The Extra Yard (2 page)

Or just floating through it.

From the across the field Jack shouted, “Are you planning on coming back anytime soon?”

“If I come back,” Teddy shouted back, “I know what you're going to say.”

“What?”

“Go long again.”

“Exactly!” Jack said.

When Teddy got back to him, he said to Jack, “You went a lot easier on me when you felt sorry for me.”

“No way,” Jack said. “You didn't need me to do that, because you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Excellent point.”

The truth was, and they both knew it, they were both feeling pretty sorry for themselves when they first became friends, even though they didn't know that was what they were doing at the time. There was the day when Jack just got tired of the other guys picking on Teddy, how funny the other guys thought it was when Teddy ended up on the floor during a game of dodgeball. Jack went over and helped Teddy up, in more ways than one.

But around the same time, Teddy helped Jack get up too and stop blaming himself for his brother's accident. Teddy finally helped convince Jack that Brad Callahan, as reckless as he was, with dirt bikes and everything else, was an accident waiting to happen. Jack didn't need anybody to pick on him, because he was doing way too good a job beating himself up.

“I found out the hard way,” Jack liked to say now. “It's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get back up.”

He and Teddy had done that.

Together.

•  •  •

Jack threw Teddy another deep ball, telling him to angle toward the infield this time, like he was running a deep post pattern. On this one, Teddy had to slow down a little to catch the ball in stride.

“Arm getting a little tired there,” he said.

“We'll see how tired I look the next time I knock you over with a short pass,” Jack said.

That was the thing about Jack. As cool a kid as he was, he was cocky, too. He just managed to do a good job hiding it from people. But it was always there.

“I take it back!” Teddy said, laughing. “Please don't hurt me!”

Teddy knew the drill with Jack Callahan: you were never just throwing the ball around. There was a purpose to everything he did. To him, this was a real practice. So they ran some short slants, the ones Jack was sure would be in their playbook this season. Jack practiced taking a one-step drop after being snapped the ball by an imaginary center, straightening up, hitting Teddy in the gut with passes that sometimes knocked the wind out of him.

They alternated those with quick outs. Then Jack told Teddy to go deep again. When they decided to stop for good, they stretched out on their backs in the outfield grass, both out of breath.

They were silent for a while, feeling the sun on their faces, until Jack said, “How much taller are you than when you started seventh grade?”

“My mom says four inches. Maybe five.”

“You, my friend, are going to be a matchup nightmare. You're built like a tight end, but you're as fast as a wide receiver.”

“How about we find out if I can catch like this at the tryouts before you send me to the Hall of Fame in Canton?” Teddy said. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'm not ready for this? It's not like I
made
the baseball team. I just turned out to be an emergency catcher after Scott Sutter got hurt.”

Jack propped his head up in his hand and looked at him. “Blah, blah, blah,” he said. “When the old Teddy starts talking, I can't hear a word.”

Teddy nodded. “Old habits.”

“Forget about old habits, or the old Teddy. You can do this. We can do it together.”

“We're a team now.”

“Just like baseball,” Jack said. “I pitch, you catch.”

Jack said he'd wait while Teddy dropped the ball off at his house, and then they'd call Gus and Cassie and meet them at Cassie's. Teddy ran the short distance to his house, the ball under his arm again. He smiled as he ran, knowing he should feel tired, but not feeling tired at all.

He just felt happy.

At least he did until he got to his back porch, looked up, and saw his father standing there.

“Hey, champ,” David Madden said.

T
he next afternoon Teddy and his three friends were at the pond near Cassie Bennett's house. They lay on the dock, all of them in their bathing suits, having just gone for another swim.

Cassie Bennett always asked the most questions, about everything. Today was no different.

“This is really happening?” she said. “Your dad's moving back here?”

“He
has
moved back.”

“And you didn't know until yesterday?”

Teddy shook his head.

Cassie said, “And he didn't tell your mom, either?”

“He said he wanted it to be a surprise,” Teddy said. He spread out his arms, put a fake smile on his face, and shouted “Surprise!” the way you did at a surprise party.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“Gee, you
think
?”

“And you're not happy about this?” Jack said.

“Do I sound happy?”

Jack let that one go.

They all sat there in silence for a moment, all of them on towels, staring up into sun and blue sky. Only it didn't feel like much of a blue-sky day to Teddy.

“And what did he say to you, mostly?” Gus said.

“He said he wanted to make this a new beginning for us,” Teddy said. “I asked him when we'd ever had an old beginning.”

His father had moved to Oregon to take a job in sales for Nike. Now he had gotten a better offer from ESPN, which had a new office about a half hour away. Teddy had driven by it one time, when Jack's parents had taken them to a water park down the road from what everybody called the new ESPN “campus.”

But Teddy's dad wasn't going to live near his new office. He was going to live in Walton.

“How does your mom feel about this?” Cassie said. “She can't be happy.”

“She wasn't happy or sad or angry or anything,” Teddy said. “She just said that we're all going to have to make this work. And that she hoped I would give him a chance. I asked her when he'd ever given me a chance.”

“Well, then that's what we're going to have to do!” Cassie said.

Somehow she had gotten off her back and was sitting cross-legged facing him.

“We?”
Teddy said.

“Yup,” she said. “We. Because we are all in this together. Right?”

Jack knew enough to say “Right.” When Gus hesitated, Cassie smacked him on the shoulder.
“Right?”
she said to him.

“Right,” Gus said. “And ouch.”

“Tell me again, how many times have you seen him since he and your mom got divorced?” Cassie asked. “Ballpark number.”

Teddy said, “I think six times in eight years.”

Cassie shook her head. “I get how far away he lived. But that's like somebody pretending that airplanes haven't been invented.”

“Just about every time it was because he had to be back on business.”

“And he doesn't call?”

“At first he did. Until he started to figure out that he didn't have anything to say to me.”

“What was yesterday like?”

“He didn't have much once he got past calling me ‘champ.' Which I have now decided I like even less than Teddy Bear.”

Gus sat up. Teddy knew that being from a close-knit family, Gus understood as much about growing up without a father around as he did about being an astronaut. It was probably why he had been so quiet today.

“Does he send you stuff on your birthday, or Christmas?” Gus said.

“He's the league leader in Amazon gift certificates. I've got a nice collection of them saved up.”

“You've never used them?” Gus said.

“Nope,” Teddy said. “I could never figure out whether they were gifts or bribes. And then I decided they weren't nearly big enough to be bribes. Now instead of a gift certificate, I'm getting
him.
”

“Maybe he's changed,” Jack said.

“He's changed
jobs
,” Teddy said. “He's changed location. That's it.”

Jack said, “You've gotten through everything else; you'll get through this. And like Cassie said, we'll help you.”

“You know what this doesn't help me with?” Teddy said. “Making the Wildcats tomorrow.”

“Shut up,” Cassie said.

“Excuse me?” Teddy said.

“Shut . . . up,” she said. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

“Easy for you to say,” he said.

“She's right,” Jack said. He grinned. “As much as I hate saying that.”

“You should be getting used to it by now,” Cassie said.

“No,” Jack said, “I mean it. This isn't going to get in your way, because nothing is going to get in your way.”

“Then how come I feel like somehow my own dad has tackled me from behind?” Teddy said.

Cassie smiled. “Because he did?”

“No wonder you get good grades.”

“Don't you feel better now?” she said.

“No!”
Teddy said. Then he said, “Can we change the subject?”

“No!”
they all yelled back at him.

The truth was, he didn't feel any better today than he had last night about his dad moving back to Walton, moving back into his life, no matter how much his friends were trying to get him to laugh his way past the whole thing. He was still angry, he was still confused, he still
hated
his dad blindsiding him and his mom the way he had. He told Jack and Cassie and Gus now that knowing his dad, it really was a surprise that he'd told them in person, and not tweeted out the news instead.

“Hundred and forty characters,” Teddy said. “He could have summed up our whole relationship in that many. The dad from Twitter.”

“I thought you wanted to stop talking about this,” Cassie said.

“Now I do.”

And they did. The only thing that made him feel better was being with them. It didn't matter to Teddy that Jack might look at Gus, or even Cassie, as his best friend. Or that Gus might feel closer to Jack. Teddy just felt close to all of them, never closer than he did right now. Over these last months, as he had become stronger and more confident—as much as that confidence had gotten rocked yesterday when he'd seen his father standing there, big smile on his face, on the porch—Teddy had figured something out:

You kept score in sports, not friendships.

On this day, more than ever, he was getting as much as he needed from his friends, and that was all that mattered. A few minutes later, they went for another swim. When they got out, Jack and Gus started to talk about tomorrow's tryouts, and Teddy allowed himself to get carried along by their excitement about the next season starting for all of them.

Before long, a lot of the afternoon sun was gone, and so was the afternoon. It was time for all of them to head home for dinner. They dropped Cassie off at her corner. Gus had left his bike at her house, so the two of them walked down her street together.

Just Teddy and Jack now.

“We've still got an hour,” Jack said.

Teddy knew exactly what he meant.

“You go get your sneakers,” Teddy said. “I'll go get the ball.”

He ran most of the way home, not sure whether he was running away from something or not.

T
eddy and Jack played until Teddy's mom called to him from the backyard that it really was time for dinner, even though today Teddy would have been willing to catch passes from Jack until it got too dark.

“You're ready,” Jack said as Teddy was leaving.

“For anything?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “For anything.”

When he got into the house, the first thing he said to his mom was, “Is he here?”

“No,” she said, “he is not.”

“Just the two of us for dinner?” Teddy said, feeling relieved.

“You and me, kid.” She told him to go get cleaned up, their food would be ready in fifteen minutes.

Once Teddy had decided to get into shape, his mom started cooking healthier meals, limiting red meat to once or twice a week, if that. Tonight was red snapper and green beans on the side and a salad. Teddy was happy to have it, even though there had been a time when he would have been happy eating cheeseburgers and fries every night.

They spent most of the early part of their dinner talking about a letter that all school parents had received that day, telling them that because of budget cuts in Walton, various programs were about to be cut in the town's public schools. The most serious in his mom's mind was that Mrs. Brandon's music department at Walton Middle School would be closed down at the end of this semester. There was even talk of canceling the big holiday show that Mrs. Brandon staged every year before winter break.

“But everybody loves Mrs. Brandon,” Teddy said. “Even I like the holiday show.”

“I went to school with her,” his mom said. “We even had a girl group back in the day.”

“No way.”

“Way,” she said. “We called ourselves the Baubles.”

“You're making this up.”

“I wish,” she said, grinning. “There was a popular girl group back in the day called the Bangles.”

“The secret life of Mom,” he said.

She shook her head. “I have to think of something,” she said. “For kids who love music, this would be like cutting a sports team.”

“What can you do?” Teddy said.

“Something.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes.

“By the way?” Teddy's mom said. “I still feel terrible about yesterday. I should have come out to the field and told you myself that he was here.”

“What, and spoil his big moment?”