Kid Owner (2 page)

Mr. Simpkin had nodded wisely and chuckled after I beat Jason to the swing set by two strides. “Well, you're small, but with that kind of speed, I could see you making a heck of a third-down slot receiver.”

I grinned. Talk about heaven. I lay awake that entire night, staring up at the fluttering roof of the camp tent in Jason's backyard beyond the pool, dreaming of third-down plays where I'd streak into the open and make a spectacular grab. Thinking if my dad could've seen me, he'd have been so proud.

I didn't keep my mom up to speed on any of this. I probably should have told her that I was going to hang up the soccer cleats forever. But
football
was an F-word.

So I'd waited until sign-ups were being held at Williamson Elementary before I told my mom about my dream, and that we
needed to go down there with my birth certificate and a check for $795.

I had planned to tell her in the car ride home from day camp at the country club, but the knot in my stomach said to wait. Then, during dinner, when Teresa was serving veal cutlets—one of my mother's favorites—as soon as we'd said grace, my mother cleared her throat and asked, “Is everything okay, Ryan?”

That had flustered me. My mom is a pretty woman, but she has these eyes that can burn into you like the desert sun through a bug glass, and that's scary. I nodded and mumbled that I was fine and quickly cut loose a hunk of veal, stuffing it into my mouth. Every swallowed bite was an opportunity to bring up football, but my tongue stayed tied.

Finally, Teresa cleared the dishes and my mom took a deep breath and a sip of iced tea and asked me what I had planned for the evening.

And then, it was go time. Sign-ups only went until 7:30, and it was already 6:53.

“Mom . . .” Her look—just a simple smile—terrified me, because I knew how quickly it could change, like a summer thunderstorm blowing up out of the desert.

“Now are you going to tell me what's wrong?” Her smile went sideways and she took another sip from her glass before tilting her head to wait.

“We have to go to my school.” My words were barely a whisper.

She scowled. “Why? What's wrong?”

“For sign-ups.” I still couldn't
say
football.

“Sign-ups?”

I stood up from my place. “We have to go now, Mom. It only goes until 7:30. And you need to bring a check.”

“A check for what? Hey, mister.” Her stern tone stopped me cold. “What's going on?”

“And my birth certificate.” My eyes started to well up and I sniffed and looked at my sneakers. “Football sign-ups, Mom. Everyone's doing it. The Highland Knights. I'm gonna play this year. Remember our deal?”

I looked up at her with as much confidence as I could muster, knowing that the deal she'd cut with me three years ago might be something she'd forgotten completely. That's how adults
are—they never remember the details like that.

“Football?”
She'd practically snorted the word. “Ryan, what are you talking about? You're a soccer player. We've talked about this. Football isn't part of who we are. End of discussion.”

I'm a pretty good kid. I know it's me saying it about myself, but other people—teachers, parents—think so, too.

And I don't get into trouble. That's because I stay inside the lines—almost always. But I have a flaw: sometimes, I blow my stack. I flat-out lose it. I can't tell you why, but sometimes it's a little thing that triggers it while big things just float on by and I stay cool. And sometimes,
ba-boom
.

And when my mom called me a soccer player, I lost it and grabbed my water glass and slammed it so hard onto the kitchen table that it shattered. I barely noticed the shards of glass on my hand when I screamed, “
I hate when you do this! You said I could!
Don't lie!”

My mother is small but tough, and she was up out of her chair in a blink. She had me off my feet, lifting me by the collar and marching me down the hall and up the stairs before tossing me onto my bed. She stopped at the door on her way out to point a finger. “You don't call your mother a
liar
. Who do you think you are, young man!”

She turned and slammed the door before I could speak, partly from surprise, but mostly from having been choked by the collar-carry.

“LIAR!”
I screamed in defiance.

The word hung in the air like an exploded bomb of silence. From all the way downstairs in the kitchen I could hear the tinkle of glass as Teresa swept up the broken pieces. Then the rumble
of my mother's footsteps filled the hallway, coming closer by the instant, so that when the door flew open and smashed into the wall, I was ready for it.

“Who do you think you
are
? You're acting so disrespectful!”

“You
said
third grade! I played that hot-poop sport for
three years
because you said I
had
to. You said if I played soccer and I still wanted to play football that I
could. That's
what
you said!
”

“This is coming out of nowhere, Ryan! You don't just drop something like this on me! Maybe,
maybe
, if you'd talked to me about this earlier, I could have
considered it
! Not now, though, mister.
NO WAY! NO HOW!
You are
not
playing football!” She slammed the door shut again. It was meant to be final.

I jumped up off my bed, fired my Lionel Messi bobblehead at the door, smashing it and putting a divot in the wood to punctuate what I was about to say.

“THEN LET ME GO LIVE WITH MY FATHER!”

PRESENT . . .

That jolted me back to the present. I must have dozed off because my book had fallen to the side, and I realized that my face was wet with tears. Because my father had died. I could hear my mom talking again on her phone in the kitchen. Did she need to deliver this news of my father's passing to family and friends? I didn't know why when she'd barely mentioned the man for the past twelve years. I even thought I'd heard the words
football
and
Dallas Cowboys
, but knew that had nothing to do with anything. I couldn't think about this anymore, and clearly my reading wasn't getting done. My phone vibrated and I read a text from my best friend, Jackson Shockey. He was reminding me to ask my mom if it was okay if he came over after football practice tomorrow. I replied that it was without
asking, and without telling him anything about the shocking news I'd just received. I just didn't want to talk about it.

I put my book away, crept upstairs to my room, got in bed, and turned out the light. The storm had passed and the moon shone in through my sheer window curtains. I just lay in bed, still thinking. Try as I might, I was unable to stop remembering back to that argument about football sign-ups.

YEARS EARLIER . . .

I'll never forget the sound my mom had made. It had been a gasp and a sob, like something someone snatched from deep inside her, the core of her heart, dropping it like a punt and kicking it high into the air.

Then she did the worst thing you could ever imagine.

I heard the soft scrape of her shoulder blades down the other side of my bedroom wall and the thump of her bottom as it hit the floor. Then, the muted crying. It hurt me, and it cleared the fog of war in my brain.

I crept across my bedroom floor and opened the door, crunching the pieces of the broken bobblehead beneath my sneakers. “Mom?”

She had planted her head between her knees and she wore her arms like a hat.

“Mom, don't cry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have talked to you that way.”

She shook her buried head and talked between her ragged breaths. “No. Don't be sorry. I'm sorry . . . I should have told you a long time ago about your father. I should have talked to you
when you drew that picture of Julian in kindergarten and asked me. I wanted to. Tell you. But every time I was going to, it just . . . never seemed right.”

I sat down with my back against the same wall and put a hand between her shoulder blades, against the knobby ladder of her backbone. “It doesn't matter, Mom. I've got you.”

“He'd be proud of you.” She raised her head, her red-rimmed eyes burning. “He
may
be proud. I have no idea what he knows or doesn't know about you. And you'd be proud of him, Ryan. I really think you would. He's very successful, and he's not a bad person. He and I . . . we just . . . sometimes adults have different ideas of what life is supposed to be.”

“Is he a . . . does he play? F-football, I mean?”

My mother laughed at that. “I suppose in high school he did. Not after that. He's an engineer. Very smart. But he loves the game. That I know. He
loves
that game.”

I nodded my head. I liked him already. Smart. An engineer. Football fan. I was hungry for more. “Is he rich?”

She took a deep breath, uncovered her head, and looked up at me. “You and I are rich. Us. What we have, a family. And we
love
each other. That's rich, Ryan. I want you to remember that. So, in that way, no, your father isn't rich at all. Not by my standards.”

“But he has a lot of money?” I couldn't help asking it.

She sighed and nodded. “And to give credit where credit is due, that's why we live the way we do.”

“He pays for things?” I asked.

She nodded. “Everything.”

“I thought Poppa and Nanna . . .” My grandparents lived in
Seattle, in a nice home on Lake Washington. I just figured everyone had a bunch of money. No one I knew really talked about money, so I just assumed my mom
had
it, like everyone else.

My mom laughed. “Oh, no. Not that they aren't comfortable, but your poppa? Not a dime. He didn't even pay for my college. No, they don't believe in that.”

“What's my dad do?”

She took my hand and held it and pulled me next to her so she could drape an arm around my shoulders. It was
one of the warmest moments in my life, sitting there, just the two of us on the floor with the big quiet house my father bought all around us. We were like seeds in the core of some wonderful shiny red apple.

“Well, like I said, he's an engineer, but he's more than that now.” It sounded to me like she admired him, maybe even liked him. “He started out as a kind of inventor on a research team for a big company that made medical devices. Then he realized that if he could get his own company going, he could do things faster, even better.”

“So he just started a company?”

She laughed. “In our garage.”

“Your garage? You lived with him?”

She looked at me funny. “We were married, your father and I.”

“You
were
? Then how come I don't know him? How come everything's a secret?” I asked.

She bit her lower lip. “I did that for you, Ryan. I still want to do it for you. You have to trust me. It's better for you
not
to know him or who he is. It would only make things harder for you. You have to believe me. It hasn't hurt you not to know him. It hasn't hurt
you not to even talk about him. That's why I call it the F-word. Let's not even talk about it.”

This was news that made my head spin.

Then my mother said the only thing that could have possibly taken my mind off my father.

PRESENT . . .

I woke up suddenly, my heart beating and my brow sweaty, realizing that I had tangled myself in the sheets, and now I struggled to break free. I turned over and looked at the clock. It was midnight and pitch-black around me. I had practice tomorrow, and I was already exhausted. My mom must have been, too; I could hear her voice floating up from the kitchen, still talking on the phone. I flipped over, trying to get comfortable. It was raining outside again. Shadows cast by the moonlight took on strange shapes, suggesting bad thoughts and deeds, lies and deceit and cover-ups all around me. I wanted to scream, but I kept quiet and untangled myself. I lay panting in my bed as I realized it really hadn't been the best thing for me not to know my father. Not now, not with him dead. Now I would never
get to make him proud, so that even if I fulfilled my dreams of becoming a star quarterback, he'd never know. I'd never be able to tell him.

But back when I was in elementary school, my mom distracted me from the fact that I didn't know who my dad was.

YEARS EARLIER . . .

She'd said, “Let's only have one F-word we don't talk about. I'm taking football off the list. Let's go sign you up.”

She'd had a twinkle in her eye, and I couldn't believe I'd come through that terrible tantrum complete with broken glass, slammed doors, and calling my mom a liar with her still willing to make me a Highland Knight.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, grinning.

I didn't say another word for fear of breaking the spell, but was on my feet in a split second and headed for the door to the garage. “Don't forget the birth certificate.”

“I know, and my checkbook,” she mumbled. For some reason, she sounded irritated.

But I knew the birth certificate was a must for PYFL sign-ups. The league had strict age limits on its players. I opened my mouth to explain, then stopped. It hit me why talk of a birth certificate might annoy her. Besides having my date of birth, that official government document would also probably have my father's name on it.

I rode up high beside her in the front seat of our big white truck. Lots of moms drive pickups in Texas. The inside of a King Ranch F-350 is like the living room in a hunting lodge, with big
thick leather seats, the kind of place you could put your shoes up on the furniture without a second thought. I kept my shoes on the floor, staring intently at the sunbaked road up ahead but powerfully aware that the folded paper on the console between our seats very likely held the name of the man who was my father.

The thought of grabbing my birth certificate and quickly stealing a look ran wild around the inside of my head. I stuffed my hands beneath my legs and started to sweat, despite the cold blast of AC from the dashboard vent.

I looked over at my mom. She scowled at the road, lips tight. I took a deep breath.

“Mom, the league makes you bring a birth certificate to prove you're not too old to play. I'm not going to look at it.”

“Oh, I don't care about that.” She waved her hand in the air, but I could see her face suddenly relax.

“Okay.” I gave a short nod, then turned on the radio to fill the quiet.

Ten minutes later, my mom parked the truck in the fire lane in front of the school. It was almost 7:25, and I hopped down and walked real fast, tugging her toward the main entrance. Two boys I didn't recognize walked out just as we got there. Both were big and hulking and my mom looked them over before turning to me and tilting her head in a way that asked if I was really sure I wanted to do this.

I flung open the door and held it. “After you.”

In she went and we marched up to the table in the front hall of the school just outside the principal's office. The fluorescent lights above the table glowed, but the rest of the hallways were dark and eerie, and it made the whole thing seem like a dream, which
made me think about how it
was
a dream, a dream come true. Me, playing football. Finally.

Jason Simpkin's dad sat on the other side of the table with a man who I thought I recognized as the father of Bryan Markham, one of the biggest, strongest—also meanest—kids in the third grade. I knew from talk at school that Bryan's dad was Mr. Simpkin's assistant and had himself played middle linebacker at Baylor. While Mr. Simpkin, the former SMU center, reminded me of a neckless rhino, Mr. Markham was more like a balding gorilla, complete with long arms and dark furry hair on the backs of his pale hands and neck. In his mouth was the unlit stub of a fat greenish cigar. The two youth-league coaches were in the process of gathering up their papers when they saw us, stopped, and looked at each other. I thought Mr. Markham rolled his eyes, but the sudden chill I felt left me uncertain of exactly what I had seen.

“Hey!” Mr. Simpkin found his smile and rubbed his forehead with a thick stubby hand. “Jason's little buddy . . .”

My mom extended her hand. “Ryan. He's Ryan. I'm Katy. Katy Zinna. We're here for football sign-ups.”

Mr. Simpkin shook my mom's hand, dainty as a rhino. “Yes, well, it's nice to see you. I—”

My mom fished through her purse, then handed him my birth certificate and slapped her checkbook down on the table. “Seven hundred ninety-five dollars? Is that right? How do I make that out?”

“Well, you see . . .” Mr. Simpkin looked to Mr. Markham for help.

“Sorry,” Mr. Markham grunted, adding a few more wrinkles to his thick brow, “but you missed it.”

“Missed what?” My mother had that thunderstorm look.

“Sign-ups.” Mr. Markham shrugged in a not-so-nice way and spoke around his stub of a cigar so that it wiggled. “We're full. Maybe next year, though. Anyway, it'll give the little guy a chance to grow.”

I closed my eyes, 'cause I knew what came next. And it was not going to be good.

“Excuse me?”
My mom's shrill voice could have cracked a glass.

Mr. Markham's face contorted into a mean smile and his voice got smooth, so you knew he was no stranger to nasty situations. “I'm just telling you the facts. You missed sign-ups. It's over. Sorry, lady.”

I glanced at Mr. Simpkin, hoping he'd vouch for my speed and suggest I was worth bending the rules for.
I'm the third-down slot receiver, remember? You said so at Jason's party.
I wanted to say that, but didn't.

“And you're the coach?” My mom glowered at Mr. Markham.

“One of them.” Mr. Markham puffed up and yanked the cigar from a picket of yellow-stained teeth.

“Good, then I wouldn't want my son being coached by a pompous jerk like you, anyway. Come on, Ryan. I'm betting there are better teams than this you can sign up for.” She took my arm and we headed toward the door. Out on the sidewalk, we passed a father and his son, a boy both tall and lean.

“They closed them down, the sign-ups,” my mom said, trying to be helpful.

“Oh. Yeah? Well, we'll give them a shot anyway,” the man said.

My mom shook her head as if to wish them luck despite her doubts, and we climbed up into her truck. The big machine
rumbled to life. She put it in gear and we pulled away from the curb. As we passed the entrance, my mom slowed down and leaned my way, peering through the passenger window at the school.

“Oh, really?” she barked at the window like she was talking to someone else.

Then she hit the brakes, so only the seat belt kept me from bouncing my head off the dashboard.

She slammed the truck out of gear, turned off the engine, flung open the door, and hopped down. As she marched toward the main entrance to the school, I threw my own door open and shouted, “Mom! What are you doing?”

Caught in the horror of wanting to stop her but knowing it was hopeless, I jumped down and chased her into the school.