Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [3]
It was Casey who greeted him first today, jumping on him the minute he came through the front door, as if to say, Where have you been all day?
His mom was right behind, asking how school had gone, the way she did every day, the way she probably would until he stopped being the new kid.
Whenever that was.
Usually he’d just tell her fine and go straight to the cookies. But today he surprised her.
“Crazy,” he said.
“Good crazy or bad crazy?” His mom was small, the way he was, and smart about practically everything. If that wasn’t enough, people said Scott looked like her, too.
They were in the kitchen. It wasn’t a special occasion that Scott could think of, but there on the table was what she called her Amazing Chocolate Cake.
“Both,” Scott said, and then told her everything that had happened with Jimmy and Casey’s picture and Chris Conlan.
“You’ve mentioned this Chris before,” she said, “right?”
“Mom,” he said, “he’s the man.”
“And he stood up for you this way in front of all the other kids?”
“Like I said, crazy, right?”
“Doing the right thing is never crazy,” his mom said. “Young Mr. Conlan doing what he did, well, that just says to me if he hadn’t, that would have been crazy.”
“Mom,” he said, “you’re the brain around here.”
She smiled at him. “Don’t tell your father.”
“Maybe it’s going to be okay at this school after all,” Scott said.
He was already tearing into the huge piece of Amazing Chocolate Cake she’d cut for him. When he looked up, she was still smiling at him.
“You think?” she said.
Then she said, “You know, if you want, I could call Chris’s mom . . .”
“No,” Scott said. “No, no, no.”
“A mouthful of cake and a mouthful of no,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Got carried away there.”
“Runaway Mom,” Scott said.
“Leaving the kitchen now,” she said, backing away. “You and Case going out to play ball when you finish eating?”
Scott smiled at her now. “If the dog doesn’t practice,” he said, “how’s he going to get better at football?”
“You make a good point,” she said, smiling.
There were woods behind their house and a pond on the other side of the woods. But between the trees and the water was a small clearing that Scott’s dad made sure was mowed with the rest of their lawn.
“Got to take good care of your field of dreams,” his dad would say.
It was Scott Parry’s field of dreams.
This was where he would go with Casey and pretend he was a football player.
That he was one of the guys.
His dad had measured out the distances, painted an outline for an end zone, painted perfectly straight yard lines across the field that stretched out thirty yards. He’d even used the kind of chalk roller they used on tennis courts and baseball fields, so that Scott could make the lines white again when they started to fade.
The best part was at the back of the end zone. That’s where the goalposts were, the ones his dad had put up himself, and the big old tire hanging from the crossbar.
The tire was Scott’s target.
He would drop back and pretend he was throwing from the pocket. Or he’d roll out to his left or right, pretend he was being chased by some crazed guys on defense—a whole gang of Jimmy Dolans—and give himself points if one of his passes connected anyplace on the tire.
But the biggest victory, the pretend-the-crowd-goes-wild victory, was reserved for when he somehow threw the ball through the opening without touching anything, like a game-winning swish in basketball as the clock runs out. It didn’t happen very often, but Scott kept trying. He blamed his lack of accuracy on the size of his hands. They were too small to get a good grip on the ball or to throw a tight spiral except by accident.
He kept practicing, anyway.
“It’s what you do in sports, whether you’re the star of the team or somebody at the end of the bench,” his dad always told him. “You keep trying.”
“Even if I grow,” Scott would say to his dad sometimes, “I’ll never be as good at football as you were.”
“Be as good as you can be, kiddo,” his dad would say, “and I’ll be one happy