by Jim Abbott
Believe in yourself and believe in your teammates. Believe in who you are, believe in who you can be, believe in becoming more.
Pratt’s teachings extended well beyond the football field. He taught history, political science, and foreign relations. Yet, if you asked any of the boys who played for him, they would tell you his classes were about life. The way he talked, things made more sense when Coach Pratt said them.
Mike, above all else, was ready to believe again.
The thing about the kids at St. Matt’s was that most of them weren’t great players. They were a little on the small side, some even a little on the slow side. Yet they won games, lots of games, because Coach Pratt convinced them they would. When the boys filed into church every day, Coach Pratt would already be there, on his knees. But he didn’t talk a lot about God. Maybe he figured he didn’t have to, that God and church had religion covered, and that he’d take the other areas. When Mike was a sophomore, Coach Pratt’s wife died of cancer. Mike and his teammates, his friends, knew Coach Pratt was devastated. He could hide his pain in his work, in the way he conducted a practice and then ran a game, in his insistence that they believe in themselves. But his eyes told them he hurt, and then he’d put that to use, too. When the bad stuff happened, he’d always told them they had a choice of what to do next. Coach Pratt’s choice was to keep coaching his boys.
IN THE BACKSEAT Kathy gasped and Mike pressed the accelerator another half-inch. Strange, but all those years at St. Matt’s, Mike never missed his father at a basketball or football game. They were big events at St. Matt’s. His buddies’ families were in the stands and afterward they’d all come down to visit, the dads all talking a little too loudly among themselves. His mom was there and that was enough. She’d rarely attended any of his brothers’ games, but knew it was important for Mike, so she’d bundle up and sit with the other moms and cheer when they did. Maybe there had been too many kids or not enough time, but now it was just her and Mike. Well, and sometimes Joe.
A portrait of Joe hung in the living room since shortly after his death. It was life-sized. Maybe bigger. And when Mike did something she knew his father would approve of—received a good grade, played a big game, anything—she’d grab Mike by the collar and march him to the foot of that portrait. She’d smile and get that look, and Mike would know exactly where they were headed.
“You come look,” she’d say. “Wouldn’t your father be proud of you!”
They’d stand together at the foot of the portrait until Frances was done staring. The older Mike got, the more he liked those moments.
Late in the summer before his sophomore year at St. Matt’s, Mike heard Sam Ragnone pull up to the curb in front of the house. Sam was a little older and had one of those cars that rumbled when it idled and roared when it left; you only had to hear it to know it was him. They were headed that evening to north Flint, then across town to a driver’s training class at Southwestern High, by which time there’d be at least six of them in Sam’s four-door Chevy. Sam did the picking up and dropping off, because the girls needed a ride and Sam had a car and an opportunity was an opportunity. The car was nearly full when Sam braked in front of a modest house on the north end to add his final passenger. A couple honks, the front door opened, and a brunette slipped out and closed the door behind her. Pinning her hair back and pulling a sweater over her shoulders at the same time, she arrived at the car, smiled, and squeezed into the backseat.
It was the first time Mike Abbott had ever seen Kathy Adams. He didn’t talk to her all night.
KATHY WAS THE oldest of Frank and Frances Adams’s six children, five of them girls. Her father and mother grew up ten miles west of Flint, out near Flushing and Swartz Creek, an area to which their parents—Kathy’s grandparents—had immigrated from Czechoslovakia around the turn of the century. On both sides, her grandparents worked small farms that grew corn, wheat, and soybeans, and raised cows and chickens. Amid the close community of Central Europeans, Frank and Frances met as teens, waited out Frank’s World War II service as a navigator and bombardier based in Italy, and were married shortly after he returned. Frank was twenty-four and Frances nineteen. They moved to Flint to find work. Frank took a job at Flint Home Furnishings on Kearsley Street downtown, and they started a family and a life that would be quite different from Mike’s.
Frank Adams sold furniture every day of the workweek from nine in the morning until nine at night and again on Saturdays. He was the kind of man who took a job and worked it until the day was done, and worked it until retirement, however long that was. Eventually he was reassigned to a store on Flint’s north end, in the suburbs, which wasn’t much of a drive, but when Kathy was eleven, Frank moved the family to the north end so he could continue his habit of coming home for lunch at noon and dinner at six, and then returning to work.
The first five children Frank and Frances conceived were daughters. The boy arrived when Kathy was sixteen. Frank and Frances, their five girls and their son shared three bedrooms, two girls in one of the rooms and two sets of bunk beds in another. Frances kept the house pristine. She did the laundry on Mondays, the ironing on Tuesdays, and the baking on Wednesdays. She didn’t have a car, so she’d give Frank a list of items to pick up at the grocery store, and that’s what she had for the week. They worked hard and didn’t miss a day and that was the example they set for their children, who generally followed the same path of diligence and purpose.
EVEN IN HER present state—heart pumping, contractions building, wind blowing her hair this way and that—Kathy could read Mike’s anxiety from the backseat. When their eyes met in the rearview mirror she tried to settle him with her coolness, but knew it probably wasn’t working. His neck was taut, his eyes panicky. Truth was, though the drive and the drama weren’t exactly how they’d planned it, Kathy was as hopeful as Mike was skittish. While Mike felt he was falling off a cliff into fatherhood, Kathy already felt connected to motherhood. As irrational as it sounded to others, she trusted Mike. She adored him. If it was time for a family, then she believed they would make it work, maybe because she believed enough for both of them.
Mike was cute and cool and fun and had all these friends. Because of the driver’s ed carpool, and in spite of his attending St. Matt’s and her attending St. Agnes, they were running in some of the same crowd. One of Mike’s buddies had taken a liking to Kathy and began to call her. She’d be polite for as long as she could and then ask a lot of questions about Mike. Even when she saw a Flint Journal story about St. Matt’s football team, discovering with some horror that Mike was a sophomore and so a grade behind her, she showed up to a St. Matt’s dance one Saturday night hoping he’d be there. When the Righteous Brothers song “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” began to play, she asked him to dance. Years later, her sister Maureen with whom she shared a bedroom, would tell her she came home that night in love. Mike was the one, and would always be.
Mike, too, was beginning to be convinced. They were spending a lot of time together. One Friday night after a football game, Mike and Kathy had come back to Mike’s house. Mike, by then captain of St. Matt’s football team, and Kathy, in her St. Agnes cheerleader uniform, were alone in the laundry room and in full embrace when the light came on. Mike’s mother had caught them kissing.
“Michael?” she said.
“Yeah, Ma?” he answered.
“Don’t call me Ma,” she said.
“Mother,” he said.
“I want to talk to you for a minute.”
Mike headed toward the kitchen, shooting Kathy a glance on his way out the door. His grin said he would take his mother’s scolding, indulge her, and be right back.
“Michael,” she said, “I don’t ever, ever want that girl in this house again … wearing that uniform.”
Mike smiled and hugged his mom. See, Frances Abbott was first a St. Matt’s girl.
Early in their relationship, Mike saw that Kathy was what he was not. Where he was impulsive, she was thoughtfu
l. He lacked direction. She was earnest. He wasn’t sure what was next. She had a plan.
Kathy graduated from St. Agnes and, after considering nursing, went to college to become a teacher. Mike was nearby, finishing high school, considering whether he’d play ball in college, as Coach Pratt hoped he would, or go to work for the family. The college coaches were making sense. Maybe he’d stay in the area, play football or basketball or maybe both.
By December, early in Mike’s basketball season, Kathy suspected she was pregnant. She didn’t immediately see a doctor and kept her fears to herself. A little more time, she thought; maybe she was wrong. In January, having kept her secret for nearly a month, Kathy went to her doctor and he confirmed what she knew to be true. She—and Mike—would have a baby. It was due in October. They had that much time to figure out what to do.
There was no wedding planned, nothing like that. Mike had six months of high school still. Kathy had barely started college. They had been raised in conservative families, educated in Catholic schools that held services every day. This wasn’t supposed to happen, certainly not to Kathy, who was so smart and had such a promising future.
Her father, who had been so very proud of her, said nothing, but stared through her. Kathy knew he was terribly disappointed and was thankful he kept it to himself.
Her mother was not so restrained. Kathy would have to move out. She could not grow pregnant in front of her impressionable sisters, and in a neighborhood where people would talk, and in a town where people would judge. She would have to give up the baby for adoption, because she was so young and Mike was even younger and abortion was out of the question.
“That’s what you should do,” she told Kathy. “You’re not married.”
That was that.
A little unsteady governing the smaller details that made up her typical day, Frances Abbott nonetheless was quite sturdy when the occasional major issue arose. Mike, her baby, of “Only Mike” notoriety, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Frances did not ask why, did not tell him how irresponsible he’d been, did not allow him to feel alone. Instead, they turned to Katie, the oldest of Joe and Frances Abbott’s children. She lived with her husband, Mac, and three children in a small brick house in Bloomfield Township, not far from Detroit. Through the years, Katie had become accustomed to the breathless calls from Mike, the sound of him describing some crisis or another, asking what to do with Ma or this or that. Katie was cool and had a wonderful sense of humor and an adult’s perspective. This was big, Mike told her. He didn’t know what to do, where to go. Kathy had nowhere to live. Everybody was upset. Katie told him to stay calm and she’d call back in an hour or two. When she did, she told Mike to bring Kathy down, that she and Uncle Mac had cleared out a bedroom, that Kathy could stay there, and that he—both of them—should start thinking about keeping that baby.
So Kathy packed her things and left her sisters and her year-old brother and her mother and father in the little three-bedroom house in north Flint. She moved in with Katie and Uncle Mac and their children, introducing herself on her way in the door, Mike trailing with her two suitcases. Kathy was there for six months, out of the way. Being the oldest of six, Kathy knew a little about mothering, and through spring and summer in Bloomfield Township read to Katie’s small children, knitted them sweaters, and made them mid-afternoon snacks. Every month Katie or Uncle Mac drove her into Detroit to see Dr. Kenneth Trader, who’d delivered Katie’s two daughters. Mike chipped in with a few dollars when he could and visited on the weekends.
St. Matt’s hadn’t lost a football game in the fall and then didn’t lose a basketball game in the winter. There would be a parade and convertibles and bands for an unbeaten basketball season, a state championship. Mike was finishing his fifth year playing for Coach Pratt. Over the final weeks of the basketball season, however, their relationship grew cool. Mike had tried to keep Kathy’s pregnancy to himself. On the final bus ride of the season, Coach Pratt walked the aisle, got to Mike, and lowered his eyes to meet Mike’s. Coach Pratt knew.
“You know,” Coach Pratt said gravely, “you’re flunking foreign relations.”
“Coach,” Mike said, “I’ve got more on my mind than foreign relations.”
Coach Pratt returned to his seat. That was the last conversation they’d have about Mike getting his girlfriend pregnant.
Meantime, Katie, still advocating for Mike and Kathy to keep the baby, took them to her church—St. Hugo of the Hills in Bloomfield Hills—to meet a clergyman about a holy union. A young priest, Father Jim, told them no, he would not marry them, not with Kathy being pregnant, not in his church, not like this. Mike and Kathy left the church confused. Mike had not actually asked Kathy to marry him but had arrived with Kathy on the idea that it was the most responsible path. They did love each other. And they were, after all, trying to do the right thing. Katie left angry and stayed angry at the church for some time. As fall neared, Kathy convinced a priest at St. Agnes, her alma mater, to marry them. They set a date for late September. Kathy would be pregnant still, but that seemed a minor detail all things considered. What was important was they be together officially, because just like the wedding, they’d not ever actually decided to keep this child; it simply came to be.
They also had decided they’d eventually live in the house on East Fourth Street. Frances had moved to an apartment, leaving the old place empty. Where there’d once been nine, there’d be two—Mike and Kathy—and their baby. Decaying when Mike was a boy, the neighborhood had continued its slide, but the house was comforting to Mike. And it was free. He’d joined the Michigan National Guard, which would keep him out of Vietnam, but, ironically, not Detroit. The same summer, with Kathy in Bloomfield Township and Mike mopping hot tar in Flint, Detroit police raided an unlicensed bar at the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue on the west end of Detroit. The police action sparked an uprising—soon called the Twelfth Street Riot—that lasted five days. Nearly fifty died, more than 7,000 people were arrested, and some 2,000 buildings burned down, Kathy watching it all on the black-and-white TV. In Flint, the 125th Infantry of the Michigan National Guard, Mike’s unit, was called in. Mike was only newly sworn, however, and so lacked the training to march into a smoking Detroit. He was left behind to build his life.
Kathy telephoned Mike on the afternoon of September 19, breathless. She was in Flint for the first time since she’d been sent off to become more pregnant and have her baby. She’d come back to be married. Two days before, she and Mike had walked hand-in-hand into a Flint jewelry store, pointed out two eighteen-dollar gold bands, and paid cash for them. And then, in the kitchen of her parents’ house in north Flint, six months since she’d last been there, days from her wedding, Kathy went into labor.
“My water broke,” she told Mike.
MIKE WAS SILENT, though not yet from anxiety or fear. He didn’t know what she meant. Water? What water?
Life was moving fast, so much so that Mike could barely keep up in that old Impala. He prayed a state trooper would haul him down from behind and lead them into Bloomfield Township, through all those potential delays. But they were on their own, barreling toward a new life and a new child, parenthood and marriage, racing first to Katie’s house—she stood anxiously in the driveway, and it killed Mike even to slow down and kick the door open—and then to Providence Hospital.
“Name?” the nurse at the desk demanded.
“Mike Abbott,” he said. “Kathy Adams. Me or her?”
“Address?”
“Thirty-one hundred Miller Road West in Flint,” Mike said, his mother’s address.
“Insurance?”
“I don’t have any,” Mike said.
“You don’t have insurance?”
“No, I don’t,” Mike said, hoping they wouldn’t be sent away. “I don’t really have a job, either. Well, maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I don’t know what I have.”
The nurse looked over the top of her glasses at the soon-to-be father.
�
�My mother will pay,” he told her.
IT WASN’T LONG—two hours at most—before a doctor came through the door of the hospital room and stood at the end of the bed. Mom had given birth quickly. Dad had taken care of the administrative details, those he could, and killed time in the waiting room, sweating. He was nervous, a little frightened of course, but forcing himself to breathe. He cared a lot for Mom, as different as they were, as they’d always be. They shared a great attraction for each other. He had the long legs of a basketball player and the thick waist and shoulders of a football player, and a generous, gregarious spirit. She was thin, magazine-pages pretty, and adored Dad. He was loud and so sure of himself. She was shy, liked books, and came to think life might be kind of boring without him. He needed stability. She wanted some color. Now they had wedding bands … somewhere. They’d had a baby. They smiled to each other, then looked to the doctor.
He smiled thinly, as generously as he could. “You have a fine baby boy,” he began, “but …”
Dad’s sister, Aunt Katie, sat beside him, Mom’s mother, Grandma Frances, next to her, all to Mom’s right. At “but,” they’d reached for each other’s hands.
“… he was born without one of his hands,” the doctor concluded.
For Dad, the next minutes clicked and clattered like an old silent movie unspooled by a projector. He listened but did not hear. He tried to hold the words in his head, align them exactly, but they wouldn’t stay in order. Instead, other words came, other questions. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this, he thought. Who do I turn to? Can I handle this responsibility? Can I be the father to do that? Am I man enough? He had been deeply unsure; now he was afraid.