Jay nodded thoughtfully, as though he were beginning to get the picture. Pastor Dennis sat back down, and Tim made his way to an empty chair next to Marty Materia, who clapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “Way to go.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Pastor Dennis went on, still directing his comments to Jay. “What we do isn’t easy. It’s hard not to get lazy and
forget our purpose. It’s tempting to turn on the cruise control and let the car drive itself for a while.”
Pastor Dennis looked at the floor and shook his head.
“I’m talking from experience. I haven’t really discussed this with anyone but God and my wife, but these past few months, I’ve been a little lost. Don’t get me wrong—we’re growing, picking up lots of new members, but it was starting to feel like we were going soft like all these other so-called Christian churches. I mean, the reason we’re doing so well is because we made waves—we shook things up in this town and convinced maybe 2 percent of the people to really look at the way they were living; and then we showed them that there’s a better way in Christ.
“But I’ve known for a long time that we needed some new tactics, a way to get through to the 98 percent of the people who’ve been tuning us out. But for some reason I was stumped. The Lord just wasn’t telling me what to do. I thought He’d abandoned me, but I see now that He was just instructing me to be patient, to wait for one of my warriors to step up and relieve me of my burden. Because this church isn’t about me, it’s about us. What we can do together to be instruments of God’s will.
“So I want you all to think about the example Tim has set for us. If you coach a Little League team, or a soccer team, or Pop Warner football, or whatever, that’s great—now you know what to do. And if you don’t coach, think about signing up, because it’s a wonderful opportunity to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the children of your community, the ones whose parents won’t let them hear it because they’re the ones who need it most. And if the powers that be don’t like it, if they want to stop good Christian citizens from saying a simple prayer at a youth sporting event, I say bring it on. That’s a fight we want to be having.”
Pastor Dennis turned to Tim.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re an inspiration to everyone in this room.”
Tim shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” he explained.
“Don’t listen to him,” Pastor Dennis told Jay. “Any time a man sticks his neck out for the Lord, trust me, that is a
very
big deal.”
ABBY COULDN’T
understand why Tim didn’t have satellite radio in his car. As she frequently pointed out, her mother had XM in her Volvo and her stepdad had Sirius in his Lexus, and both services had top-forty channels way cooler than the crappy FM station she was forced to listen to in the Saturn now that Tim had banned her iPod (he’d gotten sick of waiting for her to remove the earbuds every time he asked a question). Even so, her scorn for the idiot deejays and the tacky commercials didn’t stop her from turning on WRZO before they were even out of the driveway, cranking up the volume and singing along with the soulless ballad that came blasting out of his tinny sound system.
Tim made an effort to humor her—he hated being maneuvered into the role of Uptight Dad—but he couldn’t help sensing something slightly hostile in the way she closed her eyes and swayed in her seat, a deliberate attempt to shut him out, or at least keep the conversation to a minimum. They hadn’t seen each other in a week; it wouldn’t kill her to talk to him for a few minutes. He waited for the song to end, then lowered the volume. Abby opened her mouth to protest, then decided to let it go.
“So,” he said. “How was school this week?”
“All right.”
“Anything interesting happen?”
“Not really.”
“Anything funny?”
“It was just school, Dad.”
They enacted this tooth-pulling ritual every week without a whole lot of variation. He’d hoped things would improve when she moved to
the front seat—she’d only gotten the pediatrician’s okay a month ago—but having her right next to him only made him that much more aware of how little they had to talk about. These rides had been a lot easier last year, when a couple of her teammates carpooled with them—Tim had found it both amusing and instructive to listen to the three girls squeezed together in the backseat, laughing and gossiping the whole way—but neither Natalie nor Jess had qualified for the A team. Tim still missed those girls, Natalie in particular, a sweet goofy kid who would sometimes forget where she was and start turning cartwheels on the soccer field, and who thought it was hilarious to call him “Coachie-Poo.”
“Take any tests?” The only thing worse than interrogating her like this was sitting in silence, waiting for her to volunteer some information about her life.
“Just math.”
“How’d you do?”
“Eighty-seven.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“My teacher’s kind of mean, though.”
“Don’t tell me. Ms. Holly, right?”
“She’s Social Studies. Mrs. Harris is Math.”
“Harris, that’s right. I got them confused.”
Tim always felt himself at a disadvantage, discussing school with Abby. The decision to enroll her at Elmwood Academy had been made without his participation; he’d only been notified after the fact. Even now, her second year there, he still hadn’t visited the campus or met any of her teachers. All he really knew was that Elmwood had a stellar reputation—“nurturing but academically challenging,” was the word on the street—and cost nearly as much as a top-notch private college.
“They both start with H,” Abby conceded. “But Holly’s young and nice and Harris is old and crabby.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“You better.” There was a note of affectionate teasing in her voice that cheered him up a bit. “There’s gonna be a quiz.”
“You still like English best?”
“It’s not called English. It’s Language Arts.”
“Back in my day, we called it English.”
“When was that, the Middle Ages?”
“Ha-ha. So what are you studying in Language Arts?”
“We’re doing a unit on biography. This week we wrote an essay on the Man I Admire Most.”
“Man?” Tim was surprised. From what he’d heard Elmwood was a pretty PC place. “Not
person?”
“We did the Woman I Admire Most two weeks ago.”
“Oh. Who’d you choose for that?”
She hesitated.
“Mom.”
He nodded, taking this in.
“Hey, that’s great. Did, uh, everyone pick a parent or grandparent?”
“Not everyone. This one girl did Condoleezza Rice.”
“So what did you say about your mother?”
“I don’t know.” Abby sounded irritated, like he’d asked an unfair question. “Just, you know, how nice she is.”
Tim didn’t press for details. He could easily imagine Abby’s portrait of a noble single mother who goes back to work full-time after her irresponsible husband falls apart and the bank takes their house away. Times are hard, but she keeps her spirits up, never complains, not even about the shabby apartment that’s the only place she can afford, or the pathetic Mercury Tracer that keeps breaking down on her. The story comes complete with a Cinderella ending: the woman goes on a blind date with a friend of a friend, a wealthy lawyer who falls in love with her at first sight, then whisks her and her child away to a suburban castle where they live affluently ever after.
“What about the man?” he asked, as if he were simply curious, as if he
weren’t already imagining a piece of wide-lined paper, and a young girl’s careful cursive:
My parents are divorced, but my Dad is a huge presence in my life. He coaches my soccer team, and all the girls love him
. “Who’d you pick for that?”
Abby looked slightly mortified. She wasn’t always the most perceptive kid in the world, but even she seemed to have realized that the conversation had taken a problematic turn.
“It was stupid,” she said. “I couldn’t really think of anyone. I just, like, picked someone at random.”
A horrible thought came to Tim:
My stepdad is the greatest guy. He’s really fun and knows more than anyone else in the world about patents and trademarks
.
“I guess that means you didn’t write about me,” he said, hoping to defuse the tension with a joke, but not managing to sound as playful as he’d intended.
Abby turned her head, suddenly fascinated by the red brick buildings of downtown Gifford. He wondered if it was possible, if she really did admire Mitchell more than him. It was true that she spent way more time with her stepdad, and he bought her everything she wanted. But he wasn’t her father. That had to count for something.
“If you really want to know,” she said, “I wrote about Donald Trump.”
Tim’s immediate sense of relief only lasted a second or two.
“Donald Trump?
Are you kidding me?”
“He’s cool,” she said.
“He’s not
cool
, Abby. Trust me on this one.”
“Yah-huh,” she insisted. “He’s totally cool on
The Apprentice’”
“I can’t believe Donald Trump is your hero.”
“I didn’t say he was my hero. I just said I admire him.”
“For what?”
“Come on, Dad. Everybody admires him. He’s got a skyscraper, a private jet, a casino, and his own TV show. He can do whatever he wants.”
“That just means he’s rich. It doesn’t mean he’s a good person.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“I’m not jealous of Donald Trump.”
“You have to admit,” she said, “it’d be pretty cool to have a private jet.”
“I’m sure it would,” he agreed, as they pulled into the SUV-choked parking lot of Gifford Memorial Park, a six-field complex that would have been a prime soccer venue if not for the goose shit the kids were always slipping on. “I’d get one if I had a bigger garage.”
BECAUSE THERE
were never enough playing fields to go around, the Stars had to wait for a Boys U-10 game to finish before they could begin warming up. Some coaches focused on stretching and others on passing drills, but Tim liked to get in the goal and have the girls shoot on him at point-blank range. It was a good way for him to interact with his players, to see who was psyched and who might be needing a little extra motivation, which he liked to dispense in the form of some good-natured trash talk.
Tim felt his spirits lift a little as the balls began whizzing in his direction, concentrating his mind on the here and now.
We’re here to play soccer
, he reminded himself.
Just like any other week
.
“Whoa, Slinky!” he wailed, slapping down a cannon blast from Sara D’Angelo. “Take it easy on an old man.”
“Come on, Hangman!” he shouted at Hannah Friedman. “My grandma coulda stopped that, and she’s been dead for fifteen years!”
“Bring it on, Monkey!” he told Maggie Ramsey, who seemed a little more tentative than usual, as if the memory of last week’s shame hadn’t completely worn off. “Show me the Big Foot!”
Maggie smiled at him—at least he thought it was a smile; the mouth-guard made it hard to say for sure—and began dribbling toward the right corner of the goal. Tim came charging out, modeling the aggressive
goal-tending techniques he’d been working on with Louisa Zabel, but Maggie surprised him with a tricky stepover turn, suddenly reversing course to the left. Scrambling back into position, he dove for the shot, but it sailed past his outstretched fingers and into the net.
“There you go!” he gasped, pushing himself up from the grass and resting for a moment on all fours. He’d hit the ground harder than he’d anticipated and was having a little trouble catching his breath. “Just like that in the game, all right?”
He stood up gingerly, rubbing at his rib cage. At his age, he really didn’t need to be diving for saves, but he couldn’t help himself. Unlike most of his fellow coaches, he hadn’t been a jock in his younger days, hadn’t gotten the sports out of his system when he was supposed to. For guys like Jerry Writzker of Bridgeton, who’d been the starting point guard on his college basketball team, or Mike Albers of Green Valley, a highly ranked over-forty marathon runner, supervising a team of eleven-year-old girls must have been small potatoes, but for Tim it was a big deal, a weekly blast of adrenaline.
“Your turn, Nomad!” He bounced on the balls of his feet, shifting his weight from side to side. “Don’t hold back. See if you can take my head off!”
JOHN AND
Candace Roper didn’t show up until a couple of minutes before the opening whistle, after the ref had completed his pregame shin guard and jewelry inspection, and Tim had selected his starting lineup. This wasn’t unusual; with three soccer-age kids, John spent his Saturday mornings rushing maniacally from one field to the next, driving like he had a freshly harvested liver packed in a cooler on the front seat.
“Praise God,” he said, embracing Tim with disconcerting fervor on the sidelines. “Today’s a big day for the Lord.”
“They’re all big days,” Tim replied. He extricated himself from the
hug and looked at Candace. He could’ve sworn she’d grown a couple of inches since yesterday’s practice. “When we sub, I want you in at midfield.”
“Midfield?” she groaned. “Can’t I be forward?”
“Maybe second half.”
Turning away from the Ropers, Tim clapped his hands sharply and repeatedly until he had the attention of the whole team. It was no small feat, getting a gaggle of fifth-grade girls to stop talking among themselves.
“All right, guys! No overconfidence today. Let’s get focused and play our game. We pass, we hustle, we anticipate, and we stick to our positions, okay?”
“We need this one!” John chimed in over his shoulder. “Let’s play strong, just like last week!”
There was a moment of confusion as the players took the field, when the opposing coach—a cheerfully nerdy guy who wore a Bandits jersey with the words
SOCCER DUDE
emblazoned on the back—suddenly realized that he didn’t have a shirt for his goalie.
“I left it in the car,” he explained. “It’s been one of those mornings.”
Tim offered to loan him a couple of practice pinneys, but the guy begged the indulgence of the referee to make a quick trip to the parking lot.