Gracie (9 page)

We stared at each other. It was all out now. I'd said what I really felt—and he had no reply. I knew he wouldn't, so I turned to walk away.

“Gracie!” he shouted when I was nearly down the hall.

He wanted me to do what he said, to stop being such a pain and do it his way. He always wanted
everything
his way. Well, not this time. “No!” I shouted back at him. “I'm not good enough!”

“Do you think anyone gets good on their own?” he asked, coming toward me. So he
had
noticed that I was training myself. I hadn't realized he paid even that much attention to what I did. “I
coached
Johnny,” he said.

“Johnny was a
natural,
” I said bitterly, repeating what I'd heard him say a thousand times.

“Johnny was a boy,” he said.

I didn't want to hear any more about how Johnny was a boy and I wasn't. There was nothing more to say about it. I was right near the girls' room, the one place Dad couldn't follow me, so I bolted inside.

Standing by the door, breathing hard from emotion, I listened while Dad kept talking to me from the other side. “I didn't have anyone who cared,” he said. “No one took the damn time. Maybe I wouldn't have screwed up my knee. Maybe I could've gone on with my game.”

Tears came to my eyes. He'd never talked to me like this, never shared much of anything about his past. It had hurt me that he thought I was so unimportant. Now he was trying, though. He
was
trying.

“Gracie, I honestly don't know if you're good enough,” he continued. “Let me help you.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks. He stopped talking and waited. All I had wanted was a chance. I supposed he was only asking for a chance, too.

But was it too late for both of us?

Maybe so. It felt too late.

Footsteps in the hallway told me he had given up waiting for me to come out. I heard the sound of the exit door as he pushed it open.

Could I move from my spot? I didn't know.

And then I was out the door and running after him. I caught up on the cement path as he headed for his car. We walked the rest of the way side by side, not talking. I had to go to school, but I went as far as the car.

If he was willing to take a chance on me, I'd give him the chance to do it.

Dad and I started training hard. He got me up early and we worked until after dark.

Dad was tough, but guess what? I was tougher. I was just a hair better, but there were times I left him panting, struggling to keep up with me. This shocked me and I think, from the look on his face, it took him by surprise, too.

In a way, our daily training sessions became a battle of wills. Neither one of us wanted to admit that the training was torture. We both acted like it was a piece of cake; though I don't know what kind of cake leaves you struggling to breathe and feeling like you might vomit at any moment.

Mom, Mike, and Daniel thought we had lost our minds. “Delusional” is what Mike called us. It occurred to me that he might be right.

One night, I heard Mom and Dad arguing. Since Johnny died, they fought more than they ever had before. It was almost as if they blamed each other for his death, though I don't see how either of them could possibly have been to blame for such a stupid, tragic accident. My guess was that they felt that they had to blame someone. I knew
because I'd felt the same way. My parents just turned that need to blame against each other.

This conversation, though, was different. It was quiet and intense, as though the subject was so serious they couldn't risk any of us kids hearing. I was in the dining room, though, and I could hear them talking in the kitchen. Mom asked Dad why his paychecks weren't showing up in their bank account.

“I quit my job,” he told her.

At first Mom didn't say anything. She must have been as stunned as I was. Quit his job?

“When?” she asked him after a moment.

Dad didn't answer.

“Without discussing it?” Mom asked indignantly.

“I couldn't tell you,” Dad replied. I wondered if Dad felt the same way I did, if Johnny's death had made him simply stop caring. Just as I couldn't care about school, maybe he couldn't bring himself to care about his job anymore. I understood that.

“I need a break,” he insisted. “I'll find something new.”

“What are we going to live on?” Mom demanded.

“Right now, I'm coaching Grace,” he replied firmly. “I'm not losing another kid.”

The back door slammed shut as he went out into the yard, ending their conversation.

I sat there thinking about what I'd heard. It was a lot to take in. I knew Mom was right to worry about how we'd live, but that wasn't the main thing on my mind. The thing that really grabbed me was that Dad was putting
my training before his job. He was going to give it everything he had—everything.

It meant I couldn't let him down, not even for a second. I promised myself, then and there, that I wouldn't.

So the training continued. Even though my brothers still thought we were “delusional,” they helped me repair the goal Dad had torn down on the day of Johnny's funeral.

Dad put together a weight room in the garage. He got a lot of the equipment from stuff he'd found during bulk pickup day, when people put out their big furniture and anything else big that they wanted the garbage trucks to take away. “It's amazing what people throw away,” he commented as he dragged in a leg-press weight board.

I figured part of not letting Dad down was to avoid summer school if at all humanly possible, and I wasn't sure that it was. Summer school would eat up precious time that we needed to train if I was going to be ready for tryouts in September. With all my class cuts, the blank test, and the zero for cheating, my current grade was completely in the toilet. But Mr. Clark was a decent guy, and I had to give it a try.

One day after class, I approached him. “I need to pick up my grade,” I said. “Can I write a paper or something?”

He handed me a textbook about the Civil War. “Read a chapter every day. Summarize it and bring me your summary at each class,” he said.

A few weeks earlier I would have just walked away from an assignment like that. Now I had a reason to be happy about it. He was giving me a chance, and I appreciated it. “I'll be here,” I assured him with a smile.

“With your summaries,” he emphasized.

I nodded, thanking him as I backed out the door. If I had to read the chapters in the middle of the night with a flashlight, I was determined to get the summaries done and avoid summer school.

Dad and I trained well into the evenings. Some nights he put on the big outdoor lights and I ran through a tight obstacle course of orange cones that he'd set up. I was slowly improving, each night knocking over fewer and fewer of them.

Sometimes I played scrimmages with Mike and Daniel while Dad coached from the side, just as he'd done with Johnny.

Mom wasn't home in the evenings anymore because she'd picked up a second job at the hospital. In the mornings, she looked tired. It wasn't easy on her. I knew she was doing it so Dad could train me without worrying about looking for work. She was another person I couldn't let down.

One evening, while we ate frozen dinners Dad had heated up, he set up his reel-to-reel projector and the stand-up screen. He put on a movie of a soccer game. “Is that Johnny?” I asked, seeing a player who looked a lot like him.

“It's me,” Dad said.

I leaned in, looking closer. It
was
Dad at about nineteen, dressed in a soccer uniform and playing in one of his college games.

“It was my junior year,” he said. “You've seen this before.”

I shook my head. “Never.” He might have shown Johnny, but I would have remembered if I'd ever seen it.

“This was before I hurt my knee,” he added, leaning back in his chair to watch the play on the screen. “Watch this. Wait, wait…now! Ooooh! I smoked that guy!”

“You were, like, a star!” Mike cheered.

“Hardly,” Dad told him. “Mostly I warmed the bench.”

It surprised me to hear him admit that. I had always assumed he had been a big-shot soccer player in college. We all had.

“I had no one watching out for me,” Dad said as an explanation.

“What about Granddad?” I asked.

Dad turned away sadly. “What about him?” he asked. I suddenly realized that I wasn't the only one who had ever felt all alone. Dad had done it on his own, and it hadn't turned out as he'd hoped.

I recalled him saying that nobody got there on their own. He must have been thinking about his own life. Was that why he coached Johnny so hard? Was he trying to give him something he'd never had? Had he only lately realized that a daughter might need his help as much as a son?

Even if it was a little late, he'd realized it in time. I wasn't going it alone anymore. I had to admit it felt good.

My training put a strain on my friendship with Jena. She'd been grounded because of the Jersey Shore escapade, but when she was free again, she wanted to hang out like we used to. I no longer had the time, though.

“People are talking,” she said to me one day while I was training in the garage weight room. “You're committing social suicide.”

“Like I care,” I said, still lifting.

Dad came in with two cartons of eggs. Jena rolled her eyes at him as she walked out in a huff. I didn't blame her for being angry. She felt like I'd abandoned her. If she was really my friend, though, she had to understand how much this meant to me.

Dad stood before me and I saw that he had no shoes on. He tossed an egg lightly into the air and, when it came down, he caught it on the toes of his right foot. “Soft as a pillow,” he remarked before tossing it up again with his right foot and catching it with his left.