Sunday, September 11, 2:50 p.m. EDT

Washington, DC

Scott ran the DVR back again, then paused it. He had already watched the segment twice, and now he was waiting for Tara to get back from getting little James up from his nap. With the flat screen ready, he quickly looked around for something he could use to clean up the mess from the Yoo-hoo spit take that had just redecorated the coffee table.

It’s on our coasters. It’s on the candles. It’s on Tara’s Food & Wine magazine. Crud, it’s even on our wedding album!

He spotted a decorative blanket that Tara used to accent a corner of the couch he was on. But when he reached for it, the pain from his chest bruise caused him to pull up short.

“You were not just going to use my chenille blanket to mop up your mess, were you?”

Scott looked over and saw Tara standing there, looking as beautiful as ever and as frustrated as usual. Baby James was squirming in her arms, wanting to get to Daddy.

“Don’t worry, I called up the Captain, and he said it was okay.”

Tara just stared at him.

“Get it? The Captain? Captain and chenille? Sounds just like Captain and Tennille? Work with me, babe.”

Scott could see just the faintest movement at the corners of Tara’s mouth, which was all the encouragement he needed to plow forward. He stood up and moved toward her.

“Come on, ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’? ‘Do That to Me One More Time,’ which, for the sake of the little dude-a-mus here, we will assume is referring to the desire for another shiatsu foot massage.”

Tara’s resolve broke and she started laughing now. Sliding up against her, Scott wrapped her and the baby in his arms and began slowly swaying with them.

“And of course, the greatest of all, folks,” he continued in a bad Casey Kasem impersonation, “the one that zoomed to the top of the charts, the animal love ballad to top all other animal love ballads, ‘Muskrat Love.’”

As the threesome danced around the room, Scott sang, with Tara soon joining in:

And they whirled and they twirled and they tangoed

Singin’ and jingin’ the jango

“I have no idea what that means,” Scott whispered to James.

Floatin’ like the heavens above

It looks like muskrat lo-o-o-o-ove.

Scott tried to end the dance with a dip, but his chest caught him up again. Unfortunately, Tara was already on her way back, and all three of them ended up in a laughing heap on the hardwood floor.

“I told you, baby,” Scott said to Tara, “once you give in to the dark side, there’s nothing but good times ahead.”

He still couldn’t believe that she was his, or that he was hers, or that they were each other’s, or whatever the politically correct phrase was. It was nothing short of a miracle that they were together.

In a conversation on their honeymoon, Tara had admitted to him that she’d spent much of the last few years in a love-hate relationship with Scott. She respected his intelligence, courage, loyalty, and surprisingly to her, his leadership skills. Also, his willingness to sacrifice himself for his country and his friends was well beyond most people she had ever met.

But on the flip side, she had said that his lack of professional discipline, his disregard for authority, his passion for sarcasm, and most of all, his insistence on wearing T-shirts celebrating the tours of bands who had probably been broken up or dead for decades had all combined to make sure that no love connection would ever be made between them.

Then came the daily visits to the hospital. It was during those long visits, she had told Scott, that she really had a chance to see the character beneath the frungy exterior. It was then, also, that she had given up her mission to change him and had decided to start trying to love him as he was.

Now, two years and one baby boy later, Tara took time to remind him daily of how lucky she was to have a man like him. And to Scott, who had never really known what family love was and who deep down had the self-image of a hairless terrier, those words were like gold.

“How’d you like that dancing, Jimmy-Jer?” Scott said, lying on his back and tossing James above him. Each throw caused him to wince in pain, but his boy’s laughter made it worthwhile. “Yeah, I know you! You got the moves! You like to rock it! You like to get down! Admit it, you dig it when this white boy plays his funky music!”

Scott brought his knees up and laid James against them. He quickly glanced at Tara, who was watching him with love in her eyes.

“You ready to work it, son?” He started dancing the boy’s chubby legs while he laid down a beat. James was giggling uncontrollably, causing spit to fly everywhere. “Uh . . . oh yeah . . . uh, uh, uh, break it down.”

“Pardon me, MC Scott,” Tara broke in, laying a hand on Scott’s shoulder.

“Just a sec. Drum solo.” Scott took James’s arms. “Doog-a-doog-a-doog-a-doog-a-doog-a-doog-a-crash-crash.” Then raising James’s arms up, he said, “Thank you, folks! I’ll be playing here all week!”

Tara shook her head, laughing. “You realize that our boy doesn’t stand a chance of being normal?”

Scott just grinned.

“I hate to break up the concert, but what’s up with the mess? Is there a reason Yoo-hoo is all over the floor and apparently the coffee table, too?”

Scott put James’s hands up to his chubby little cheeks. “Oh, my! That’s right! I’ve got to something to show you and mommy! Come on!”

“Scott . . . the mess?”

“Sorry, you’re right. James, wanna play Indy 500?”

Sitting James on the floor, Scott said, “Here we go! Vroom, vroom! Rev that engine! Yellow, yellow, yellow, green!” With the sound of peeling out, Scott began scooting James all around the floor. “Watch out for the parked car—you don’t want to be like Mario Andretti,” he said, curving around a large decorative vase, which held three brown-painted bamboo stalks that Scott had never quite figured out the purpose for.

“Scott Ross, you are not using my son as a human mop!”

“Of course not, baby! He’s just driving the track. It’s pure coincidence that his super-absorbent patooski is soaking up the spill. Errrrk!” Scott made a quick turn of James, just missing a table leg.

When the floor was dry, Scott took James to the couch and sat down with him on his chest. Tara was just finishing cleaning the liquid off the coffee table. After dumping the paper towels, she sat next to him.

“Uh, I think your son needs a change. He seems to be a little moist underneath,” Scott said trying to hand James over.

Tara responded with a slap to his arm. Then she picked up the remote while Scott grumbled to James about his derelict mother.

She pressed play, and the frozen Fox PFL logo spun on the screen, then shot off the top right. Full screen were the two announcers for the Washington Warriors–Cleveland Bulldogs game, Clay Sturgis and Tim Anderson.

“Well, just when you think you’ve seen everything the PFL has to offer,” Sturgis started out.

“No doubt,” Anderson tagged in. “While you were away, folks, the action here didn’t stop—at least not on the sidelines.”

The picture of the announcers switched to a bouncy close-up shot from across the stadium of Rick Bellefeuille. He appeared very upset as he spoke into a telephone handset.

“Obviously, with his team down by twenty-eight points early in the fourth quarter, Rick Bellefeuille is not a happy man,” Sturgis said. “And right now he’s letting somebody know it. And who, Tim, is the lucky recipient of his wrath?”

“Why, it appears to be America’s hero, Riley Covington,” Anderson answered.

The television screen switched to a split screen. Bellefeuille was relegated to the left half, while a tight shot of Riley on the sideline filled the right.

“There’s no doubt that Superman has been fed a kryptonite sandwich by the Bulldogs today. And it appears that Bellefeuille is letting him know what he thinks about it.”

“Poor Riley,” Tara said.

“Just watch.”

“Now, there’s nothing new about a player getting chewed out by an owner,” Sturgis said.

“Although Bellefeuille is one of the few who actually does it during the game,” Anderson added.

“True. What is unusual, however, is Covington’s response.”

As Sturgis said this, Scott and Tara watched Riley let the phone fall away from his ear and lie horizontally in his hand.

“He did not,” Tara said with her mouth hanging open.

“Shhh, it gets better!”

“. . . seen a player do this with an owner,” Anderson continued. “And judging by Bellefeuille’s reaction, he’s not seen it either.”

On the screen, Bellefeuille was in meltdown mode. He was wildly swinging his free arm, causing all of his staff to move to a safe distance. His wife could be seen in the corner of the box with her mouth hanging open, covering the ears of their tween-age daughter.

“It’s probably good we don’t have audio with this shot,” Sturgis said.

“You got that right. But we haven’t seen the best of it yet. Watch what Riley does next.”

As Scott, Tara, and an estimated 205 million other people watched (whether now, during later sports reports, or after the video went viral online), Riley walked to the Gatorade table, lifted the white plastic lid off the big orange bucket, and dropped the handset in.

“Aughhhh,” screamed Tara. “He didn’t! He didn’t just do that!”

Scott tried for some smart comeback, but he was laughing too hard to get any words out.

“Put it back,” Tara cried. “Play it again!”

Scott quickly rewound the DVR. This time they watched it muted.

“Look at his face,” Tara said through teary eyes, ever the analyst. “He’s trying to decide what to do. Then watch . . . right there! That’s when he got the idea. Now he’s mulling. . . . He’s thinking about the outcomes—you can see it in the way his eyes are darting up to Bellefeuille, then over to the bucket. And there! That’s when he decides to do it. And we both know that once Riley decides to do something, he doesn’t stop until it’s done. Splash!”

“You know, we got to get you back in the office more, woman,” Scott said, impressed.

“No one better,” she said with a grin.

After rewinding the DVR one more time, he turned to James, who was busy peeling the cracked and faded sun off the Utopia 1977 Ra tour T-shirt his dad was wearing. “Look at the TV, little dude-a-mus,” Scott said. “It’s Uncle Riley.”

“He’s not interested, my dear.”

“He needs to be. Come on, watch this, buddy.”

Scott tried to direct James toward the screen by shaking a grenade-shaped rattle in front of it—a baby gift from the guys on the ops team.

Finally satisfied that James was facing in the right direction, he slowed the recording to half speed and began his own description of the action.

And when the handset began its descent into the tub, Scott became very serious and whispered into his child’s ear, “That, dear boy, is your Uncle Riley. Do you know what he’s doing? He’s sticking it to the man. Learn well, my son. Learn well.”

“Kid doesn’t stand a chance,” Tara said with a sigh, then fell back into the couch.