Kick

  The New Jersey Golden Eagles were one of the top teams in the country. They had won the past three State Cups and two regional titles. They came in second in the nation last year. It would take a miracle to beat them. You’d have to pull off some kind of stunning upset, the kind that would show up on the ESPN highlights in the morning—if ESPN cared about soccer.

  I was psyching myself out for the finals. I didn’t want to set the bar low, but I knew I would be cool with a silver medal.

  After Coach’s talk, he wanted us to go view the next game and learn about the opponent. I grabbed a sweatshirt from my soccer bag. Now that the game was over, I was freezing.

  By the time we reached the sideline, the Golden Eagles were already up 1–0. This is going to be a blowout, I thought. The other team’s offense looked lost. The Golden Eagles’ best player was a black dude they called Kwame. Every time I saw the guy in a game, it was as if his whole life depended on every play.

  “Not to be negative here, guys” I said, “but the only thing that our team is learning is that we’re going to lose.”

  “Badly,” Matt added. “Their team is full of stars.”

  “Look, guys, everyone is assuming that the Eagles are going to win,” Shawn said. “But the truth is we don’t have anything to lose if we give it all we got, and maybe we can just pull this thing off.”

  I didn’t know if I was wrong to think that we were going to lose or whether I was just trying to be realistic. We’d find out in a week’s time.

  On the way home I thought of what Shawn had said and how the whole team felt about playing next week. There was a good chance we’d get our butts kicked, but if we didn’t at least try, we were definitely going to lose.

  I thought maybe I had been guessing all along that I had to lose in court, too. I still figured I was going to be toast, but I did have a play in the back of my head. I went straight to my room. I found the number I was looking for on speed dial and pressed the button.

  “Hello, Sergeant Brown, could I talk to you about Christy and her dad?”

  Chapter 13

  “Jerry, do you know what you’re getting into with this dinner?” Carolyn asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then why are we going?”

  “Because it’s a chance to maneuver McNamara into a place where he might feel like being a good guy.”

  “Why don’t you just sit him down and tell him how nice that boy is?” Carolyn had slipped on her serious face. “Tell him that Kevin isn’t a thief.”

  “If McNamara had been in the mood to listen to the world, we wouldn’t be dealing with him, woman,” I said.

  “And if those kids had any common sense . . .” Carolyn’s lips tightened slightly.

  “Look, those kids were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Christy is smart enough to know her mother needs some kind of professional help, and she’s clever enough to understand that what her father’s doing—trying to control his wife’s behavior and to bully her into good behavior—isn’t going to work. That night he was pushing his wife—Christy’s mother—around, and the girl just couldn’t take it anymore. That started the whole chain of events.”

  “She should have called—somebody!” Carolyn said.

  “Like who?” I asked. We were attending a dinner and get-together at Kevin’s house that I hoped would begin to ease things up a bit.

  “I don’t know their family,” my wife answered.

  “We’ve had problems in the past and we didn’t reach for a phone,” I said. “We hung on to those problems, trying to keep them within our household until something came along to solve them. What do you expect from people as young as Kevin and Christy?”

  “But getting into a car . . . ” Carolyn didn’t finish her sentence.

  I knew what she meant, but I’d also had enough experience over the years dealing with people who had problems to know that the simple answers were always easy when they were somebody else’s problems.

  “I’ve seen parents tell their children to lie to the police because it seemed to them the only way out of a difficult situation,” I said. “And sometimes I thought they were right.”

  “Would you lie to get out of trouble?” Carolyn looked at me, and I glanced at her.

  “To hold my family together?” I asked. “To protect you? Yeah, I would lie. If I couldn’t think of anything else. The girl was trying to hold her family together, and she didn’t want her father to get into trouble.”

  “Lord, lord, lord.” Carolyn shook her head.

  “Look, everybody knows what’s going on and everybody’s a little scared,” I said. “The thing is that there just aren’t any easy answers.”

  “That’s why he’s coming to this dinner?”

  “No, like I told you, Kevin asked me to invite the McNamaras to dinner. He asked me if I would come. You’re coming along to show everybody that it’s just a friendly dinner.”

  “And why is McNamara coming along?”

  “One thing I’ve learned from my years on the force is that people act because they’ve either made a decision or they’re close to making a decision,” I said. “McNamara wants to know how hostile we’ll be to him or his situation and if we’re really on his side. What he senses tonight will push him one way or the other. That’s why he said he’d come to this dinner. Now, can we get going?”

  “And you’re sure of this?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you’re convinced that this dinner is going to work?”

  “Nope. But I got my fingers crossed and a song in my heart,” I said.

  “You’re as bad as Kevin!”

  “Or as good—if it works,” I said.

  “Hope that song doesn’t end up on a blues note,” Carolyn said. “What does Mrs McNamara do that’s odd, anyway?”

  “Sounds like depression to me,” I said. “I looked up the symptoms on the internet.”

  “Jerry, that is the worst thing you could have done. You’re not supposed to be looking up people’s symptoms on the internet and making judgments about them. What did it say?”

  “It said that depression was serious and you had to be careful with it,” I said.

  “It say anything about chicken soup?”

  “Kevin thinks that we shouldn’t work on Mrs. McNamara,” I said. “He thinks we should work on Mr. McNamara. He thinks that if Mr. McNamara sees everybody is friendly, he’ll come around.”

  “He won’t,” Carolyn said.

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  I fixed the rearview mirror and drove the rest of the way to Kevin’s house in silence. Carolyn was right. McNamara hadn’t been friendly at all when I spoke to him on the phone, but he had asked some interesting questions. The most interesting was whether Kevin had “talked a lot of guff” about what had happened that night. I thought what he wanted to know was if anybody was thinking of charging him with domestic violence against his wife. That would have revealed his whole situation and opened a can of worms that maybe should have been open, but that McNamara wasn’t ready to deal with.

  “And why does Kevin think he’s even going to show up?” Carolyn asked.

  “Because Kevin is as good a young man as we think he is,” I said. “And like most kids his age, he believes everyone else in the world is just waiting for the chance to do the right thing. And you know what? I like that attitude. I really do.”

  “But he did say he was coming,” Carolyn said. “So I guess he’ll at least show.”

  I remembered the phone conversation. The strain in McNamara’s voice told me he had some serious reservations about the dinner.

  My mind kept switching to the car. I imagined I heard something wrong with the engine, and then the lights seemed dimmer than usual. By the time we reached Kevin’s place, it was my stomach that needed the tune-up.

  “Look, Carolyn, anything you can do to help tonight will be appreciated,” I said.

  “Jerry, I’ve been putting up with you for almost thirty-nine years
,” she answered. “I kind of get the routine by now. We go in, it gets messed up, and then all the way home you tell me how right I was. Isn’t that how it works?”

  Kevin’s house was all lit up with candles. There were real candles on the mantelpiece and on the end tables. Others, placed around the room, were electric. They gave the place a warm glow but enough dark shadows to add drama. Kevin’s grandmother gave me a big hug and then kissed Carolyn. She turned and said something to her daughter in Spanish.

  “She’s saying your wife has the same color as cinnamon,” Kevin said.

  “I used to think of her as brown sugar,” I said. “I guess cinnamon fits her now.”

  Estela, Kevin’s mother, took Carolyn into the kitchen, and the grandmother stood in front of me with a big smile on her face. I didn’t know what to say, so I just smiled back. Finally she patted me on the shoulder and went to join Estela.

  “Sometimes she speaks great English,” Kevin says. “But when she tries to get fancy, she has to speak Spanish in her mind and then she can’t find the words in English. Then she just looks at you.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “It happens to me when I want to sound super-intelligent. Have you heard from you-know-who?”

  “Christy’s been working on her mother, trying to get her excited about coming,” Kevin said. “She told her that she wants to learn how to cook Colombian food.”

  “You kids ought to be politicians,” I said. “You spend your life scheming away.”

  The women returned with plates of cheese and crackers, something that looked like peas in cream, some midget bananas, and sodas. I liked the way Carolyn was mixing in. If she had a good time, the trip home wouldn’t be so bad.

  Kevin put on some music and we sat around and talked. Somehow, the conversation got to be about the differences between dogs in the United States and dogs in Colombia.

  “In my country, un perro es un perro.” Kevin’s grandmother hit the middle of her left palm with her right index finger for emphasis. “In this country, un perro es un kink!”

  “A king,” Kevin said.

  “It’s what I said,” his grandmother went on. “Un kink! They have more food for dogs in the market than for bebés!”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and it was a good assessment of American values. People loved their dogs and were willing to pamper them.

  Carolyn and I had arrived on time for dinner at six thirty. There was no sign of the McNamara family. When the clock on the wall had reached seven thirty, Mrs. Johnson finally suggested we sit down and eat. I glanced at Kevin and he shrugged, clearly disappointed. I felt disappointed too, and frustrated.

  “I had hoped that Mr. McNamara would come,” I said to Estela. “I was surprised that he said he would, but I knew it was a long shot.”

  Kevin’s mother forced a smile and nodded. Then she gestured to the table. Life moved on.

  We sat down and the grandmother had just placed a tureen of soup in the middle of the table when the doorbell rang. I caught my breath, and for a long moment we all froze around the table. Then Kevin’s mom wiped her hands on the front of her dress and went to answer the door.

  The suit McNamara wore, a light brown double breasted with patch pockets, looked at least a size too large for him. The shirt he wore looked clean but not crisp. I knew he was uncomfortable as he shifted from foot to foot during the introductions. We sat with me, Carolyn, and Kevin’s grandmother on one side of the table, the McNamaras at the other side, and Kevin and his mother at either end.

  Christy’s mom, close up, was an attractive woman. She had wispy brown hair just long enough to touch the bottom of her jawline. Her face was thin, youthful looking, with a touch of makeup. I imagined Christy making her mother up.

  But it was her hands that I noticed most. It was as if there was no place for them. She put them on the table, then on her lap, then folded and unfolded them inches from the table. She had smiled nervously at everyone as she was being introduced, making sure not to make too much eye contact.

  “It’s avocado soup,” Kevin’s mom said. “Kevin loves anything with avocados in it.”

  “He’s a dreamer,” his grandmother said, rubbing his head in a way that I knew he didn’t want Christy to see. “Everything is too much, like Florentino Ariza in . . . I don’t remember the book. But he falls in love with every star and every moon he sees. Isn’t that right, Kevin?”

  “Abuela!” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t fall in . . . ”

  “I like romantic boys,” Carolyn said. “I used to go out with a boy who used to tell me that my teeth were like pearls and my eyes were like precious jewels. He owned a pawn shop when he grew up.”

  I glanced over at Christy’s father. He was staring down at his plate, and I was sure he was thinking the whole idea of coming to the dinner had been a mistake.

  “When Kevin’s father was really young . . . ” Kevin’s mom sat down at the table and in a minute, Kevin’s mom, Carolyn, and his grandmother were deep into a discussion about boys they had known when they were young. Christy’s mom sat shoulders slumped, wringing her hands in her lap.

  McNamara was sitting next to his wife and keeping a close eye on her. I saw his jaw tightening and relaxing, as if he were trying hard to control himself. Christy was eating the avocado soup, clearly tense, watching her mother.

  I tried to think of something to say to Mr. McNamara, but everything I thought of sounded stupid even before I opened my mouth. I wanted to sneak a peek at the clock. I started doing the math. Fifteen minutes for the soup. Thirty minutes for the main course. Twenty minutes for dessert. Twenty minutes for polite conversation, and then two hours of Carolyn’s mouth before I got to sleep.

  “Do you like avocados?”

  Silence.

  I looked up and saw that Kevin’s grandmother was talking to Mrs. McNamara.

  “Do you like avocados?” she asked again.

  “She doesn’t like soup very much,” Mr. McNamara interjected.

  “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Mrs. McNamara lifted her head. “That was the name of the book. Love in the Time of Cholera.”

  “That was it!” Kevin’s grandmother’s face lit up. “Did you read that book? I have it in Spanish. That man, Florentino, I could have married. Of course, I wouldn’t have married him, but I could have. You know what I mean?”

  “I do. He was a wonderful character,” Mrs. McNamara said.

  And then the conversation was between Kevin’s grandmother and Mrs. McNamara at one end of the table and Carolyn and Kevin’s mother on the other end.

  “You do the math?” Kevin was talking to Christy.

  She shook her head no.

  Okay, everybody was talking except me and McNamara.

  I decided to take a chance.

  “You want to grab some air?” I asked, standing.

  He hesitated, and for a moment I thought I had lost him. I gave him a nod and started toward the door. He came.

  Somebody in the neighborhood had cut their grass that afternoon, and the smell was sweet in the warm summer air. In the distance, a half-moon hung like it was painted over the houses.

  “You know, there’s help for people who have problems with their nerves,” I said. “A captain from the force—real good guy—went over to that medical center off the service road that leads to the mall. They helped him a lot when he was dealing with a bout of depression.”

  “You’re all up in my business, ain’t you?” McNamara came back.

  “You think that’s because of all the years I’ve had as a cop?” I asked. “Maybe I got the habit?”

  He patted his pockets, then shook his head. “I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be giving up smoking.”

  “That’s good,” I said, trying to think of something else to say.

  “Yeah, I guess,” McNamara said. We turned and went back inside Kevin’s house.

  I tried again to come up with something to say and couldn’t. He didn’t say anything, either, and I
hoped he was feeling as stupid as I was.

  The food wasn’t bad. It just seemed to me not to be real food. A little too exotic, maybe. Or a little too spicy. Or just strange, like the capers in cream. Anyway, we survived the dinner. We were having little cakes that were too sweet and wine, which was even sweeter, when McNamara said he had to leave.

  “Long day,” he grunted.

  “You have to come again.” Kevin’s grandmother patted Mrs. McNamara’s wrist.

  Mrs. McNamara smiled; she looked over at her husband, and quickly down.

  Mr. McNamara shook hands with Kevin’s people and me as quickly as he could and left with his arm around his wife’s shoulder. I followed them out onto the porch and patted Mr. McNamara’s arm. He turned, and I realized he was slightly taller than I had thought.

  “This is my first real Spanish meal,” I said quietly. “I’ll have to decide if I like it.”

  “It was okay,” he said. “I liked it.”

  “Look, if you want to talk to me anytime . . .”

  “Because of the kids?” he asked, nodding toward where Kevin and Christy stood.

  “Yeah, because of the kids,” I said. “And because I’m an easy guy to talk to.”

  I watched the McNamaras as they walked away, looking for clues to how things had gone, but there weren’t many. I liked his referring to Kevin and his daughter as “the kids,” but I didn’t want to read too much into it.

  Carolyn and I stayed for a while longer before leaving, but not without a plate full of Colombian goodies to eat later.

  “So, how did you like the food?” Carolyn asked as we reached the short stretch of highway on the way home.

  “Good,” I said.

  “You ate enough of it,” she said. “That’s probably why they gave you that plate to take home. I’ll bet they’re still talking about how you gobbled up that chicken.”

  “Carolyn, I did not gobble up the chicken,” I said. “It’s only polite to eat what you’re given.”

  “And when she asked you if you wanted some more, you said yes, and she piled your plate up and you downed that like there was no tomorrow,” my wife went on.