Off the Field

Chapter One

“So you agree with me?” I called after her.

She fluttered her fingers in a wave without looking back, and I grinned, making my way up to my door. As I stepped inside, I peeled off my soaked shirt and threw it on the stairs before walking down to the kitchen. I headed straight to the fridge and located a blue Gatorade, unscrewing the cap and drinking deeply.

My dad sat at the table with a cup of coffee, buried behind the newspaper. “Good run?” he asked, flipping a page. I shrugged a shoulder, still drinking, and now he looked up at me. “I asked you a question. It’s polite to answer.”

“Sorry that I was drinking,” I said after swallowing, slapping the Gatorade down on the counter. “Next time I’ll just choke, okay?”

“The attitude is unnecessary, thank you.” My dad folded the newspaper in half, sipping the last of his coffee. “Hope you didn’t wear yourself out before practice this afternoon.”

“It wasn’t that hard a run,” I lied, feeling my calves aching. “I’ll be fine.”

My mom came into the kitchen behind me, saying, “Danny, please put on a shirt, dear, that’s not appropriate for the household. Did you have a good run? Make sure you drink the protein shake I made for you – it’s in the fridge. And Caleb has to be at his practice around the same time as yours, so could you please drop him off?”

Eight in the morning and already she was doing everything at once. That was my mom.

“Thanks, Ma,” I said as I fished the protein shake out of the fridge and snuck a kiss onto her cheek, even though she tried to shy away from my sweaty body. “You’re the best.”

She smiled and waved me off, handing me a straw. I leaned against the counter as I sipped the shake, but Mom shooed me to the kitchen table; she had this thing about standing and eating. As I sat down, she picked up my dad’s coffee cup and brought it to the dishwasher, still speaking to me.

“Jack was disappointed that you didn’t come with us to drop him off yesterday.”

I rolled my eyes. “Jack was fine. He’s finally off at college – it’s what he always wanted, isn’t it? He’s not going to miss me.”

“You’d be surprised,” said my dad, getting to his feet and straightening his tie against his crisp white shirt. “It’ll hit you at some point. I think the little kids are already missing him – Mo cried the whole way home.”

Mo, my baby sister, was only eighteen months, so I doubted he really knew what she had been crying about. But I just sipped my protein shake in silence, picturing Jack’s serious face from the day before when he’d spoken to me right before he’d left.

“Win that championship for me, Dan, okay? It’s up to you now. You owe me.”

As if I didn’t already know that. As if I didn’t know that I was the one who had screwed up our one shot the year before. As if I’d forgotten the look on Jack’s face when the opposite team had gotten ahead of us within a minute of the end of the game – and then, with ten seconds to go, when I had missed my own shot by an inch.