I went home after school and took a nap for three hours. In doing so, I missed the traditional night-before-the-game dinner at Steve’s Pizza.
For the last couple of falls, every Thursday, day before game day, after the team walk-through out on the practice field, Twiggs, Riley, and I went to Steve’s Pizza. Every Thursday we each ate an entire large pizza.
It probably wasn’t good for us, physically. But it was good for our spirits. We’d talk about football and school and sometimes Twiggs and Riley would talk about girls (and I’d listen and smile, but say nothing about Grace). It worked for us. Since moving to varsity sophomore year, we’d only lost six games. Five were when we were sophomores, and just one, the state semifinals, last year.
Eating pizza at Steve’s the day before a game was part of our victorious tradition. I broke it.
Where the hell are you? Riley texted.
Why didn’t you tell us you had a concussion, dude? Twiggs asked.
Sorry. I don’t know. I’m resting up. I’m a little messed up.
Neither Riley nor Twiggs replied.
I lost my breath. I stared at the walls of my bedroom. It was getting dark, sun going down.
My phone buzzed. I looked at the screen, hoped it was my friends. But it wasn’t. Coach Conti from Cornell wrote:
How about tonight? Are your parents home? Let’s get you set up for your visit!
Then, all at once, two other texts blew in. The first was from a number I didn’t recognize.
I saw you watching me. Why? Don’t answer. Ask yourself.
I knew who it was from. Her identity was confirmed a second later.
I got this message from my dad:
Are you available tonight? Grace Carey is concerned about your behavior. Could you come over, please?
Grace Carey? What the hell did Dad have to do with Grace? She was at Grandma’s house two days ago and now Dad was texting me on her behalf? What the hell was that about?
Yeah. Okay. I’ll be over.
Mom stays at work late on Thursdays to meet with clients who can’t meet during business hours. So I didn’t have to explain why I was going to Dad’s place or, conversely, to lie to her about going.
Unfortunately, Mom had taken her car. I went into the garage and climbed on my old, barely used eighth-grade bike and made my way across town. The rusty heap creaked underneath me. Dad lives in an efficiency apartment above his engineering department colleague’s garage. The place is a couple miles away, across the street from campus.
I could’ve thought of many things while biking. Riley and Twiggs. Coach Conti and Cornell. Mom, Coach Reynolds, or the physics test I was supposed to take the next day. But I didn’t think of any of that. Instead, I felt good, pumping the creaking pedals, the wind blowing around me, picking up speed. Movement makes me calm.
I hid my bike under the rickety staircase that leads to Dad’s place. I climbed the stairs, entered without knocking. Dad sat on the couch, watching MSNBC, eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (he has the taste buds of a fourth grader). There were engineering texts and student assignments on graph paper covering the coffee table in front of him.
He looked up. “The Republicans are no longer Republicans,” he said. “They’ve turned into goddamn fascists. All they care about is keeping the rich, rich.”
“Same old same old,” I said.
“The hell it is,” he shouted. “Everybody has to get their damn heads out of their damn asses, do you understand? Look at this!” He turned up the volume and the people on a panel spoke animatedly about whatever it was that had jacked Dad up.
I watched but didn’t listen. This is one of the ways my family had gone crazy. Politics. What’s stupid is they’re all Democrats but still hate each other. Mom hates Bernie Sanders as much as she hates Trump. Dad thinks the Clintons destroyed the party. Grandma loves Joe Biden but thinks all the other national politicians are bad for American business, which makes both Mom and Dad call her a fascist. This is another reason they have a hard time sitting in a room together.
I miss Grandpa John. He wouldn’t have put up with the family coming apart because of politics. He believed everybody has a “glass ass,” which meant a weak spot. Instead of kicking at a person’s glass ass, he said, we should remember that we’ve got one, too, and that someone might come along and kick ours if we’re not smart enough to know we’re not perfect ourselves.
“Hand out cushions for their glass asses. That’s one way to be a good friend,” he told me after he calmed a fight between Mom and Melinda one Thanksgiving.
Grandpa John was military and a cop and about as tough as a dude could be, but he was nice to the bone, too. He literally tried to do good.
Speaking of good. Maybe Dad was trying to do good.
I sat down on a beat-up office chair next to the coffee table. “You wanted to see me?” I said over the noise.
Dad looked up, stunned out of his TV trance. He reached for the remote and turned the volume down. “Yes I did. Why in the hell would you hide behind Dairy Queen and jump out at Grace Carey?” he asked. “What were you doing away from school? Why weren’t you at practice? What is going on?”
“I have a concussion. I can’t practice,” I said.
“You’re still on the team. You don’t leave the team just because you’re injured. Or are you quitting because things are tough for you for the first time?”
“Are you talking about tough in football or tough in life, generally?” I asked.
“Football!” he shouted.
He had quit my family, left me behind, started a new life, moved into a tiny apartment that made it impossible for me to stay overnight. I glared at him. He’d made my life tough.
“So? What do you have to say, Isaiah?”
I sniffed. Focused. “Coach Reynolds asked me to pick up his daughter from piano lessons, since I couldn’t practice with the team. I was early, so I went on a walk to kill time. I didn’t mean to scare Grace. I didn’t even know she was working.”
“Really?” Dad asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was just a weird situation.”
“Well, good. But . . . listen. So you know . . . there are just some things you should know about Grace,” he said.
“Why? I barely think about her now.”
“Good. She doesn’t want you to think about her.”
My stomach tightened. “That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t. Ever.”
“Then what in the hell made you hide behind a bush next to Dairy Queen?” he asked.
“I already explained that. What’s the deal with Grace? Why is it such a big deal?”
“Grace thinks of you as her role model,” Dad said.
My mouth opened, but no words fell out.
“The way you’ve turned your life around, Isaiah. What you’ve been able to do.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”
“It is. But I’m worried for her. I don’t have to tell you, Grace doesn’t come to the table with the same good cards you were dealt.”
“What good cards are those?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Isaiah,” Dad said. “You might have been beat up when you came to the table to play, but you had a great set of cards.”
“My dead sister card? My murdered grandpa card? My parents who hated me? Are those the cards you’re referring to?”
Dad took in my words for a moment. His face reddened. “Parents who hated you?”
“You sent me away.”
“You needed help. We couldn’t provide the help you needed,” Dad said.
“Mom brought me home before I completed the treatment program.”
“She missed you, Isaiah.”
“Isn’t that selfish?”
Dad breathed for a moment. “Listen to me. Your mother had lost her daughter. She was wrecked. She’s still wrecked if you haven’t noticed.”
Is that why you left? I thought. Your wife was too damaged for you to deal with anymore? “I know,” I said. “I feel sorry for Mom.”
“I do, too,” Dad said. “But Grace’s situation is different than yours. There are bad things happening in that house. Ongoing, you know? An ongoing tragedy.”
I nodded. “Grace’s mom is a train wreck.”
“Nothing like that piece-of-trash stepfather of hers.”
“He’s bad. I know.”
“You can’t possibly understand how bad, Isaiah,” Dad said.
“Uh” is all I could muster.
“His presence in the house made it impossible for Grace to graduate from high school, right? It makes it impossible for her to be safe. That’s not her fault.”
“Yeah,” I said. How did he know this stuff?
Dad nodded, showing he knew more. “Grace has been on her own since she was sixteen. Do you know she bought her own groceries with her Dairy Queen money because these supposed adults in her house wouldn’t feed her?”
“I know,” I said. “We were friends then.”
“Lucky for Grace . . . somehow your fascist grandmother has seen fit to pay her well and to give her more and more responsibility and pay her better. That church you’ve started going to has given her an AA group to attend.”
“Grandma’s church. I just drive Grandma. It’s not my church.” This was sort of a lie. “Don’t worry.”
Dad looked confused. “Why would I worry?”
“Because you’re Jewish.”
“I’m as Jewish as your mother is Christian. I don’t give a shit what you do if it gives you some joy or sustenance. Don’t you know that?”
“I know,” I said, although this was news to me.
“Isaiah, Grace earned her GED last spring. Your grandmother asked me to step in and help get her ready for college. I got Grace into an ACT prep course over the summer.” Dad began to tear up. He had a hard time speaking. “She got her scores on Monday. She did well.”
“On the ACT?”
“Twenty-five,” Dad said. “A twenty-five from nothing.”
“That’s because . . . you and Grandma have been helping Grace. You didn’t tell me anything about it.”
“Why would I? You don’t think about Grace,” Dad said.
“But I care about her. Probably more than you do.”
“Not more than Gin. Did you know your grandmother provides health insurance to her full-time employees? And that she only has one full-time employee? She pays for Grace’s health insurance. That insurance has allowed Grace to go into therapy.”
“Grandma says therapy is bullshit,” I said. “She told Mom it’s bullshit.”
“Apparently Gin has different rules for different people. She’s encouraged Grace to go to therapy. Grace has been working hard on it. And . . . and I shouldn’t tell you this—Grace took me into her confidence—but I want to protect her . . . and you, so I’m going to say this. You don’t think about Grace, but she thinks about you. You’re in her thoughts constantly. Some tripped-up part of her believes you’re her destiny. That you make everything better. She thinks you saved her from suicide back when she was . . .”
I stood up. “I need to see her right now,” I said.
Dad stood up. “What?”
“I want to see her.”
“No. Are you listening, Isaiah?”
“She needs me,” I said.
“Exactly wrong. She needs to leave you behind like you left her behind. I’m telling you to stay away from her, on the off chance that you weren’t, in fact, helping your coach yesterday, but were, in fact, hiding behind Dairy Queen so you could force an encounter with Grace.”
“I wasn’t trying to force anything.”
“Good, because Grace doesn’t need . . . She cannot have you barreling in there and messing her up, Isaiah. She’s close to pulling herself out. There’s no future between the two of you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You said you don’t think about her.”
“Why shouldn’t we have a future?”
Dad shook his head, like he was trying to shake out cobwebs. “Because you’re you. You’re not going to be here after this year, Isaiah. You’ll go to college and then start your adult life someplace else. It won’t be here. What’s here for you? But for Grace? What else does she have? She may well end up owning the Dairy Queen.”
“Wait. Our Dairy Queen?”
“Your grandmother’s Dairy Queen.”
“Our family’s Dairy Queen.”
“You haven’t set foot in Dairy Queen for years.”
“It’s more my Dairy Queen than Grace’s,” I spat.
Dad sort of laughed. It was an odd reaction. “Isaiah? What is wrong with you?” he asked.
“Mom wants me to stay here for college.”
“So? Your mother doesn’t choose your college.”
“I’m staying here. I won’t leave here. I deserve some happiness.”
“Bullshit,” Dad said. “Why would you stay here? You could go to Madison to study or play football at a great Division III school somewhere. You can’t stay here. That’s ridiculous.”
“I committed to Bluffton.”
“Not true. I’ve told Coach Reed a thousand times not to count on you staying in town.”
“Have you talked to Mom ever?” I said.
“She’s saying you have to stay here?” Dad asked. “What in the hell is going on in that house of yours? Why aren’t we talking about this? Have you looked at other colleges, Isaiah? Haven’t you been recruited?”
“Yes.”
“Well?” Dad asked.
“I told them I’m staying here.”
“Why? What’s your ACT? You haven’t even told me your ACT. Is it okay? You could go to New York City or Houston or Boston, Isaiah. Seattle! Portland! I know you get good grades.”
“Do you?” I said.
“Of course I do. So?”
“So what?” I said.
“Isaiah, come on,” Dad said. “You own your future. No one else does.”
I took in a deep breath. This is the thought that bloomed in my cracked bell: Grace and I could own Dairy Queen together. Good life. Perfect. Meaningful. My next life. “I have to go,” I said.
“No,” Dad said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do not go and see Grace. Please,” Dad said.
“I just want to go think.” I felt dizzy. I don’t think it had to do with the concussion. But I am injured. My bell began cracking a long time ago. Before the hit in the Lancaster game. The dizziness didn’t have to come from an injury on the field to be a symptom of a grave injury. My bell is broken.
I scrambled to the door. Dad followed behind me, talking the whole way.
“You won’t go see Grace? We can talk more about this. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I’ve been helping her. I’ve always felt for the girl. I’ve always thought she was more positive than negative in your life. Just let her . . . let her breathe, okay?”
“I just want to think,” I repeated.
I opened the door.
Dad called out behind me, “Will you please tell me your goddamn ACT score?”
And, for some reason, I didn’t lie. “Thirty-two,” I shouted over my shoulder.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Isaiah!” he yelled.
ACT? Who cares?
No more football?
Then Grace. Because why not? Everything is stupid. The world is stupid. There is no point to this endless suffering and bullshit.
I biked around town for two hours without doing it, without going to see Grace, but the voice in my head said, do it. I tried to think about other things, get my mind to relax, but there was no good place for my mind to go.
When I got home, instead of going inside, I sat down on the cold back stoop and googled how many kids die in car accidents each year. Answer? A lot. So damn many. Thousands.