The Abstinence Teacher

  Tim sat up straight, preparing to make his pitch, but a strange feeling of self-consciousness came over him before he could begin. The moment seemed wrong somehow, but he couldn’t tell if this was an accurate reading of the situation or just an excuse for avoiding the unpleasantness of asking a favor from a person who wasn’t really even a friend. He turned to look out the window, as if the answer might be found in the passing traffic on River Street.

  “How’s your team doing?” George asked.

  “Not bad,” Tim replied, feeling simultaneously relieved and disappointed to be let off the hook. “We had a rocky start, but we’re finishing strong. As of this week, we’re tied for first in our division.”

  “Lucky bastard.” George looked dejected. “We did just the opposite—started out like gangbusters, then we fell apart. It’s gotta be my fault, but I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

  “There’s only so much you can do,” Tim reminded him. “You gotta work with the players you got.”

  “I got the players,” George insisted. “At least on paper. But some of these kids, they got attitude problems. The other team scores one lousy goal, and they just give up. We stink, we never win, can we just go home? It drives me crazy.”

  “I’m lucky that way. I’m coaching the A team, and my girls are totally motivated. They hustle, they come to practice on time, they cheer each other on, they give a hundred percent every game. I really couldn’t ask for a better bunch.”

  When George’s cell phone rang, it played the theme from Rocky. He withdrew it from the leather holster attached to his belt, checked the caller ID, and muttered something under his breath.

  “Lemme put this thing on vibrate,” he said, pressing some buttons and setting the phone on the table. “You know who my biggest problem is? George, Jr. Last year, I swear, he was incredible. Leading scorer on the team, Charlie Hustle. His coach loved him, said he woulda been happy to have a whole team of little Georgies. Now this year, it’s like he can barely drag his ass up and down the field. I don’t know, maybe he’s depressed or something. But he sure looks happy enough when he’s banging away on that goddam Xbox.”

  “It’s tough with your own kid,” Tim agreed. “My daughter’s not playing up to her potential, either. I try to talk to her about it, she just tunes me out.”

  “You gotta be careful, though,” George reminded him. “You know, not to be too hard on ’em. The other parents are quick to say you’re favoring your own kid, but if you ask me, the problem is just the opposite. Another kid screws up, I’m Mr. Cool. No problem, Eddie, don’t sweat it. But my own kid makes a mistake, I’m like, No dessert tonight, you little shit!”

  Their burgers arrived, and Tim sensed another opportunity to nudge the conversation back to real estate. But again he hesitated—it was hard to have a serious conversation with your mouth full—and George was more than happy to pick up the slack by asking if Tim knew any good throw-in plays he could teach his kids. Tim borrowed a pen from the waitress and diagrammed his favorite maneuver on the back of a place mat. Studying the X’s and O’s, George was surprised to see that Tim utilized a two-two-one formation, which led to a fairly involved discussion of its strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis the more standard three-two configuration, a subject Tim had given a fair amount of thought over the summer.

  “I wouldn’t say that one’s inherently better than the other,” he explained. “My system puts a lot of pressure on the midfielders, so you gotta be pretty careful about who you put there.”

  “You know what?” George said. “It wouldn’t matter what kind of setup I ran if I could use this kid Matt as my goalie all the time, but his parents won’t let me. They want him out on the—”

  George’s phone went off again, buzzing so vigorously that it began skittering across the tabletop. He shot Tim a quick grimace of apology before snatching it up.

  “Yeah?” He listened for a second, then let out an exasperated sigh. “Ah, shit. All right, I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Half hour, tops.”

  He snapped the phone shut and shook his head.

  “Sorry to cut this short, but I gotta run. Another mess at the job site.”

  George wolfed down the rest of his burger, then paid the bill on the way out, insisting on picking up the tab. Feeling like an idiot for blowing his big chance, Tim trailed him out of the diner and through the parking lot, the bigger man moving so quickly it felt like he was about to break into a run any second.

  “All right,” George said, stopping in front of a behemoth SUV. “It was good talking to you.”

  “Same here,” Tim told him, nodding a little longer than necessary, as if it were the moment of truth at the end of a first date. “Thanks for lunch.”

  “No problem. Thanks for letting me pick your brain. I’m definitely gonna try that throw-in.”

  “I hope it works for you. I’ve had really good luck with it.”

  George clicked the remote and the locks of his Navigator opened with a solid ka-chunk. He reached for the door handle, but then thought better of it and turned around.

  “Oh, hey, I almost forgot. Me and some buddies have this poker game, every other Tuesday. We’re looking for a new guy. You interested?”

  “Poker?” Tim said, blindsided by the invitation.

  “They’re good guys,” George assured him. “Couple contractors I work with, a real-estate guy, my brother-in-law, and my stupid cousin Billy. The stakes aren’t too high. It’s more about drinking a few beers and shooting the shit. I think you’d fit right in. And you’d make some great contacts for work, tell you that.”

  Tim stared at the ground. He knew what to do, because they’d talked a lot about how to handle moments like this at his Addicts 4 Christ meetings. If the other person was a friend, you could just remind them that you’d dedicated your life to Jesus and made a sacred commitment to steer clear of temptation. In the event the other person was unfamiliar with your religious beliefs, you could keep it simple. Just say, ‘No thank you,’ Pastor Dennis had advised. Say you’re busy that night and leave it at that. But when Tim looked up and saw George smiling at him, he found to his surprise that it was impossible not to smile back.

  “I’ve been known to play a little poker,” he said.

  A Big Day for the Lord

  NORMALLY, ON GAME DAYS, TIM WAS JUMPING OUT OF HIS SKIN TO get going. He’d wake up long before the alarm and chug several cups of coffee, but after that he was useless—couldn’t eat breakfast, couldn’t read the paper, couldn’t manage a conversation with Carrie, couldn’t do anything but glance obsessively at the clock until it was time to pick up Abby and head for the field.

  Today, though, for the first time since he could remember, he was dragging. The weatherman had predicted a 50 percent chance of showers, and Tim spent a good part of the morning gazing morosely out his kitchen window, hoping the rain would start early enough and be heavy enough to wash out the Stars’ eleven o’clock match against the Gifford Bandits. It wasn’t the game itself he was hoping to avoid—the Bandits were one of the weaker teams in the league, an easy tune-up before next week’s make-or-break showdown with the Green Valley Raiders—it was the decision he was going to have to make when it was over.

  Until he went to Bible Study on Thursday night, the situation had seemed clear enough. He’d made a promise to Ruth Ramsey, and he intended to keep it. He wasn’t sorry he’d led the team in prayer last week—it was his fervent hope that he’d planted a seed in some of the girls’ hearts (his own daughter’s especially) that would blossom in due time—but he understood it as a one-shot deal, a spontaneous act of worship he’d be a fool to repeat, at least if he wanted to keep on coaching.

  FOUR YEARS ago, when he’d checked the box on Abby’s registration form, volunteering his services as assistant coach, Tim barely knew the difference between a direct and an indirect kick. All he’d wanted at the time was a way to stay involved in his daughter’s life after the divorce, to prove that he could be something more
than the loser her mom had kicked out of the house.

  In what he later came to recognize as a stroke of genuine good luck, he was assigned that first season to help out on a U-8 team led by Sam “Corny” Hayes, the founder and elder statesman of SHYSA, a visionary who’d climbed aboard the youth soccer bandwagon way back in the late 1970s, when most Americans still viewed the sport with suspicion, if not outright contempt, as a pastime fit only for sissies and Europeans. Corny was a crusty old guy, a retired pipe fitter given to dark mutterings about the goddam rich people who were ruining his town, but he loved coaching and had vowed to keep doing it until the undertaker made him stop. For whatever reason—maybe because Tim obviously wasn’t one of those goddam rich people—Corny took a liking to his new assistant and went out of his way to teach him to think like a soccer coach. They got in the habit of heading to Victor’s Luncheonette after every game—in those days, Abby went straight home with her mother—and conducting detailed postmortems on the day’s action, evaluating the performances of individual players and strategizing about the lineup combinations that would maximize their strengths and neutralize their weaknesses.

  Tim assisted another veteran coach on Abby’s U-9 team, and was entrusted with his first head-coaching assignment the following year, when he took charge of the U-10 Sharks. Despite his inexperience, the team did remarkably well, coming in second in the C Division with a solid eight-and-four record. Even so, Tim had been taken aback when Bill Derzarian called last August to let him know he’d been chosen to be head coach of the Stars.

  “The A team?” Tim said. “Are you sure you want to do that? There have to be a lot of other guys way more qualified than me.”

  “That’s not what Corny says. And I’m telling you, Tim, we got a lot of great feedback on you from the parents. They really like your enthusiasm, the way you run your team.”

  “Wow. I really don’t know what to say. I’m honored.”

  “You’ve proven yourself,” Bill assured him. “You have our complete confidence.”

  TIM HAD come close to skipping Bible Study altogether, partly because he hadn’t finished the reading—they were making their way through the two books of Samuel, and it was tough going—but mainly because he was ashamed of himself. At the end of every session, Pastor Dennis set aside time for a “spiritual gut check,” in which each participant was invited to give an account of his successes and failures in leading a godly life during the previous week. Tim did his best to be honest—what was the point otherwise?—and he was painfully aware that his recent behavior didn’t make for a very uplifting picture: he’d gone into a bar for the first time in years; he’d had sex with his wife, contrary to the Pastor’s explicit instructions; and, on top of everything else, he seemed to have joined a poker game.

  The meeting was held at Bill Spooner’s house, a small Cape Cod near Shackamackan Park. Tim arrived a half hour late, not because anything had detained him but because he kept pulling up at the curb behind John Roper’s Odyssey, losing his nerve, then driving off again, only to come back and do the same thing a few minutes later.

  Pastor Dennis was reading about Goliath when Tim stepped sheepishly into the tiny living room, barely large enough to contain a couch and a recliner, let alone the kitchen chairs that had been dragged in to accommodate the extra guests. All the usual suspects were present—Bill, John, Andy McNulty, Jonathan Kim, Steve Zelchuk, and Marty Materia—as well as one familiar-looking stranger Tim took a moment to recognize as Jay, the Jenna Jameson fan.

  A notorious stickler for punctuality, Pastor Dennis stopped midsentence and looked up from his Bible. Fixing Tim with a gaze of unnerving intensity, he raised his right hand and unfurled a stern finger of accusation. At least it felt like an accusation—when you knew you were guilty, lots of things felt like that—until the Pastor’s face opened into a smile full of warmth and affirmation.

  “A righteous man walks among us,” he said, much to Tim’s surprise. “And we know from Scripture that ‘the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.’”

  ONE BENEFIT of his dawdling was that his daughter was waiting on the front stoop in her uniform when he pulled into the driveway. Usually, no matter how he timed his departure, he managed to show up at her house a few minutes early and had to suffer through an awkward round of small talk with Mitchell while Allison flounced around in a skimpy nightgown, trying to locate Abby’s shin guards or electric toothbrush.

  “You’re late,” Abby said, hugging him at the foot of the wide granite steps. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I’m just moving a little slow this morning.”

  “Mom thought maybe you forgot.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I’m gonna forget a game.”

  Abby nodded. “That’s what I said.”

  She headed to the car, but Tim hesitated for a moment, not quite sure if he needed to check in with Allison before he left. It seemed a little rude, driving off without even sticking his head in the door to say hello. On the other hand, it would’ve been nice to escape without his regular fix of misery, one more depressing reminder of how well she was doing without him.

  Before he could make up his mind, she came hurrying out of the house, looking both flustered—she was carrying Logan like a football in one arm and clutching Abby’s overnight bag with the other hand—and unusually modest, in a knee-length robe over cotton pajamas.

  “Wait!” she called out, as if he were driving away instead of standing a few feet in front of her. “Abby forgot her stuff.”

  She made her way down the steps and handed him the bag.

  “I told her four times: Don’t forget your stuff, don’t forget your stuff. Of course she forgot her stuff.” She flipped Logan into an upright position with a nonchalance that verged on carelessness, her face scrunching into a familiar expression of distaste. “Ugh. He’s a stinky boy. Second time this morning.”

  Logan smiled proudly. Even with a dirty diaper, he was a happy camper, a plump wide-eyed cherub with a headful of chaotic ringlets, the kind of kid who got treated like a celebrity by the old ladies at the supermarket. Tim was fond of him, despite his uncanny resemblance to his father.

  “Mr. Logan,” he said. “How’s the big guy?”

  “Teem!” he exclaimed. “Abby Dad!”

  Tim poked a finger into Logan’s doughy belly and smiled at Allison.

  “You want me to change him?”

  Allison kissed her stinky boy on the forehead.

  “Abby Dad a silly man.”

  “I don’t mind,” he insisted. “I’ve never had a problem with that.”

  “You don’t realize what you’re dealing with. He’s not a sweet little baby anymore. He eats what you eat.”

  “It has been a while,” Tim conceded. The fumes had just begun wafting into his airspace, and they were bracing. “I guess you forget.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, a hint of gloating in her voice. “Your turn’s coming. Then you can tell me how much fun it is.”

  “I don’t know. We’re not even sure if we want kids.”

  She tilted her head in surprise.

  “I’m sure Carrie does.”

  Tim didn’t reply. Allison pondered him for a moment. She seemed on the verge of asking him a question, but instead she lifted Logan into the air, brought his padded butt close to her nose, and gave a cautious sniff.

  “Wow,” she said, with a small shiver of amazement. “What the heck is in there?”

  AFTER CALLING Tim a righteous man, Pastor Dennis rose and embraced him.

  “You did a beautiful thing,” he said.

  “Who, me?” Tim glanced anxiously around the room, more bewildered than relieved. “What’d I do?”

  The men of the Tabernacle laughed, as though charmed by his modesty.

  “I told them about Saturday,” John Roper explained. He was leaning forward on the couch, sandwiched between Jonathan Kim and Andy McNulty, but eclipsing the two smaller men with his bulk. “What you did after the
game.”

  Pastor Dennis turned to Jay, the new guy.

  “If you want to know what our church is all about, I couldn’t give you a better example. This isn’t some once-a-week-sit-on-your-butt-and-praise-Jesus sort of operation. It’s a twenty-four/seven ministry, and its purpose is to find new ways to inject our faith into every aspect of our lives.”

  Jay nodded thoughtfully, as though he were beginning to get the picture. Pastor Dennis sat back down, and Tim made his way to an empty chair next to Marty Materia, who clapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “Way to go.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Pastor Dennis went on, still directing his comments to Jay. “What we do isn’t easy. It’s hard not to get lazy and forget our purpose. It’s tempting to turn on the cruise control and let the car drive itself for a while.”

  Pastor Dennis looked at the floor and shook his head.

  “I’m talking from experience. I haven’t really discussed this with anyone but God and my wife, but these past few months, I’ve been a little lost. Don’t get me wrong—we’re growing, picking up lots of new members, but it was starting to feel like we were going soft like all these other so-called Christian churches. I mean, the reason we’re doing so well is because we made waves—we shook things up in this town and convinced maybe 2 percent of the people to really look at the way they were living; and then we showed them that there’s a better way in Christ.

  “But I’ve known for a long time that we needed some new tactics, a way to get through to the 98 percent of the people who’ve been tuning us out. But for some reason I was stumped. The Lord just wasn’t telling me what to do. I thought He’d abandoned me, but I see now that He was just instructing me to be patient, to wait for one of my warriors to step up and relieve me of my burden. Because this church isn’t about me, it’s about us. What we can do together to be instruments of God’s will.

  “So I want you all to think about the example Tim has set for us. If you coach a Little League team, or a soccer team, or Pop Warner football, or whatever, that’s great—now you know what to do. And if you don’t coach, think about signing up, because it’s a wonderful opportunity to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the children of your community, the ones whose parents won’t let them hear it because they’re the ones who need it most. And if the powers that be don’t like it, if they want to stop good Christian citizens from saying a simple prayer at a youth sporting event, I say bring it on. That’s a fight we want to be having.”