The Hard Count (32 page)

I move up and slide my hand under my dad’s arm; Jimmy O’Donahue cracks his neck, spits on the ground, and steps into the locker room barking at Travis and Colton, “Get your asses in there,” as the door closes behind him. The boys do, leaving my brother with me and my father.

“What did she say?” I ask my dad.

“She told him…he had a lot to learn about being a human, and that if he ever belittled her again—assuming she didn’t understand football or the law—she would have her brother shove a helmet on his head so she could jerk his neck around and see how he liked it,” my dad says, blinking, almost in amazement.

“Wow,” I say, the word slow and round as it escapes.

“Then she told him she planned on getting the game tape, and she’s still not sure if she wants to send it to the media or not,” my dad says.

His words spark my urgency in an instant. I squeeze his arm and dash off to the bleachers, rushing up the steps to the press box, tripping on the last few metal rows and racking my knee against the corner so hard that I’m sure it’s bleeding under my jeans. The press box door is still open, but the lights inside are off. I feel my way to the ladder and push up on the ceiling hatch to climb out onto the roof.

My camera is lying on its side, and I know before I even get to it that it’s likely turned off. I pull it into my hands and switch it on, then sink back, my body resting against the small half wall that lines the roof. The film was turned off after three minutes. I filmed nothing more than a few warm-ups. Those bastards thought of everything.

I sulk back to my parents, my camera packed away in the bag, and my father nods to me as I get closer, questioning if I got it on film without really asking. I shake my head
no
, and his eyes close slowly, his arm stretching out for me to fall into his side.

My dad eventually sends my mom home with Noah, and he stays with me while every player leaves the locker room. One by one, they walk up to him and shake his hand. It wasn’t something planned, which makes it all the more beautiful. My father’s eyes tear at one point, when players that rarely get a chance to even step on the field walk up, some of them hugging him and telling him they’ll always be playing for him, even if they’re not.

Jimmy O’Donahue’s coaching staff exits, too, but they stand against the far wall together, watching the display of affection for the man that should still be at the helm. My father was the victim of gross private-school politics, and they know it could happen to them at any moment. I don’t fault them for holding on to their jobs. I know as they stand there together—away from Jimmy, who still hides inside—they feel the same as every player giving Chad Prescott their allegiance.

Nico is the last to step out, and he walks up to my father without even wavering, his gear slung over his back, his board tucked under his arm. My father takes his bag from him without exchanging words, then puts his arm around him just as silently.

“I told your mom I would take you home,” he says, surprising me, because I didn’t know that was part of their exchange.

“Yes, sir,” Nico says.

“It’s just
Chad
now, son. Just Chad,” my dad says.

“Yes, sir,” Nico says again.

My father chuckles, and I follow them both a few steps behind. When we get to the car, my dad looks over to mine, then his eyes come to me.

“I’ll bring you back to get your car when we’re done. Come on,” my dad says.

I climb inside, letting Nico take the front seat next to my father, and we drive the eleven miles to West End in silence, Nico only speaking after we cross the freeway and my dad needs directions. We pull up to the house, and Valerie is waiting just outside the door with a bouncing Alyssa at her side. Uncle Danny’s car is still out front, so I’m sure he’s still inside.

I linger in the back seat of the car as Nico steps out, and I watch as my father helps him with his bag, walking him up to his house, and shaking hands with Nico’s mom. She grips my dad’s hand in both of hers, and my father doesn’t look up from their touch for the longest time while she just speaks. Nico turns in the doorway, his eyes meeting mine, and he pulls his phone from his pocket, waving it to let me know he’ll call. I pull mine in my hands and climb to the front seat as my father walks back to the car.

He gets in and shifts the car into reverse, exhaling heavily and checking his mirrors before finally pulling out into the roadway. We get to the stoplight at the freeway, and I feel my phone buzz in my hands. I’m about to look when my dad finally speaks.

“That kid is something special, and I’m not going to let what happened to me ruin it for him, Reagan. You tell him I promise, okay?”

My dad’s face is serious; the red glow shines over his skin at the light, reflected against the way his jaw works and his lips frown in frustration.

A few sprinkles hit the windshield, and as the signal switches to green, my dad flicks on the wipers, the car now filled with the low hum of some sports-radio station and the squeal of the rubber blade along the window. The sound is comforting and pulls a dozen memories to the front of my mind, remembering the smell, the feel, every little sensation that went along with so many games that I rode home from in this very seat with my dad. It makes me smile.

“Okay,” I say, finally responding to his question.

“Okay, then,” he says back, his heavy hand patting my knee twice.

His face seems to soften with our agreement, as if making this promise out loud to me somehow eases my dad’s pain. Maybe it does.

When his attention is completely given back to the roadway, I flip my phone in my palm and swipe open the message from Nico. It’s nothing more than a picture of a heart. I send the same thing back, and then I hold it tightly in my hands, and I believe that my father will do what he says.

“
M
om
, really…your dress is fine,” I say as my mom fusses with the tie belt around her waist, hiding behind my dad’s car in Nico’s driveway.

Valerie invited us over for Saturday lunch with her family. She insisted, and my father couldn’t refuse. For the last fifteen hours, my mom has been panicking about making a good impression, and my father has been pouting over giving up his first free Saturday in years. Mostly, my dad doesn’t like to be social. The parties were always my mom’s thing, while dad had the built-in excuse to leave and go talk football in the backyard with the other coaches or with my brother. He avoided. But when she asked him to come today while he stood at her doorstep last night with her son, he couldn’t refuse.

“I’m not sure why we have all of this food,” my dad says, popping his trunk and pulling out a box with a crockpot and two trays of cookies, brownies, and whatever other baked good my mom could buy at the deli counter on her mad dash to the market this morning.

“What’s in the pot?” I ask, taking it from my dad. I look down and see something boiling through the lid.

“I made pozole,” my mom says through a beaming smile.

“Like…from scratch?” I ask, my brow pulled tight.

“She poured it in from a mix. I watched her,” my brother says over my shoulder as he awkwardly climbs from the car with his crutches that were stretched across our laps for the ride here.

“Thank God,” I say to him.

“I know, right?” he chuckles.

“Hush, both of you. I could cook if I wanted to,” she says.

Our father lets her walk on to the door, but turns to face us with the trays of cookies in his hands and shakes his head to show how little he agrees with that statement.

Alyssa has the door held open by the time my mom reaches the porch, and she already has her eyes on the trays of cookies. The laughter spills out of the house, and I can tell from here that several people are inside. I see my family straighten their posture, my dad pausing, probably considering running back to the car. I step in front of them and press my hand on Alyssa’s head, scrunching her hair with my fingers.

“Hi, princess,” I say.

“Hi, Reagan,” she says, a small lisp slipping out through the new hole in her top line of teeth.

“Hey, you lost another one!” I say.

“I did!” she says, stuffing her hand deep into the pocket of her jeans and pulling out a crumpled dollar. “Toof-fairy!”

“Awesome!” I say.

I step inside, urging my family to follow. Nico steps up from a seat at the kitchen table and rushes over to me.

“I didn’t know you were here, sorry. I would have helped,” he says, leaning in and kissing my cheek chastely, moving quickly to shake my father’s hand.

“Here,” he says, taking the heavy pot from me. He carries it to the kitchen where his mom clears a place for it, and she pulls the lid off and smells the aroma.

“Oh, it needs to be stirred,” she says, pulling a large spoon from a door and stirring the soup a few times while my mother walks up next to her.

“It’s pozole,” my mom says proudly, as if she spent hours slaving over it.

“Yes, I recognize it. Thank you…you didn’t have to bring anything,” Valerie smiles.

My mom acts bashful, waving her hand as if what she did was nothing at all, which…it really wasn’t. I notice a pot on her stove and I step close enough to look inside, where homemade soup is brewing. Valerie’s eyes catch mine, and she winks. I smile. She’s going to keep this secret, and it makes me like her even more to see her spare my mom’s feelings.

Nico leads my father and brother around the table and into the backyard where more people are gathered, introducing them, always calling my father
Coach
and saying Noah is his son and a great quarterback. I’m sure Noah thinks this is all Nico kissing up, but I know better. It’s respect, his way of showing it. By the time they’re sitting near a fire pit on a small brick patio in the backyard with Nico’s uncle and a few of the neighbors, I see my father’s comfort level starting to settle in. My brother’s, too. I leave them, staying at my mom’s side and talking in the kitchen with Nico’s mom and aunt and Mrs. Mendoza from across the street.

While conversation outside seems to have evolved into the easy topic of football and Nico’s potential—inside is another story. The lulls are too many, and I can see my mom struggling to fill them. She’s complimented the house, which I know she thinks is sparse and old, but she’s bluffed well. She’s also praised the scent pouring from the kitchen, not flinching when Mrs. Mendoza said it was the pozole. It’s really coming from Valerie’s soup, but my mom sat up a little taller thinking it was hers.

“Your yard is beautiful,” I say to Mrs. Mendoza after another long moment of silence. She perks up at my approval, and Valerie and a few other women in the kitchen grumble.

“Why thank you, Reagan,” she says, turning her head from side to side, looking at the others.

“Am I…missing something?” I ask.

“Ugh,” says the woman at the far end of the table. “She was featured in the
Southwest Gardener
magazine last month and ever since, her head. Oh my God, I mean…I can’t even.”

“I have
not
had a big head,” Mrs. Mendoza says, which only ignites a round of laughter from every woman in the kitchen other than her, me, and my mom. My mom eventually bites her lip and giggles because it’s contagious.

“Let me just show you,” Valerie says, pulling open a drawer and taking out something that looks like a poster. She walks over to the table and unrolls a laminated copy of the magazine spread, holding the ends down so it doesn’t curl up. The main photo is of Mrs. Mendoza in her front yard with a pair of shears and a bright-green watering can. “Just look. It’s laminated. She made one…for all of us!”

“I only thought you would be proud of your friend,” Mrs. Mendoza says as she begins to get up. I can tell her feelings are a little genuinely hurt, but I also get the sense that she’s not about to get great sympathy from this group.

“Oh, Maria…stop. Sit down and just autograph it for me already,” Valerie says, holding out a marker, her other hand on her hip.

Mrs. Mendoza stops only a step or two away from her chair, her lips pursed and her perfect lipstick slightly smeared by her pouting.

“Are you just going to sell it?” she asks, holding a serious expression in her face-off with Valerie. The quiet lasts for a few seconds before they both finally break into a laugh.

“Absolutely,” Valerie says. “I’ll put it on eBay, become a millionaire, and hire my own damn gardener for my house in Malibu.”

“Pssshhh, Malibu is overrated. You want to go to Santa Fe,” Maria says, taking the marker and actually signing the copy of her magazine article. “That’s where all of the
new
rich people are going.”

Valerie takes it and pins it to the front of the refrigerator with four mismatched magnets.

“Reagan, have you heard about Nico and the roses?” Maria says, taking her seat again at the table.

“No,” I smirk, my mouth twitching in curiosity. I scoot my chair closer to hear her better.

“When he was a little boy, he used to sneak into my front yard with his kiddie scissors, the kind that barely cut paper, you know?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I answer.

“Well, he would cut a rose on his way to school. Only, I didn’t know he was doing this. And every morning I would inspect my roses, feeding them and watering them, and always there would be one or two missing, almost ripped from the bush. It was the ugliest cut, and the petals would be sprinkled around the yard. I thought maybe it was someone’s puppy, or a cat. So one morning, I got up extra early, and I lay down by my back fence, real low so no one could see me. And here comes little Nico with his school bag over his shoulder. He pulls out his sad pair of scissors and cuts a red one from the bush, sawing at it and eventually ripping it free, and I jump out and scream, ‘Aha!’”

I jump a little in my chair, and the women laugh at me.

“You know what he was doing?” she says.

“No,” I smile, shaking my head.

She leans forward in her chair, her arms folded on the table.

“That little stinker was taking the flowers to school to give to some girl he liked. He would bring her one every day. Of course, after stuffing it in his backpack and dehydrating it for most of his trip to school, it was always sad and pathetic-looking by the time he handed it to the poor girl, I’m sure. But he still did it.”

“That’s…” I sit back. “That’s…really sweet.”

The rest of the women all have the same expression, even my mom.

“It is,” she says, closing her eyes briefly at the memory. “I started meeting him out front every morning after that. I would cut the rose for him, trim it up and wrap the stem in a paper towel. He’d always say, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Mendoza.’ He’d head off to school with a flower to deliver. This went on for a few weeks, and then finally I had to ask him, ‘Nico, what does your girl think of all these flowers? Is she your girlfriend yet?’”

She stands, pushing in her chair and moving toward the kitchen, and we all turn, engrossed by her story.

“You know what he told me?” she asks.

I shake my head
no
again.

“He said she told him she thought he was ugly, and he should stop bringing her flowers,” she chuckles.

My mouth drops to a frown fast, and my mom gasps a sad noise.

“That’s horrible,” I say, imagining a heartbroken Nico being told he’s ugly by a girl he liked enough to bring flowers to.

“I thought so, too. But then I thought, he’s still taking the flowers. So, I asked him what he was doing with the flowers now, and he said he was bringing them to new girls. He said he was going to give a flower to a new girl every day instead, to make them feel nice. And we kept up our deal, every morning. He took flowers to teachers, to the woman that ran the cafeteria, to the principal, to girls in his class. It didn’t matter who they were, he said. They all deserved flowers. And one day, there would be a girl that he thought deserved them all.”

My breath is gone when she lifts a vase from the sink, blooms of purple, pink, orange, white and red stuffed inside, each hand-cut carefully, stuffed and fit together in a clear-blue vase with a ribbon tied around the center. My eyes mist as she brings the vase close to me, and I rub my thumbs to blot away the tears. My mom does the same.

“Thanks, Mrs. Mendoza,” Nico says from behind me, his hands stuffed in his pockets, pushing them down deep, his shoulders hunched in a shrug, his smile crooked. The sweetest boy I’ve ever known.

“You’re welcome, Mijo,” she says. I stand and take them from her, breathing in their scent before turning slowly and walking over to him.

“You’re something, you know that?” I say, shaking my head and setting my flowers down on the corner of the table. I push my hands beneath his arms, wrapping them around his waist until he finally lets his free from his pockets and pulls me close to him, squeezing me against his chest and kissing the top of my head.

“They’re beautiful,” I say.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, letting out a small breath with his shrug and crooked smile.

“What’s going on in here?” my father asks, a little looser after what I’m guessing is his third beer. He steps in through the back door and Nico lets go of his hold on me out of habit.

“Not much, Chad. Your daughter’s boyfriend is just raising the bar really high, making all you men look bad,” my mom says.

My father’s brow wrinkles, and the entire table of women laugh, some reaching across to high-five my mom.

My dad turns his focus to Nico next.

“I just gave her flowers sir,” he shrugs, keeping his shoulders high like he’s waiting for the punch.

My dad looks to the table, leaning forward to smell them, then stepping back.

“Flowers, huh?” he says.

He pulls one out from center, holding it out in a gesture as if to ask if he can have it. Nico nods with a smile, and my dad walks around the table and hands it to my mom. She takes it in her delicate hand, her head falling to the side as she looks up to meet my father’s gaze.

“You romantic fool,” she teases, moving to her feet and then her tiptoes as she kisses my dad softly on the lips, blushing under his gaze as she sits again.

“Awe.” Nico’s Uncle Danny puts on a feminine voice to break the mood and tease my dad, and soon the kitchen is buzzing with laughter and music.

Valerie begins serving food, handing plates around and encouraging everyone to come in from outside, inviting more neighbors over to eat. My brother has found a spot on the sofa next to Nico, and they’re both sitting with plates on their laps and the USC game on the TV. I stay in the kitchen, watching them talk, and pound fists over good plays.

“I love their game,” my brother says.

“Oh my God, I know. They never huddle. But everyone knows exactly what the play is, where to go, and they hit it—every freakin’ time!” Nico says loudly.

“Nicolas Medina, your tongue!” Valerie shouts from the kitchen.

“I said
freakin’
Mom,” he shouts.

“Yeah, don’t act like I don’t know what freakin’ means. Beat your freakin’ head next time you think you can use that word here,” she says, moving her attention back to her plate, reaching for a pitcher of lemonade in the center of the table.

Nico laughs her off, chuckling with my brother, and the scene of them both seems so perfect, I don’t know why it’s taken so long to happen.

“You like Southern Cal then, huh?” my dad says from the easy chair he’s commandeered on the opposite end of the living room.

“Hell yeah…I mean…
heck
yeah,” Nico says, quieting down, but still getting a glare from his mom.

They all turn their attention back to the TV, and my brother pushes himself up to his feet awkwardly, having to use Nico’s shoulder for a lift so he can stand, his arm pumping as he shouts, “Go, go, go!”

“Wooo whoo!” There’s a collective scream from the living room, and Alyssa runs through waving a homemade golden pom-pom in her hand, doing her best to do a cartwheel in the small space between the living room and kitchen.