okay if… things are still bothering you. That’s tough stuff for a teenager to go through. You don’t just grow out of it. I would know.”
Link shook his head. Those memories did still bother him, but at least Terry had them, too. “It’s Chris,” he blurted out.
“Oh, honey,” Marco said slowly. “You don’t still feel guilty about that, do you?”
Another shake of the head. Chris would’ve loved Terry; they would’ve wanted Link to be happy—He was sure of that. He’d already (mostly) come to terms with that back in space. “No. Just… I don’t know. I don’t wanna put that on Terry.”
Marco patted his shoulder. “You don’t talk to her about them?”
“Of course I do!” Terry liked to hear about Chris—even just the few blurry memories Link had of them. “I feel like she must get sick of it at some point.”
In the corner of Lincoln’s vision, Grant’s hand was hovering uncomfortably close to Marco’s set of tiny craft tools and X-Acto knives. “You said she’s sick of you?” Grant asked darkly.
“Dad!” Link shouted. He knew his dads loved Terry like a daughter, but Grant would turn on anyone in an instant if they hurt Lincoln. “That’s not what I—put the wrench down! God…”
Marco laughed and leaned in to give Link a hug. “It’s okay to mourn them,” Marco reminded him.
“I know…” Link trailed off, took a deep breath, and rambled, “I just really miss having kids around, y’know? And I know Terry says she doesn’t want kids, and that’s fine, but—I’m sorry. I’m being a baby.”
Grant was still for a moment. Then, he sat on Lincoln’s other side. “You’ll always be our baby,” he said quietly.
Marco nodded. “No matter how big you get.”
Lincoln rubbed his eyes and managed a smile. “Thanks, dads…”
“Yep. And since you’re still a baby, you can help your dads get up,” Marco said, grabbing Link’s forearm. “I’m too old to be sitting criss-cross applesauce.”
With a laugh, Lincoln hoisted them both up off the floor, and the three of them went upstairs to discover their banana bread was a little burnt.
—
The first soccer game of the season snuck up on Lincoln.
It turned out coaching was even easier and more fun when most of his players were already pretty skilled. Each practice flew by as he excitedly sketched formations, timed drills, and joked around with the boys.
This week, they were playing both Claremont’s JV and varsity boys’ teams… easy. Those kids were already toast, Lincoln thought.
Terry’s girls weren’t playing until later that afternoon, but she was still in the stands, pretending to be aloof but still cheering loudly as the mascots came out for the JV game.
It was an away game, so the Claremont Wolf came out first (boring, Link thought with an eye-roll he barely concealed from the Wolfpack’s coach standing beside him on the sideline).
Link’s JV boys, lined up behind him to high-five the other team before they would run onto the field, jeered and hissed at the mascot.
“Be nice,” Lincoln told them half-heartedly.
They only obliged once Teeny ran out from the other side, whooping and clapping as he did a cartwheel across the field.
Lincoln was always glad that the high schoolers nowadays liked Teeny the Teen more than they did back when he was in school. Every time, he wished Normal was there to hear the applause.
When he glanced up at the bleachers again, Terry had her phone out, recording Teeny’s flips. Maybe she was going to send it to Normal.
Link smiled and looked back at his boys. “You guys ready to get out there and kick some a—butt?”
Most of them cheered again.
Jerry, though, in the middle of the lineup, was still staring wistfully out across the field. “Uh huh,” he said distantly.
Lincoln frowned and walked over to him, leaning down to talk only to Jerry. “You nervous, bud? You’re gonna kill it out there.”
Jerry shook his head, looking up to the bleachers. “I’m okay, Coach.”
“Yeah, you are,” Link agreed, giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. “You’ve got this.”
After Lincoln gave a few more particularly anxious players individual pep talks, the two boys’ coaches looked at each other, nodded, and blew their whistles.
—
“Good game, good game, good game,” Lincoln said as each player from the JV Wolfpack filed off the field. Most of them ignored him, and one even spit near his shoe.
That was fair, he supposed; the Teens had destroyed them 5 to 0.
Jerry had scored most of those, so Lincoln ran up to high-five him and usher him over to get water and snacks. “The height on that last goal kick was insane, kid,” Link said excitedly, shaking his shoulder. “So proud of you.”
The shaking made Jerry spill some of the water from his paper cup.
“Oops. Sorry—”
“Thanks, Coach,” Jerry said with a small smile, still catching his breath. “I’m… so tired… oh, my God. Are all games that long?”
Lincoln laughed nervously. “Um—usually longer, if they’d scored any points. Varsity ties a lot, and that means overtime.”
“Remind me to never go out for varsity.”
With another chuckle, Lincoln said, “Speaking of, we’ve got, uh… almost an hour until their game. You should stick around to support them and cool down together after, but you can go sit with your family.”
Jerry’s face dropped. “They’re not—”
“Oh!” Link felt his ears get hot with embarrassment as he remembered: Jerry’s foster mom had dropped him off near the end of warm-ups and immediately drove away. “Sorry, Jerry. Well, you can sit with your friends if…”
Jerry was shaking his head, glancing back at the other JV boys laughing together by the water cooler.
Lincoln tried not to look too heartbroken on the kid’s behalf. “Here,” he said, making a ‘follow me’ gesture and heading up to the stands. “You can sit with me and my wife.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mm hm.” He walked up to Terry and said, “Hi, gorgeous,” as he slid into the seat beside her.
“Link!” she shouted, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and squeezing tight. “Hi, handsome,” she said with a giggle. “That was awesome! Like, the best first game you guys have had in years.”
“I know, right?”
Terry pulled back, grinning, and kissed him in a way that would definitely get them in trouble for PDA if they were still students before noticing Jerry. “Oh. Hey… kid?”
“Jerry,” he said, extending his hand.
Terry’s eyes widened. “Whoa!” She laughed and returned the handshake. “Did you teach him this, Link? He’s like a baby Grant.”
Link laughed, too, and shook his head.
“Terry Marlowe,” she told Jerry. “I help with girls’ varsity sometimes, but I don’t think our practices have overlapped yet. Haven’t seen you around. I trust Coach Link here has told you all about me…”
Rolling his eyes, Link added sarcastically, “Yes, and how cool you are.”
“Um—no?” Jerry said honestly.
Lincoln put a hand on his wife’s wrist and played with the hair ties around it. “Is it alright if he sits with you during boys’ varsity? His foster parents aren’t here.”
Jerry froze up. “Uh!”
“Oh, no,” Link said quickly, raising his hands in apology, “I’m sorry! I didn’t know that wasn’t—”
“It’s cool,” Terry interrupted. “Jerry, you know Link and I are also foster parents, right?”
Jerry tensed even more with surprise before his shoulders relaxed. “Really?”
“What, he didn’t tell you?”
“No!”
“I figured,” Terry said, giving Link a look. She rolled her eyes at him. “Wilsons…”
Lincoln felt his face get warmer. “Sorry.”
He sat with them for a while longer, watching the Teen High cheerleaders do a little routine between the games. Teeny lifted them up to do all kinds of crazy flips in his big, flesh-colored hands while the audience cheered.
Jerry watched with rapt attention.
Terry leaned over to him, across Link’s lap. “Pretty cool, huh? Y’know, our friend was Teeny when Link and I were in high school.”
Jerry nodded, staring as the routine ended and Teeny ran aside before the kid inside pulled the head off and took a breather, chatting with the other cheerleaders.
“The suit totally reeks,” Terry added with a snort. “It’s reeked since our friend made it, like, two decades ago.”
Shrugging, Jerry said, “Yeah, it’d be, uh, really lame to be the mascot…” He laughed awkwardly.
Terry and Link shared a frown over his head.
As the cheerleaders took a stretch break, Link checked his watch again: time for varsity. “Alright,” he said, pushing back Terry’s bangs to kiss her forehead. “Gotta run. Love you. Thanks for hanging out with him.”
“He’s cool! Right, Jerry?” Terry said, giving Jerry a fist bump. She turned to Link and added, “Love you, boss. Break a leg.”
“You gotta stop saying that.”
—
“It’s just so sad,” Terry said through tears. She’d driven them to Claremont High that morning, but she was definitely too much of a wreck now to drive them back. “He’s so sweet. He just wants to be a cheerleader.”
She was telling Link about her talk with Jerry, who had stuck around for the girls’ games in the afternoon and even later, since nobody had come to pick him up. Right when Link had offered to drive him home himself (after he would call his foster mom and get parental permission, of course), the minivan finally showed up: forty-five minutes late.
From just their few hours of bonding, Terry was already torn up about the poor kid.
Apparently he’d never stayed in one place longer than a few months, since he had a habit of running away for days and ending up as an Amber Alert. Then, they’d track him down and send him to the next place.
“And, like—he said he feels like he doesn’t fit in,” Terry continued, wiping her face with the inside of her wrist. “God—That’s, like, how I felt, y’know?”
Lincoln hummed in agreement and patted her leg as they came up to a stoplight.
“And he’s just a kid.” Terry sniffled.
And she said she didn’t like kids.
Link smiled sadly. “I know, baby. He’s enjoying soccer, at least—and he could do cheer at the same time. I’d let him split the practices fifty-fifty, or he could wait until spring, but…”
“The dad wouldn’t let him,” Terry said. “That’s what Jerry told me—that his foster dad wanted him to do football instead, so they compromised on soccer.”
That wasn’t much of a compromise. “How do so many assholes get approved by the DCS…”
“I know! He said these ones are way better than the last place, but still.” Terry sighed. “It sucks.”
She sniffled again, and Lincoln kept a hand on her knee as he drove. She’d gotten better at crying (for non-dark and edgy reasons, anyway) in front of him since high school, but it was still pretty rare to see her like this.
After a moment of silence, Terry said miserably, “He likes birds. Like Dad and Ron. There was a female cardinal across the field, and I told him what it was, and he was so excited…”
“Aw,” Link said. “Did you show him your favorite? The pie… um.”
“Pied flycatcher,” Terry supplied as if it were obvious, “but yeah. His favorite is a bluebird—well, not really. It’s a lazuli bunting,” she read off her phone. “He didn’t know the real name, but he had a picture. They’re cute… bluer than an actual bluebird. They live here. We could see one.”
Lincoln squeezed her knee. “You seem excited, too.”
Terry sniffled once more and looked away, out the car window. “It’s whatever.”
“Okay,” Link said with a small smile. He moved his hand up her leg until it found her hand, and he squeezed it. “Well, all I can do is try to be a good coach for the kid, right? Put my best foot forward or whatever.”
“I guess so.”
“And we can order Thai tonight, if you want?”
Terry let out a wet little laugh. “Yes, God, that would be so good right now.”
—
After dinner and a couple hours of nervous deliberation, Lincoln—at Terry’s urging—called Normal.
“Wh—Scary?”
“Oh, hi,” Link started. “Sorry. I’m on her phone.” Lincoln’s had died while he’d been sitting with his finger over the call button, debating whether or not to press it. “Am I, um—interrupting anything?”
“Oh! Hey, man,” Normal said slowly. A mattress creaked audibly through the receiver. “How’s it going? What’s… wrong?”
“Nothing!” Link said quickly. He paced the bedroom while Terry shook her head at him from their bed. “Don’t worry. Everything’s good. I just wanted your advice on something.”
It went silent on Normal’s end for a moment, and then he laughed hard. “You want my advice? Okay, sure. I’m free—just got off work. So, uh, shoot, I guess.”
Lincoln swallowed and looked to Terry, who gave him a thumbs-up. “It’s about cheerleading stuff.”
The silence on the other end was longer this time.
This was what Link was afraid of—that Normal would be annoyed to hear from him, especially about high school.
“Uh,” Normal said eventually. The mattress creaked again, slower, like he was sitting back on the edge of his bed. He mumbled something to himself and said in a jarringly peppy voice, “Sure! No worries! What is it?”
“There’s, uh, this kid on my soccer team who I think wants to do cheer, too,” Lincoln explained, decidedly leaving out Jerry’s admiration for Teeny, “but his family doesn’t want him to. So… if you’ve got any words of wisdom for the kid, then… that would be cool.”
“His family, huh?” Normal sighed, dropping his act just as quickly as he’d started it. “I guess he should, like, follow his heart… but if he ever wants friends, I’d tell him to stick to soccer.” He tacked a forced laugh onto the end.
Lincoln and Terry shared a look across the room.
“Awesome. Thanks, man,” Link said, forcing a laugh of his own. “How, um… how are you doing? We miss you.”
Normal was quiet again. “Do you?”
“Yes!” Lincoln said, probably too enthusiastically. He tried to dial it back. “I just, you know…” He trailed off. “We don’t wanna bother if you’re busy.”
“Right.”
“Um…”
“Well, I don’t wanna bother, either,” Normal said awkwardly. “I know you two are always busy with your foster stuff, right?”
“Not right now. It’s been a while since we’ve had some quiet around here,” Lincoln joked.
“Right… I don’t want to disturb that,” Normal said, and his voice was somehow both jittery and dejected. “I should go. I’ve got the early shift tomorrow, so.”
Lincoln grasped at the opportunity to ask something about him. “Where are you working now?”
“Still Walmart.”
“That’s cool!”
Normal laughed again, and Link relished the sound. “Sure. The 4 am shift is super cool. Okay. Um… Have a good night!” Normal said in a rush, and he hung up.
Link stared at the ‘call ended’ screen while Terry said, “God damn it, Norm.”
Lincoln’s bottom lip wobbled (the most embarrassing trait he’d somehow picked up from Grant), and he crawled into bed beside Terry. “I miss him.”
She kissed Link’s forehead. “Me, too. Wanna track him down at work tomorrow?” she joked.
“There’s so many Walmarts around here,” Link said, and it was supposed to sound like a joke in return, but it just came out kind of sad.
Terry laughed anyway. “Go to sleep, worrywart.”
It was difficult, but, eventually, resting his head against her chest, he did.
—
A few practices later, Jerry sprinted from his classroom to the field just as late ever, his already huge duffle bag packed even fuller than usual.
Lincoln, hopeful, turned to him in their warm-up circle while Michael was keeping time for lunges and asked, “You got cheer stuff in there?”
Jerry went red and looked nervously around the circle before laughing and saying, “Coach, no—jeez.”
“No pom-poms?” Link teased.
“Coach,” Jerry complained under his breath.
“Kidding. How was class?” Lincoln asked as they transitioned into quad stretches. During the school day, Link mostly taught upperclassmen, so he rarely saw Jerry or the other JV boys around campus. “You have… Spanish last?”
Jerry nodded. “I hate Spanish. I’m so bad at it.”
“You’ve barely started! You’ve got time,” Link said, although he didn’t admit to not knowing any Spanish, either. His dads had opted him out of foreign language classes in high school, arguing that he’d learned Mandarin in homeschool—Little did the school know he’d only ever picked up about five phrases from his dad and aunts during Chinese New Year.
“I guess,” Jerry mumbled. “I had to stay after to finish my quiz today—and, like, what if they’re on a different unit at my next school?”
Lincoln frowned as everyone sat to do hamstring stretches. “What do you mean?”
Jerry sat to stretch, too, but he kept his bag close at his side. “Like, when they… move me again,” he said, even quieter. “I think it’s gonna be soon. I’ll probably get put in another district. I was in Orange County at the end of last year.”
Link’s heart sank—because Jerry was such a good forward, he told himself. “That’s why you’ve got your stuff packed in there,” Lincoln realized aloud.
Jerry’s expression soured. “No, I—um. I was gonna… after school…” He stopped stretching, instead picking at the strap of his bag.
The other boys transitioned into toe touches. Lincoln just chewed on his lip, stood, and tilted his head in a silent request for Jerry to follow him to the sideline.
“Aw, jeez—I’m sorry. I don’t need, like, special attention, Coach,” Jerry said as the two of them stood away from the other boys, covering his face and shrinking away like Lincoln was about to yell at him. “I’m fine, really!”
Link didn’t yell—of course he didn’t—but he did say firmly, “Don’t run away.”
“Oh, God. I shouldn’t have said anything… oh, man, please don’t tell my—”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Link said, reaching out to him. “It’s alright. If you don’t run, there’s nothing to tell. Just don’t run, okay? Aren’t they moving you, anyway?”
Jerry nodded. “And these people aren’t so bad. I just—God, I’m so stupid.”
“You’re not,” Lincoln said, his eyebrows furrowed. “Why’d they say they’re moving you?”
Jerry shrugged. “Same as usual. I’m, like, skittish. ‘Disruptive’.”
“You?” Lincoln seriously wondered how anyone could find Jerry, with his thick glasses and awkward smile and constant apologies, ‘disruptive’.
“I keep threatening to run away, for one,” Jerry said with a nervous laugh. “They have real kids, too, and we don’t really get along.”
Link’s frown deepened. By the last part and the nervous look in his eye, Jerry probably meant they were picking on him.
Selfishly—and just for a moment, but certainly not for the first time—Lincoln thought Jerry would be better off with him: He and Terry didn’t have any ‘real kids’. Even if they did, they wouldn’t make distinctions like that; Jerry would be their real kid.
“Jerry,” Link started before he knew what he was saying, his heart in his throat, “if there’s time, I would—”
“Coach!” Theo yelled. “Are we playing or what?”
Link looked down at the grass for a moment to pull himself together. He gave Jerry a final clap on the shoulder and blew his whistle. “Yep. Square drills! Let’s go!”
—
Lincoln had trouble sleeping again that night.
He kept obsessively checking his phone for Amber Alerts, drumming his fingertips anxiously against Terry’s arm.
“The way you described to me what you said to him, he’s not gonna run,” Terry said groggily. It was nearly midnight, and she’d just gotten back from three classes and another evening radio show. “He likes it here. He likes you.”
Link hummed. “Does he like soccer enough to stay in his shitty foster home?”
“First of all,” Terry said with a huff, sitting up in bed to face him, “he never said it was shitty, and, second, I didn’t say he likes soccer, Link. I said he likes you .”
“Does he like me enough to—”
“Yes!” Terry said, exasperated but loving. “Both times I’ve talked to him, he couldn’t shut up about you. He thinks you’re cool,” she added, trying and failing to hide her disappointment that she wasn’t the cool one.
Link reached up to smooth out Terry’s bangs. “He still can’t shut up about you ,” Lincoln said. “The other day, he was asking me what was in your favorite sushi roll. I have no clue how he remembered the name.”
“Sex on the beach,” Terry said with an embarrassed giggle.
“What’s in it, anyway? I couldn’t remember everything. I know eel…”
“It’s mostly shrimp tempura. The place I like does it, like, medium spicy.”
Link smiled and pulled her down to lie beside him, brushing the hair out of her face and tucking it behind her ear. Her features were illuminated by the night light on his side of the bed. “Terry?”
“Mm?”
“I was thinking…”
She nodded and shut her eyes. When Link was still silent, she added, “I’m listening, baby.”
“So, you know how I said that Jerry said he’s getting moved soon?”
She smiled. “Mm hm.”
Link paused for a moment longer before he tightened his fist and said, “If he doesn’t have a new placement lined up yet, we could… probably talk to our agency and try to—”
Terry cut him off with a kiss. “Yes.”
“Yeah?”
She kissed him again. “Yeah, dude! If you didn’t get around to saying it before you fell asleep tonight, I was going to.”
Lincoln smiled against the top of her hair as she tucked her head back under his chin. “I don’t know how temporary they would want it to be, but I figure it’ll at least keep him at the same school for a while, and…”
“He can do cheer,” Terry said happily.
Nodding, Lincoln finally let some of the tension fall from his shoulders, and he turned to fall asleep facing his wife.
She wrapped her arms around him, though, keeping her face against his neck. He could feel her smiling. “This is kinda big, huh? We’ve never had a teenager before.”
“We were angsty teens once,” Link said as Terry ran her fingers up under his sleep shirt and traced over the Eldritch Blast scar in the center of his back. “Can’t be that hard.”
Terry lifted her head just to roll her eyes at him in the dim light. Then, she leaned back in to kiss down his neck.
Link laughed and put a hand on her waist. “What happened to you being tired?”
“All of this shit,” Terry said between kisses. “I mean, it’s good shit! Just—definitely so awake now. Lots to think about.”
Yeah, it was. Getting their foster care agency to talk to DCS was always a hassle, and the two of them had yet to move the two toddler beds out of the guest bedroom.
“Plus,” Terry added as her fingertips brushed farther down Link’s back, “now we might not have much more time as a family of two or whatever—with an empty house, y’know? So… I mean,” she said, some sheepishness creeping back into her voice, “like, only if you want…”
Lincoln did want. He nodded vigorously and let her pull him closer.
—
Two days later, both Link and Terry were still exhausted: not from sex or sleeplessness, but from the following morning, when they’d been on hold with five different offices at once and ended up playing phone tag with the foster care agency all day.
The two of them (plus Link’s dads, who had come over to celebrate and instead ended up insulting DCS over the phone for a while) must’ve annoyed them into submission, though.
By the second afternoon, they stopped being difficult and explained that, no, there was no next foster home lined up for Jerry; he was just going to be sent somewhere for a temporary placement until they could find a more permanent spot for him.
When Lincoln and Terry had said, wearily, that they could be that more permanent spot, and showed that their household met each requirement for Jerry’s educational and behavioral needs, neither their agency nor the government could disagree that they would be a great fit.
Half-asleep, they were approved; the only thing left to do was accept the placement offer once Jerry was eventually moved.
But, of course, they weren’t going to do that without asking him first.
Lincoln would have talked to him sooner if he’d caught him around campus, but Jerry was one of those kids who sprinted to and from class, and his old, low-tech anagram generator wasn’t compatible with Link’s new 20-digit phone number.
So Link waited anxiously for the one time he could always rely on talking to Jerry: after soccer practice.
All the other boys were long gone, but Jerry was still walking the perimeter of the field as usual. His duffle bag was still worryingly full.
“You’re not still planning on…” Link pointed at the bag. “Are you?”
Jerry glanced down at it, stopping but still restlessly tapping his feet as he tried to stand still. “No,” he mumbled. “I, um—this school’s, like, fine! It’s better than my last one was, so… I’ll stay here until I get moved or age out, I guess.”
Oh, Jerry was on track to age out in a few more years, wasn’t he? As far as Link knew, Jerry had never even been considered for adoption. “What do you wanna do if you age out?”
“If?” Jerry blinked and gave Link a funny look. “I dunno, Coach—I’m fourteen! I’ve got time! Right? I do, right? Oh, wait, jeez, uh…”
Lincoln suppressed a laugh. “I, uh… I think you’re gonna be alright, kiddo.”
“But I don’t have any job skills!” Jerry cried. He clutched his head and paced faster. “I guess I could go to college… but only if I get my Spanish grade up. What if I fail Spanish? I’ll never get a job—”
“Whoa, Jerry! Kiddo,” Link said, jogging to keep up with his frantic pacing, “you’re not gonna fail Spanish. Do you need to do, um… a grounding exercise? I know tons.”
Jerry shook his head quickly.
“Do you wanna sit in the grass? You could take your shoes off. That always helps me when I’m stressed—helps you cool down.”
Jerry shook his head again but followed Lincoln’s lead, anyway, sitting beside him on the sideline. Link reached out to a nearby soccer ball with his foot—still got it, he thought—and guided it over to Jerry, who clung to it like a lifeline. “I’m good.”
“Okay,” Link said slowly. He wasn’t sure how to broach this now; he didn’t want to stress the kid out more.
He waited for Jerry to catch his breath, shutting his eyes and enjoying the feeling of the sun on his face and the grass beneath his hands.
Once Jerry was calm enough to start complaining about Spanish class again, Lincoln waited for a lull in the conversation and said, “I’ve got something I wanna ask you,” he said, trying to recall Normal’s therapy speak, “if you’re in the headspace to… receive, uh… something. I don’t remember the rest.”
Jerry laughed at him. “What’s up? Please don’t quiz me on Spanish, Coach.”
“I’m not,” Link promised. “So, I know your current fosters aren’t the best.”
Jerry frowned and went to chew on his nails. “I mean, they’re alright. They haven’t done anything, like, reportable.”
“Right. And they said you’re getting moved soon, but you don’t know where?”
“Yeah…”
“Um.” Lincoln took a deep, measured breath and took a moment to do a little internal grounding exercise on himself.
This was a question he had asked kids before; this time wasn’t any different. He really wanted to help Jerry, sure, but he always wanted to help those foster kids. Just… he didn’t want to scare Jerry off. Link was worried he might panic and run away.
“We talked to DCS,” Link said, looking down at the grass, “and we’re approved for you to come stay with us, if that’s… something you would want. If not, that’s okay! Perfectly fine. That’s why I wanted to ask instead of, y’know, you showing up to a new house and, surprise! It’s your soccer coach. You know?”
Jerry was silent. Link looked up at him, nervous, but was relieved when a small, shy, surprised smile came over Jerry’s face. “You and Coach Sc—Terry?”
Link nodded. “Only if you want.”
Jerry clung tighter to the soccer ball in his lap and the duffle bag at his side.
“We can set up a bedroom for you,” Lincoln offered slowly, still unsure what Jerry’s answer would be. “It’s not an emergency thing. We’re talking, like, for the foreseeable future here, so. But if you want to leave, you can ask! Obviously. Or you don’t have to come at all. Just… please don’t run. That’s dangerous, kiddo.”
Jerry shook his head. “I won’t. I won’t, Coach, I promise, I—” Before Link even saw it coming, Jerry was hugging him tight. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you…”
“Yeah,” Link whispered, “of course, sw—buddy.”
“Can I get… a bookshelf?” Jerry asked, shy yet excited, as he pulled away and jumped to his feet. He patted the side of his duffle bag, and Lincoln noticed all its sharp corners for the first time. “There’s way too many library books in here.”
Lincoln smiled. “Of course.” He was a little shocked and saddened by the idea that Jerry didn’t even have anywhere to put his books right now. “Don’t want you hurting your shoulder with that thing.”
“Oh, my God,” Jerry said happily. Apparently not knowing what to do with his energy, he ran around in a little circle and asked, “Can I get a PlayStation 10?”
Link wasn’t sure how his bank account would feel about that; he only had a teaching salary, so Terry was the real breadwinner between the two of them. He laughed. “Maybe if you keep those Spanish grades up.”
—
“I forgot how much this sucks,” Terry complained through gritted teeth as she and her step dad pushed a bed from the garage into the guest room.
Her mom Veronica, who had come with Terry Jr. and several boxes of old soccer-themed decorations from Terry’s childhood bedroom, nodded. “You haven’t had to do this in a while, huh?”
“I think a year and a half,” Lincoln said. A few months ago, they had taken down some of the twins’ drawings and toys that the adoptive parents wanted, but Link had had a toe injury at the time (from only ever jogging in very unsupportive cleats), so they hadn’t moved anything else.
The two Terrys set down the bed between a nightstand and a nice bookshelf and sank back against the wall, huffing. All the walls were still a plain, dreary gray, just because it was easier than constantly repainting. Still, Lincoln didn’t like how temporary it made everything feel. Hopefully Jerry wouldn’t mind it too much.
“Shit,” Terry swore eventually, bending down even more, “my back.”
“Babe, you’re not supposed to lift with your back.”
“Shut up,” she said with no vitriol, taking another moment to catch her breath. “Can you…”
“Yep,” Link said, running to grab the bed sheets from a freshly washed pile in the laundry room and handing the other corner to Veronica.
They laid out all of Jerry’s bedding—a little hotel-ish, but Terry had made fun of Link when he’d tried to pick out a set with a childish pattern of cartoon bugs on it.
“He’s in ninth grade,” she had reminded him in the store. “He’ll hate you. When I spilled black nail polish on my sheets, my step dad bought me unicorn ones. I went fucking ballistic.”
Now, Terry and her step dad stood back and smiled as the room finally came together.
“Okay,” Link said after finally winning a long battle against the fitted sheet, “now we can decorate.”
“Yay,” Terry’s parents said.
“Ugh,” Terry said at the same time, although she was still smiling a little. “There’s so much left to do… I’m gonna die , Link.”
Lincoln shrugged as he plugged in an old bedside lamp of Terry’s, shaped like a soccer ball on the bottom (which Link was a little jealous of). “He’s got some stuff to bring himself—books, I think.”
“Oh!” Terry Jr. said, reaching into his bag for something. “That reminds me… I got him a gift, if you wanna put it in here.” He pulled out a short, wide, thin book with glossy photos on the cover.
Lincoln squinted. Without his glasses on (which he rarely wore at home) or his contacts in (which his optometrist wouldn’t prescribe anymore after all the damage leaving in the same pair for months had done to his eyes), he couldn’t quite make out the images.
“It’s nothing special,” Terry Jr. said, waving his hand. “It’s a California Audubon field guide. Theresa was telling me Jerry likes birds but doesn’t know their names, so now he can learn them.”
Terry looked almost immediately on the verge of tears again. “Dad…”
“Henry gave it to Ron, and Ron gave it to me,” Terry Jr. added proudly.
“Dad!” Terry yelled, taking offense just as quickly. “You didn’t give it to me? I like birds!”
“You only like the, like… goth birds,” Terry Jr. mumbled, defeated, “and I did give you the pages with all those ones, but you burned them in the fireplace.”
Lincoln burst out laughing. He only laughed harder when he looked over at his wife, who was apparently remembering this story and looked mortified. “Really? Oh, my God,” Link said, and he took the field guide from Terry Jr.
Sure enough, the sections were organized by color, and all of the pages with black and black-and-white birds had been neatly removed from the plastic spiral that bound the book together.
“Terry!” Link laughed again.
“I was fifteen!” she shouted back, rolling her eyes. “Sorry, Dad…”
“Don’t apologize to him,” Veronica said. “Apologize to Jerry when he doesn’t know what a crow is.”
“Mom, everybody knows what a crow is—Link, don’t laugh! Back me up here!”
—
Having a kid in the house again was just as nice as Lincoln had hoped.
Sure, it was just as stressful as he’d anticipated, too: Jerry was a picky eater and only really liked rice-based foods, so Link had already called Marco for recipes on multiple occasions so he didn’t keep cycling through the same four or five meals.
When he was restless, Jerry liked to go on ‘jogs’—which were really just long sprints—around the neighborhood, especially after long nights of homework when it was nearly pitch black outside. Terry had had to sit him down and lecture him on how unsafe that was (even though it was really metal that he was also a child of the darkness, she’d told him).
Jerry was just as bad at Spanish as he’d described, and Link and Terry hypothesized it was because he’d jumped between school districts so many times that he’d never learned anything in order. Lately, they’d been spending their evenings with Hero on speaker, trying and failing to help him with verb tenses.
Lincoln felt entirely out of his element. He’d never had to parent a teenager.
His and Terry’s other foster kids had never stayed up past midnight on the phone with mysterious friends from another school, or ordered takeout without their knowledge, or asked to be driven home from after-school yo-yo club meetings and cheerleading practice almost every day.
But Lincoln loved it.
Teenagers were sometimes more childish than toddlers, Link knew well from teaching them, but they were also like little adults.
Jerry loved telling Link and Terry about his day, going on errands with them, and watching PG-13 movies together (with only minimal eye covering, but Link did the same for Terry when they watched scary movies, anyway). Most of his other foster homes, he said, either coddled him like a baby or ignored him like a grown-up.
Jerry, too, took a secret interest in Link’s G gauge trains, even though he outwardly pretended to find them silly and childish and openly joked about them with the other JV boys.
He shared Terry’s love for alternative music, although he preferred this ‘harsh noise wall’ stuff that was apparently all the rage with kids in the metaverse, and she sometimes played some when her morning show overlapped with Link driving Jerry to school.
This morning, though, they were all driving to the school together for another soccer game: this time, against Pasadena High, one of the better soccer schools in the area—and they were also the Bulldogs; how creative, Lincoln thought with a roll of his eyes.
Jerry stared out the backseat window of Terry’s car, humming along to the frankly ear-splitting ‘music’ playing over the Bluetooth.
Somehow, Terry seemed to like it, too, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel to the barely existent beat. “It’s different,” she said.
When they were just a few minutes away from the school, though, the music was interrupted by a phone call—from the cheerleading coach. Link and Terry frowned at each other, and Link pressed a button on the holographic screen to answer. “Hello?”
“Hi, Li-Wilson,” the cheer coach said slowly.
Uh, oh. Lincoln hoped Jerry hadn’t gotten in trouble at practice or anything, although Link couldn’t imagine what he would’ve done. Jerry had only been a substitute base for a couple of months, and he only cheered at home football games, but he loved it. “What’s going on?”
“The team isn’t gonna be at the soccer games today,” she said. “Emergency.”
“Emergency?” Terry interrupted. “What happened?”
The cheer coach took a deep breath. “So, there’s been a—”
“Hi, Coach!” Jerry shouted from the backseat. “Is, um… is everyone okay?”
There was silence on the other end for a long while. “Li-Wilson, I think you should take me off speaker.”
Oh, shit. This was serious, then. Link followed her direction and asked again, with the phone up to his ear now, “What’s going on?”
“There’s been a death on the team,” the cheer coach said carefully. “Braden—the junior who play…ed Teeny.”
“Oh, my God,” Link said. Terry reached over to grab his hand. In the rear-view mirror, Lincoln could see Jerry discreetly leaning closer to the passenger seat to eavesdrop. “I’m so sorry. What… what happened?”
“Apparently him and a couple other kids did an at-home open nephroureterectomy for a urology project,” she said gravely. “With the DIY surgery kits on the market these days, it’s usually fine, but…”
Link shook his head. “That’s awful—and what if they, like, shut down the urology department?” That was where most of Teen High’s funding came from.
The cheer coach sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t mean to be a downer. Just figured you should know why my kids aren’t there.”
“No, yeah, of course.”
“We’ll be back next week,” she promised, “but probably sans Teeny. I don’t have anyone to fill in for him… Hm.”
Link nodded. “No, no, take your time! That’s rough. I’m—yikes. I’m really sorry.”
“Thank you,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Well, I should—”
“Wait,” Lincoln said. Terry had parked beside the soccer field and was now just watching him with concern. He opened the passenger door and stepped outside for a minute. “Like I said, um—take your time. Please. Don’t worry about the other sports.”
“I will, I will. Some of my girls are gonna need a few weeks. I don’t think they’ve really processed it yet. But… it’s sad, but I really need to find a new Teeny. He goes to more events—like the reunion in a couple months.”
Lincoln nodded. This year was his and Terry’s high school reunion, and, for some reason, Erica, Margie, and the rest of the reunion committee had scheduled it for New Year’s Day instead of the actual end of the school year. “Would he need to do flips and stuff?”
“At the reunion? Probably not.”
Glancing back at the car, where Jerry had crawled into the empty passenger seat and was worriedly talking to Terry, Lincoln said, “I bet Jerry would love to do it.”
“Really?” The cheer coach sounded incredulous. “He’s always cracking jokes about Teeny—said the suit’s got a ‘shit-eating grin’.”
Lincoln scratched the back of his neck and muttered, “I mean, he’s not wrong. Anyway, I think he’s just, y’know… embarrassed.”
It was something about Jerry that Link and Terry had picked up on pretty easily: He almost never said what he actually wanted; he always hid it behind layers of awkward jokes and lingering gazes.
“He’s got the Wilson spirit,” Terry had said about it, “unfortunately.”
“Hm,” the cheer coach said now. “I’ll talk to him. Don’t wanna spring it on him right after… all this.”
“Yeah. Poor Braden,” Link said. He and the coach exchanged a few more condolences, and Lincoln got back in the car. “Hi.”
Terry immediately took his hand again. “What’s wrong?”
He looked at his watch—Okay, they had time. “Let’s go get ice cream first?” That was what his dads always did when they had hard news to share.
“Sweet,” Jerry said, his voice still tinged with nerves.
Link turned around to pat Jerry’s arm in a way he hoped was comforting.
Terry just snorted as she backed the car up.
“What?” Link asked.
“No ice cream places are gonna be open right now,” she said, pointing at the sunrise out the window.
Oh, right. It was, like, 6:30 in the morning. “At least it’s rising,” Lincoln said. He felt the warmth of the sun on the side of his face.
Terry gave him a funny look. “Yeah,” she said, looking back and forth between Lincoln and Jerry before averting her eyes and shielding her face from them with her hand.
Link smiled. “Baby, are you crying?”
“No!” she said wetly. She turned up the awful noise music to drown him out. “Shut up!”
—
In the end, Lincoln just ran into the grocery store, bought Jerry a pint of whatever ice cream flavor he wanted (rocky road), and broke the news while they sat in the parking lot.
Jerry wasn’t exactly friends with the kid, but it was clear that he’d looked up to him, and he didn’t take it well.
“You can sit out of the game today,” Link had offered. “I don’t mind. We can go home, if you really want… but I’ll have to drive back after. I really can’t miss the varsity game. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“I’m fine,” Jerry had said, his voice flat as he ate another spoonful of ice cream with a complimentary plastic spoon Link had nabbed from the bakery section. “My, um… my birth mom died a couple years ago, and I had to take a math test the next day, and I still got a B+. So.”
Link had grabbed Terry’s hand again. She was already emotional—so was he—and he feared Jerry talking about his birth mom for the first time would send her over the edge.
It didn’t, though. Terry had just nodded in silent understanding and driven them back to the school.
Despite Jerry’s willingness to play, with the hard news and the absence of his new cheer friends, he didn’t play very well.
The JV team lost 1 to 3. Jerry apologized profusely to Lincoln but ran off before Link could tell him it was no big deal, so he just went to sit beside Terry and watched nervously from the bleachers as Jerry chatted with the varsity boys on the sidelines.
“You think he’s alright?” Link asked, slumping his back to rest his head on her shoulder.
Terry hummed. “Looks like he’s making friends. Weren’t your dads coming today?”
Lincoln nodded. They still came to Link’s games when they could, even though he wasn’t the one playing.
They’d met Jerry a couple times before, but today was the first time they’d seen him play soccer. Hopefully Jerry wasn’t too embarrassed that he hadn’t played well.
“I saw them by the concessions earlier,” Link said, “and I heard them cheering during the game.” It was pretty much impossible not to hear them. “I don’t know where they went.”
“Huh,” Terry said.
“Are you alright?” Link asked.
“Mm hm. Just… I don’t know,” she said. Then, squirming a little in her seat, she added, “So, like, Jerry mentioned his birth mom earlier.”
Right. “And it… made you think of your dad?”
Terry startled and laughed awkwardly. “Just jumping right into it? Huh. I guess that is why I’m… huh.”
Lincoln smiled. He’d gotten better at reading her indirectness over the years: maybe too good. She always said it freaked her out when he read her better than she could read herself. “Sorry, baby.”
“It’s okay,” Terry said, exhaling through her nose. “I just… yeah. He told me about her one other time, at the first soccer game. She was around—just didn’t want anything to do with him. That’s tough, huh?”
“Yeah,” Link agreed. He looked down at Jerry, who was running warm-ups with the varsity boys just for the hell of it. “Do you know how she… you know. Passed?” It didn’t say anywhere on Jerry’s records, and now Lincoln realized that must’ve been because he was already in foster care when she died.
Terry shook her head and said quietly, “He said she ‘got sick’. I dunno. The way he described it, it sounded like alcohol.”
Lincoln held Terry up as she started to fold in on herself. “Honey…”
“I’m good,” she assured him, balling up her fists. “It’s not about me. I shouldn’t be… He said he never really got along with her, so.”
Link didn’t pry any more; he just wrapped an arm around her back and talked about the upcoming soccer game for a little while.
Right before Link needed to go join his varsity boys, though, Jerry came racing up the stairs, tearing through the crowd until he slid into the seat on Link’s other side, bumping into him in the process.
“Ow—hey, what’s going on, kiddo?” Link asked.
Jerry’s face was bright red. “Coach, you gotta make them stop. They won’t stop clapping for me. I wasn’t even doing anything! It’s annoying.”
“Wow!” a familiar voice said (intentionally) loudly from the bottom of the bleacher stairs. “He runs so fast. We can’t keep up with him in our old age.”
“Mm hm,” another said, even more exaggerated. “What a cool kid.”
Lincoln exchanged a glance with Terry and got up. “Dads,” he said, leaning over the railing in the center of the stairs to look down at Marco and Grant holding way too many drinks and snacks for two people, “don’t harass him.”
“We are not!” Marco shouted, scandalized.
“We’re appreciating him,” Grant agreed. “Hey, Jerry, you know, Lincoln’s never had a foster teen before. I actually wrote a book you might enjoy…”
Oh, hell no. That book was only for Link! His dad’s little Linky! The dedication in the front cover said so.
Jerry’s eyes lit up at the mention of it, anyway, but Lincoln just shushed his dads and helped them up the stairs.
—
Link was beginning to regret his suggestion that Jerry could be Teeny.
The cheer coach was grateful, which was good. Despite her concern that Jerry wasn’t charismatic or outgoing enough to be the mascot long-term, she’d agreed to let him do a test run with the next few school events, starting with Link and Terry’s high school reunion.
At school and practice and even at home, Jerry acted like Teeny was some kind of horrible burden he was being saddled with. One day, though, Lincoln had caught him excitedly rehearsing all of Teeny’s signature catchphrases and poses in the mirror—very cute. Jerry did not seem to think so, and had immediately yelled at Link to get out of the room (even though it was the mirror in the hallway).
The real issue with Jerry being Teeny was that he now wanted to spend every waking moment with the cheer team, and Lincoln still needed a JV forward.
“If you want to quit soccer,” Link said one night when he and Terry sat Jerry down to talk (and help him with his Spanish again), “that’s… f…”
“Link,” Terry said.
“That’s fi…” Lincoln strained to finish the word. “That’s fine,” he forced out. Before he could stop himself, he added. “You can quit the best sport ever, that you’re really good at, and that your m—that Terry and I love playing with you, and—”
“Link!” Terry put a hand over his mouth. “Jerry, you can quit soccer if you only wanna be Teeny.”
Jerry crossed his arms. “I don’t wanna be Teeny. Teeny’s, like, so dumb. It’s only because Coach is making me.”
“Uh huh. Listen,” Terry said, apparently having decided that she was going to do all the talking, “just because we’re soccer coaches doesn’t mean you have to like soccer, little dude. Weren’t your last fosters the ones who made you play soccer, anyway?”
Jerry nodded. “I do, uh… I do like soccer, though,” he admitted shyly.
“You could do a different position,” Terry suggested. She pushed her hand harder down against Link’s mouth when he started to try to argue. “You don’t have to be the forward. You’d make a good full-back.”
No! JV already had a strong line-up of full-backs, Link thought. In a desperate attempt to convey this very important information, he licked Terry’s palm.
“Ew, babe!” she said, yanking her hand away and wiping it off on his arm. She shook her head. “It was for your own good, Link. This is, like, the equivalent of you asking your dads to go to public school.”
“Is not!”
“You gotta let him spread his wings or whatever.”
Link pouted. He couldn’t disagree with that; it was kind of his job to let kids ‘spread their wings or whatever’. “I’ve got a couple other freshmen who would kill to be forward,” he said eventually, resigned. “I could make them compete for it.”
“Yeah. Good idea,” Terry said, kissing him on the cheek. Somehow, it felt smug.
He gave her a kiss in return, anyway.
“Um,” Jerry said, fidgeting with the pack of cards Link and Terry had both forgotten he was holding. “Are we gonna play rummy now, or…”
“Oh!” Lincoln had wanted to teach him bridge (in preparation for Link and Grant to annihilate him during a family game night someday; Link really hoped Jerry stuck around long enough for that), but they didn’t have enough players. “Yeah. Ter, you know the rules, right?”
—
That Christmas was one of the best Lincoln had had since he was a kid.
In most recent years, he and Terry’s foster kids had had to stay with their birth parents for winter break, or they’d been too young to go on a vacation, or they hadn’t wanted anything to do with him and Terry at all and had instead elected to spend all break holed away in the guest room.
All of that was fine, of course; Link and Terry fostered because they were able to, and because they liked helping kids, and because Link especially liked spoiling them with Christmas presents. If they didn’t want to celebrate the holidays at all, that was fine, too. The most important thing was the kids’ comfort and safety.
Still, it was really fun to have a kid this year who wrote a wish list, and wanted to be driven around to look at Christmas lights, and begrudgingly let Lincoln wrangle him into an ugly sweater for the living room photo wall.
This year was also one of the first that Lincoln and Terry had hosted at their house.
Their parents were chatting in the kitchen around a tiny little platter of snacks Link had put together: nothing special; mostly just to tide over Grant’s appetite until lunch.
Speaking of Grant, Link heard him laugh loudly at something Terry Jr. had said.
Lincoln shared a smile with his wife. Things had been tense between Grant and Terry Jr. for a while, even after their kids had gotten married, because both of them felt guilty for Terry Jr.’s death, somehow. It was nice to hear them slowly becoming best friends again, like Grant had told Lincoln they once were.
Terry was kicked back on the couch while Link hovered nearby with a huge garbage bag, waiting to pick up any stray bits of wrapping paper. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was trash on the floor. His Roombas were already on standby.
Jerry had spent all morning acting embarrassed, saying he was too old to open Christmas presents in front of everyone, but when Terry had joked that she could just throw them out (and it probably didn’t help that that was when Link had just picked up the trash bag), Jerry had rushed over to the tree.
He scanned the pile of gifts, reading all the stickers and tags with wide eyes. “Are these really all for me?”
“Not all of them,” Lincoln said with a laugh; there were a couple from him to Terry and vice versa, as well as a few from their parents, “but most of them, yeah.”
Jerry smiled that shy little smile again. “Wow. Cool. Um, thanks, guys.”
Terry grinned. “You got it, kiddo.”
With no more preamble, Jerry tore into the first couple of gifts—some new chapter books in a historical fiction series set in the 1990s that Jerry liked but couldn’t find at the library yet—and rolled his eyes when he noticed Link taking candids of his excited reaction.
The next few boxes were some nice new winter clothes (which Jerry was not nearly as enthusiastic about, but clothes were still important). Then, he picked up another distinctly clothes-shaped box.
Inside, though, was a duffle bag: a lot like his current one, but not tattered or misshapen from years of carrying too many things inside.
“It’s a little smaller,” Terry said apologetically, “but you don’t have to carry all your stuff anymore.”
Jerry frowned. He glanced off at the front door.
“Um—if you don’t like it, honey, you don’t have to use it,” Link said quickly. He took the paper box. “We can return it. The receipt’s in here somewhere…”
“No!” Jerry interrupted, turning sharply back to Link. He took the bag and held it close to him. “Thank you.”
Terry smiled and got up to sit on the ground beside him. “Of course,” she said, grabbing another gift for Jerry. “Open this one next. Trust me. It’s sick.”
Jerry was elated as he pulled out a new pair of headphones—which were very expensive, but Terry had assured Link that they had the best quality for music; Link had wanted to argue that Jerry’s weird grindcore stuff would sound just as low-quality with any headphones, but he’d held his tongue.
As he started opening the next one (a stunt yo-yo, if Link remembered correctly), though, two grown men in their sixties raced into the living room and dramatically slid onto the couch.
“I win,” Terry Jr. said.
“You’re faster,” Grant complained.
“Dad!” Terry and Link both yelled in surprise.
Terry Jr. leaned back for a second to catch his breath. “Did we miss any presents? You didn’t open mine yet, did you, Jerry? It’s the one in the bag over… Yep! That one.”
—
Lincoln fumbled with a huge pile of name tags as he tried to hold the event room door open with his foot.
“Alright—hey, kids,” he said helplessly, trying to get the group of soccer boys he’d gathered to volunteer at the Teen High reunion to actually help. Michael had dropped a stack of event flyers on the ground, and none of the other JV boys even seemed to notice or care. “Come on, clean up… Alright, good job.”
While a couple of the boys reluctantly knelt to pick up the papers, another came up behind them with his water bottle, pretending to pour it over the other boys’ heads.
“Hey! If you do that, you’re not gonna be the forward,” Link reprimanded him. That was the whole reason most of them had agreed to come; they wanted to be in Link’s good graces so they’d have a shot at forward if Jerry ever did quit soccer for cheer.
Jerry was struggling with the Teeny suit behind them, but he still laughed when a few drops of water fell on their heads.
“Alright, come on, Jerry,” Link scolded.
Jerry rolled his eyes, embarrassed, and tried to cover his face with the Teeny head as Normal approached from the shadows. “Sorry, D—uh.”
—
Despite Lincoln’s nervousness to see Normal again, it went better than expected. He even helped Jerry out with the mascot suit (although Link feared Jerry might take that advice about not washing his hair to heart).
Once Lincoln’s soccer boys finally started helping, it was nice to hand out tickets at the front of the room and see all his old classmates walk in, actually: Erica and Margarita, Taylor and his holographic AI anime girlfriend… Okay, Erica and Margarita were really the only couple, but it was still good to see everyone.
When he heard Terry’s old music from high school start playing, though, and turned around to see his wife was already too caught up in dancing (and maybe spiked punch) to be embarrassed by it, he had to join her.
“Jerry, take over!” Lincoln shouted over the music, ushering him over to the ticket table.
Jerry made a little panicked noise through the Teeny suit—probably because he had no peripheral vision in that thing and didn’t know what was happening—but said, “Okay, no problem!”
Lincoln ran out to the dance floor and waited until Jerry turned around to start doing the Whatnot—which also would’ve normally earned a snort from Terry, but she was totally caught up in the music, mouthing along to the words.
A certain line in the song seemed to get to her. She paused for a moment, and, just as Link was about to ask her what was wrong, she put an arm around him and smiled over at Jerry.
He was handing out tickets, barely balancing them in Teeny’s huge mitts. It looked stressful, to say the least, and Link felt guilty for a moment.
Between guests, though, Jerry would stop to do an excited little dance or spin around in the suit. When someone else walked in, he waved at them with both hands.
“Our son’s pretty great, huh?” Terry asked.
Link smiled. “The best.” Before either of them could get too emotional, he took Terry’s hands and spun her around. “Let’s embarrass the shit out of him.”
“Yeah!” Terry laughed and danced even harder than she had before.
Jerry groaned, muffled by the Teeny suit, and shouted, “Mom! Dad! This is embarrassing enough with me in this thing…”
Oh. Wow.
Link slowed down and looked at Jerry from across the dancefloor. He didn’t seem to notice, mumbling something to himself and suddenly turning around to hand out more tickets to a group that had just walked in.
Terry squeezed Link’s hand, hard.
He knew what she meant.
Lincoln rubbed his eyes. He could barely remember the last time he’d been ‘Dad’, all those years ago, in another life. And the idea of being Jerry’s dad…
“You’re doing great, honey,” Terry said back, beaming.
Jerry mumbled again, something about the mascot costume, but Link and Terry didn’t hear it over the music.
Even in her heels, Terry stood on her toes to kiss Link, wrapping her arms around his shoulders in the middle of the dancefloor. She didn’t say anything; she just smiled against his shoulder for a moment.
He nodded, kissed the top of her head, and took a second to wipe away her already ruined mascara before they went back to dancing crazy.
—
It took nearly a year for Lincoln and Terry to take Jerry to their favorite sushi place in Covina.
“We usually only come on, um… special occasions,” Link said nervously, holding Terry’s hand under the table. It was an expensive restaurant, and Terry always said she loved it so much that she wanted to keep it a special treat so she didn’t crave it more often than they could afford.
Jerry gave them a funny look from across the table while they waited for their orders to arrive. “What’s the occasion? Oh—because I passed Spanish again?”
Terry grinned. “Hell yeah, bud. And you’re the official Teeny…” she said proudly.
“That, too,” Link said, squeezing his wife’s hand (still not as hard as she was squeezing his), “but, um… oh!”
The waiter brought out their sushi: a vegetable roll for Link, along with a few others for Terry and Jerry to share.
Jerry had blushed at one of the names on the menu, but Terry had ordered it, anyway.
“You can try the sex on the beach one, kiddo,” she whispered like it was a secret, leaning across the table conspiratorially. “You’re not gonna get in trouble just because of the name.”
Link laughed at her. “Obviously not.”
Jerry didn’t look convinced.
“It’s the best one!” Terry said. “You gotta try it.”
They ate for a while, Jerry fidgeting nervously in his seat all the while. Eventually, with a mouth full of fried rice, he blurted out, “Um.”
“You okay, sweetie?” Lincoln asked, worried. He was anxious, too, but he figured it was for a different reason.
Jerry swallowed. “Why are we here?”
Lincoln and Terry looked at each other and nodded. “We wanted to ask you something real quick,” Terry started.
Jerry squeezed his eyes shut. “Uh, jeez—okay. I’m ready. You can just do it.”
“It’s nothing bad!” Lincoln promised. He reached out with his other hand to pat Jerry’s arm. “No bad news. I mean, we wouldn’t take you out in public for bad news—that’s not… just…” Link trailed off as he realized maybe they should’ve done this at home. If Jerry didn’t like the idea, Lincoln didn’t want him to feel pressured to say yes just because they were in a restaurant with other people around.
Despite Link’s nervousness, something he said must’ve been reassuring, because Jerry relaxed a little. “Okay. I’m ready,” he said again.
“We were… um,” Lincoln started. Looking at his son’s nervous posture and jittery hands, though, he almost couldn’t bring himself to ask. There was always that lingering fear: What if he runs away? “We wanted to know if—”
“Link,” Terry interrupted, “I can do it.”
Lincoln nodded. She could say it better.
Terry took a sip of her water and gave Link’s hand one more squeeze. “You’ll be sixteen in a few months,” she said.
Jerry’s shoulders tensed. “Uh huh…”
“It’s okay, baby,” she whispered to him. “The other day, you were talking about aging out.” She was talking about something he’d said during yet another family game night, Lincoln recalled, about how much he’d miss playing gin rummy with them.
“Um—”
“We don’t want that to happen,” Terry said, quiet but firm. “Link—your dad and I,” she amended, speaking slowly, “love you a whole lot, and… um.” She shut her eyes. “We want you to stay in our family.”
Jerry’s eyes were wide.
“If you want to,” Terry added quickly. “We’ve got most of the paperwork and sh—stuff settled, and… we want to adopt you. I mean, if you—”
Plates clattered as Jerry nearly launched himself across the table.
He wrapped Link and Terry in a hug, his tears almost immediately falling down into their laps. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes—”
“Oh, thank God,” Terry said, hugging him back tightly with her free arm. She slipped her other hand out of Link’s and wrapped that arm around him.
Lincoln kissed one of them on the forehead—he wasn’t quite sure who—and tried not to get his tears all over them, too. “I love you,” he said to them both.
“I love you, Link.”
“Thank you, Mom… Dad… Thank you, thank you,” Jerry rambled, finally tearing himself away when he realized he’d tipped over a little soy sauce dish that had spilled across the table. “Shit. Uh. Thank you so much. You guys are the best. Like, I don’t… um. Oh, jeez. I don’t deserve this.”
Lincoln was really crying now. “You deserve to have a family,” he promised Jerry. He reached out for a napkin to wipe up the mess.
Terry nodded. “Sometimes I think we don’t deserve you , kiddo,” she joked tearfully.
“I’m glad it’s you,” Jerry whispered. “Thanks for, um… being my coaches—and my parents. And I… I love you guys. Or whatever.”
Link and Terry both laughed at that.
By the time the three of them left the sushi restaurant, Terry had paid a frankly outrageous amount of money to replace a cracked soy sauce dish, Jerry had developed a newfound love for the sex on the beach roll (which he said he would forever be too embarrassed to ever order again), and Lincoln had a son again.
And they stepped outside as a family—still not legally, maybe, but just a tiny bit more officially than before—to a blue sky and a bright sun.