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.
I was impressed.
He gestured for me to stand and take off my shoes. “I’m going to toss you this little guy. Catch him on your foot and cradle him. Don’t break him.”
There was no way I could do that! I tried anyway, but as I’d expected, it broke, making a gooey mess all over my bare foot. “It didn’t work,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“You didn’t do it right” was all he said. He tossed another into the air for me to catch. It made another yellow, yolky mess at my feet.
“It’s impossible,” I wailed.
“I know,” he agreed, tossing a third egg into the air. “Again.”
The egg tossing went on for the rest of the afternoon. I didn’t catch one of them.
Catching the egg became an obsession with me. I knew it killed Mom to see all those eggs going to waste, and I appreciated that she didn’t complain. One Saturday afternoon we were out on the front porch together. I was trying to catch an egg while she folded laundry. “I haven’t seen Jena in a while,” she commented.
“Me, neither,” I said, sadly. Splat! The broken egg slid down the porch steps. Mom gave a look and sighed, but she didn’t say a word.
As she walked away with the basket of laundry, I tried one more egg.
Got it!
Yes!
Twelve
Now the trick was to get it every time. That would take practice.
It wasn’t easy throwing and catching on my own. I needed someone to throw for me. I couldn’t ask Mom, and Dad had taken Mike and Daniel to another dentist appointment. It wasn’t something I could ask Jena to do, either. There was only one person who might be home and might be willing: Peter.
I walked to his house, which was only around the corner. I knew where he lived, but I hadn’t been there in years. When I got there, he was in his garage, which was set up for a garage band. I didn’t even know he played. “Hi,” I said, feeling sort of funny. “I should have called, but then I realized I’ve never called you. So here I am.”
He was surprised to see me but he smiled, waiting for me to explain why I was there. I held up my carton of eggs. “You cooking something?” he asked.
“Nope. Toss me one,” I said, handing him the carton. He looked really confused as he took out one of the eggs. “Go ahead,” I prodded him as I slipped out of my flip-flops. “Toss it to me.”
He tossed it and I missed, making a big yellow mark on his driveway. “Again,” I requested.
Peter glanced around at his parents’ nice car parked nearby. “Careful,” he said nervously. He tossed the egg and I missed. Some of it splattered onto the car.
“Forget the car,” Peter said, and we both laughed. He took off his sneakers and wanted to try. As I had, he missed at first, but it didn’t take him as long as it had taken me to start catching them. Soon we were tossing them back and forth with our bare feet there in his driveway.
“Do you think I have a chance at the boys’ Varsity team?” I asked.
“At trying out or making the team?” he asked, catching an egg with his feet.
“How would the other guys feel?” I asked.
“Worried about all of them or just one?” he countered. We both knew he was talking about Kyle. “Just be a great player,” he advised.
“I’m going to be better than you,” I warned him, keeping the egg volley going.
“That won’t be too hard,” he said with a grin.
I admired that he could joke about the fact that he never made first-string. He was on the bench most of the time. “You stay on the team—why?” I asked as gently as I could. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I was curious.
“Because my dad thinks I should quit,” he joked.
I shot him a disbelieving look. That couldn’t possibly be the only reason.
“I play because there’s always next year, and I’m an optimist,” he amended, more honestly this time.
The egg that we’d kept going for a good five minutes shattered right between us. “Not a bad
run,” he said, taking another one out of the carton.
“Not bad at all,” I agreed. I was seeing him in a new light, maybe really seeing him for the first time. He was thoughtful and funny, and a rebel in his own way. No wonder he’d been Johnny’s best friend. “You’re nice,” I complimented him sincerely.
That made him smile. “I’m always nice—to you,” he said.
It was true; he always had been nice to me—really nice. Why had I been so thick-headed that I’d never noticed it before?
We looked down at the sea of broken eggs around us. What a mess! I’d have to help him clean it up.
Peter looked at me with a serious expression. “If you’re going to play with the guys, you need to train with them,” he said.
At that moment, I got it. Dad was still not training me full out. He was probably afraid the boys would cream me, as they’d tried to do that day at the stadium. I now understood something about Dad that I hadn’t known before. He wasn’t holding back because he didn’t believe in me, not entirely. He just didn’t want me to get hurt—my feelings or my body. I didn’t blame him anymore, but it was time to stop holding back. I am a much better player now.
I thanked Peter and headed for home. Dad was there. He had climbed a tall ladder to trim the front hedges.
The first thing I did was check the mailbox to see if I’d gotten anything from the School Board. I was waiting for a reply to my request to try out for the team. There was no letter from them.
The next thing I did was shoot a soccer ball right at Dad’s ladder. “Watch it!” he shouted.
“Dad,” I said, grinning up at him. “I’m ready.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, going back to clipping the hedges.
“I’m ready for my real training,” I explained.
He froze right there, knowing exactly what I meant. He must have been afraid this moment would come, and now it had. “I don’t want to just stay alive out there,” I said. “I want to know how to score, how to win.”
I knew I was right. Dad knew it, too. Phase two of my soccer training was about to begin.
Thirteen
Summer came and summer school began. My extra work had been too little too late. Mr. Clark just couldn’t find enough points to pass me. Even with my summer school work, I managed to take advantage of the extra daylight hours for training.
At my suggestion, Dad recruited Peter to help me. He was supposed to give me a taste of real play, but sometimes he just couldn’t bring himself to be tough with me. “Peter!” Dad would scold him when he saw him going easy on me. “You’re not helping anyone!”
After he was reprimanded, which seemed to happen at least once a session, Peter would play with everything he had. When he did, I couldn’t touch him. And he was a guy who mostly warmed the bench!
“Be aggressive,” Dad coached. “Think of the ball as life or death. You have to win it. You’ve got to believe you can take the ball.”
I wanted to believe. I did believe. But it just didn’t happen.
Dad was getting frustrated. “Help me out here,” he said to me one day when Peter had taken the ball from me for about the tenth time. “Weren’t you always playing with Johnny?”
“We fooled around,” I replied. “We played for fun.”
“You did drills?” he asked.
“We didn’t call them that,” I said.
Dad sighed, seemingly at a loss for what to do next. “How did you teach Johnny?” I asked.
“I didn’t. He was a natural, remember?” Dad said.
Dad did everything he could think of to get me to be more aggressive. He and Peter even tried pushing me so I’d get mad and push back. I did get angry and shove, throwing my weight into them, but I could barely budge them. They were just bigger and heavier!
We kept working even after Peter had to go home. Dad tried another tactic. He concentrated on ways for me to get my opponent off balance, figuring that might equalize the difference in our sizes. “Get your opponent moving one way. Then, when his weight shifts, cut the ball,” he instructed.
It would have worked, I suppose, but I couldn’t get the timing right. I had to get the ball the moment the opponent shifted weight, and I always seemed to be a little behind or a little ahead.
Dad was trying everything he could think of, and his patience held out for a long time. Finally, though, he cracked. “Watch what I do and do it!” he shouted at me. He threw me the ball, and once again I headed for the goal. He barreled toward me, hitting me with his shoulder. I fell over onto my rear end, sliding in the dirt.
Mom must have been watching from the kitchen window and seen Dad knock me down. “Time to stop,” she said, coming out onto the back stoop.
“In a minute,” Dad told her.
She gestured toward me, sitting on the ground. “It’s too much for her.”
Her words made me get to my feet. “Does it look like it’s too much?” Dad argued as I walked toward him. He tossed me the ball. “Try it again.”
My hip hurt from the fall. The palms of my hands were scraped. But I felt happy, happy to be working so hard at something I cared so much about, happy to care about something again.
And, as frustrated as he was, Dad seemed happy, too. Soccer was what he loved and when he threw himself into it, he seemed most alive.
I don’t think Mom was too happy, though. Mostly, she seemed worried, worried about me and about money. She seemed tired, too. She stood there that day watching us for another few minutes, and then she headed off for her second job at the hospital. In a way, this training was as hard on her as it was on Dad and me, maybe harder. I knew that if I succeeded—when I succeeded—I’d owe the success as much to her as to Dad.
That evening, Mike was setting up our frozen dinners on TV trays when I came into the room. “Dad found the movie reel with Pelé on it,” he told me.
Instantly my mind flashed to the poster of the soccer star that had hung in Johnny’s room. Dad had told me he’d once seen Pelé play and had filmed part of the game, though I’d never seen the actual film.
We got our suppers and Dad began the movie. Daniel banged my shoulder when Pelé came on. “See him?”
“Keep watching,” Dad said to me. On the screen, Pelé was tracking a much bigger opponent. The player knocked him down, but Pelé sprang back up, stole the ball, and scored.
“Pelé wasn’t tall or fast, but he had it up here,” Dad said, tapping his forehead. “And he had it in here,” he added, pointing to his heart. “He made the impossible possible.” He turned his attention back to the screen. “Look how he absorbs that guy’s energy and turns it on him!”
Dad got up and began to pace as he watched Pelé in action. “In every game there’s one moment when one player can change everything. Di momento de gracia.”
Dad rewound the film and gestured for me to come beside him so we could look at it together. This time he ran the scene of Pelé taking the ball from the larger player in slow motion. “Right there, when that guy hesitates…that’s the moment, when everything sets up perfect and then pauses. Pelé feels it.”
I watched again as Pelé scored and his teammates went wild with joy.
“The moment of grace,” Dad said. He turned to me. “It’s where you got your name.”
I looked up at him, totally surprised. No one had ever told me that about my name before.
He smiled at me. “It’s how I felt the day you were born. I knew that anything was possible.”
And all the while I had thought he hadn’t even noticed.
After I saw the film of Pelé, something clicked in my head. I got it. I saw what he was doing. Not that there wasn’t still a ton of work to do. It was fun, though, because everyone was helping me do it.
Peter came over every day and worked just with me or with me and Dad. He stopped going easy on me, and I wanted to think it was because he didn’t have to anymore.
Mike and Daniel even wanted to practice with me. Mom wasn’t too crazy about it
when Mike and I would stand at the top and bottom of the stairs, chucking the ball back and forth, or when Daniel and I would dribble it through the house, but she would only roll her eyes and walk through, deftly stepping over the ball.
One day Dad even bought me my own pair of cleats. Both of us made sure not to get all mushy about it. But we both knew what it meant. I especially appreciated it because I knew money was so tight with Dad out of work.
That night, I put Johnny’s cleats under my bed and tried on the new ones. They were a much better fit.
Johnny’s hawk squawked from his cage. He seemed to approve of the new shoes. I got up and gave him a treat, noticing how big he’d grown. Soon he would be too big for the cage. I didn’t think he could fly yet. He only hopped around when I let him out of the cage. But I hadn’t tested him lately. I made a note to myself to make time to take him outside to see what he would do.
The next morning, I came in to breakfast dribbling the ball between my feet. I was in a good mood and eager to begin the day’s practice session.
Everyone but Mom was already at the table. The first thing I noticed was that Mike and Daniel weren’t fighting over who got to read the back of the cereal box, their usual routine. Instead, they were sitting there, eating without looking up.
I glanced at Dad to question what was going on, and he wore a similarly serious expression. I noticed he held an opened envelope in his hand. “What?” I asked, suddenly worried.
“It came today,” Dad said, glancing at the letter in his hand. “They’re not going to let you play.”
“What? No…” I sputtered as I snapped the envelope away from him. Opening it, I scanned the writing. “How could they turn me down?” I cried indignantly.
“I got your hopes up,” Dad said sadly. “I’m sorry. Grace, you’re in great shape,” he continued. “You can do something else. I talked to the girls’ field hockey coach, and he said he’d be happy to have you try out.”