The Extra Yard (14 page)

A little over a minute left. Two time-outs in Coach Gilbert's pocket. But Teddy wasn't looking at him—or Jack—when he looked over to the sideline. Almost despite himself, he was looking at his dad. For the last time today, he was trying to make David Madden's belief his own. He'd try to figure out later what it meant. Just not right now at Holzman Field.

He hit Gus in traffic in the middle of the field, no fear in the throw, none. He looked over to the sideline, seeing if Coach wanted to use one of his time-outs, fifty seconds left. All Coach did was nod and keep Brian McAuley next to him.

The nod meant throw the same pass to Gus again.

The Huskies weren't expecting that, so Gus was more open this time. A lot more open. Now they were at the twenty. Clock running. There were no time-outs for first downs in their league. The clock kept running.

Finally Coach called one.

Teddy sprinted over to the sideline. When he got there, Jack handed him his water bottle. Teddy tipped his helmet back on his head and took a long swallow.

“We could run it and run some clock,” Coach Gilbert said.

“Doesn't matter,” Teddy's dad said. “They're done whenever we score.”

When. Not if.

“Then why wait?” Coach Gilbert said. “We never did in the old days.”

“How about the last play we ran for a touchdown, to Nate?”

It was like they were having a private conversation, and Teddy was just there eavesdropping.

“Love it,” Coach Gilbert said.

He gave Teddy a small shove back toward the field. “Go win the game,” he said.

Teddy rolled to his right, pulled up, threw a slightly longer pass to Nate this time. He was open again, right there between the posts. And they won the game.

“Told you,” Teddy's dad said to him when he got back to the sideline. “Simple math.”

Then, before Teddy could do anything about it, his dad hugged him.

O
n days when there was no football practice—or even when there was a late practice—Teddy and his friends threw themselves into their production of
The Voice
.

By now Mrs. Brandon was helping them. Her reasoning, as she explained, was simple: she wasn't doing it for herself, she was doing it for the school, because she believed no school should be without music.

They were meeting in Mrs. Brandon's office today, and there was even more excitement than usual in the room, because they had been given a date for the show. The next step was to decide how much to charge adults, how much to charge students, and what the best way was to start selling tickets in advance.

Before long, though, Teddy and Jack and Gus were going at one another about being coaches in the competition, and how each of them was sure his team was going to win.

Cassie looked at Mrs. Brandon and sadly shook her head. “Boys,” she said, as if that explained everything in the universe. “All they care about is keeping score.”

“I am so winning this,” Jack said, “even with one hand tied behind my back.”

“You do remember your sling came off a week ago, right?” Teddy said.

“Figure of speech, dude. Figure of speech.”

They were going to start auditions next week. The finals would be three weeks later, on a Thursday night. So far Cassie had gotten more than two thousand dollars in donations on the Internet. She vowed that they hadn't seen anything yet—she was just getting started.

The best part of it was that Mrs. Brandon was now as excited about the project as they were. Just not as excited as Teddy's mom, who was as full of ideas as ever, about how she thought the stage should look on the big night, about how there should be a student master of ceremonies; even about hiring a local band to back up the singers.

Then they were all talking about ticket prices, because the show needed to be the biggest part of the fund-raising if they wanted to have any chance of saving Mrs. Brandon's department.

“It's tricky,” Mrs. Brandon said. “We want to bring in as much money as possible. But at the same time we don't want to scare people off.”

“People in town will support a good cause,” Teddy's mom said, “even if some of the jerks in city government won't.”

Teddy turned and high-fived Gus. “Jerks,” he said. “Listen to the chirp from Mom.”

“Are you making fun of your mother?” Mrs. Brandon said.

“Just making an observation,” Teddy said.

“In the end,” his mom said, “we are going to show those people how wrong they were.”

“Light 'em up, Mrs. Madden!” Gus said.

Then she was the one high-fiving Gus. “That's what I'm talking about,” she said.

“Mrs. M,” Cassie said, “this is the most fired up I've ever seen you about anything.”

“You think only the men in my family are competitive?” she said. “Well, you haven't seen anything yet.”

Then she told everybody to follow her out of the office, it was never too early to start thinking about set design.

“Set design?”
Teddy said.

He looked at his friends. “We've created a monster.”

“Is there a problem?” his mom said.

“Absolutely not, Coach Madden,” Teddy said.

His mom punched him in the arm the way Cassie did sometimes.

•  •  •

It was the Thursday night practice before their next game, against the Clements Spartans, on the road. Gus's dad had dropped them off way early, because this was one of the nights of the week when he worked the four-to-midnight shift at the car service for which he'd been working since he'd settled his family in Walton. He had started his life in America in New York City after moving there with his own parents from the Dominican Republic. Gus had even been born in New York. But he had no memories of it, having grown up in Walton from the time he was two.

Tonight Mr. Morales had a late-night pickup and then a long drive home from the airport. But he didn't complain. He never complained about anything. Gus never complained about much either. The only time Teddy could remember Gus getting really mad, at anybody, was after Jack had briefly quit their Little League team last spring. Gus didn't understand why Jack had done it. Jack originally didn't tell Gus or anybody else that he blamed himself for his brother's accident.

Once Gus—along with Teddy and Cassie—found out, he and Jack went back to being as close as they'd ever been. And Gus went back to being the happiest kid Teddy knew, except when they lost a game.

Today he told Teddy he'd run pass patterns until the other kids arrived. Teddy said he didn't want Gus to tire himself out before practice began. Gus said that if he didn't want to run the patterns, he wouldn't have said anything.

So that's what they did for more than half an hour, and Teddy could see their timing getting better and better. He knew he'd never have the timing with Gus that Jack had before he got hurt. Jack had been the quarterback and Gus the star wide receiver on every team the two of them had ever played on.

But they were getting there.

Teddy was learning to trust that Gus would be exactly where he was supposed to be the way Teddy trusted his throwing arm. More and more, especially on the cuts that required almost perfect timing, Teddy would release the ball before Gus even turned to look for it.

When they stopped, Gus said to him, “So how we looking?”

“You tell me,” Teddy said as the two of them stretched out in the grass. “You're the guy who makes me look like I know a lot more about what I'm doing than I really do.”

“Are you kidding?” Gus said. “You get better with every practice.”

He stuck his elbow in the grass and put his head in his hand. “But I wasn't asking about football so much.”

Teddy groaned. “You too, dude? Now you want to have the father-son talk with me?”

Gus barked out a laugh. “Not
that
talk!” he said.

“Can't we please talk about something else?”

“Nope.”

“Well, if you're asking me how things are between my dad and me, they're pretty okay lately.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “
Just
okay. Unless I'm supposed to just forget that he hasn't been around for the last eight years.”

“
That
doesn't sound okay,” Gus said. “That sounds like you're still mad.”

“But not mad at you.”

“I know,” Gus said, grinning at him. “It's practically impossible to get mad at me.”

“Try me, if you don't change the subject.”

Teddy was sitting cross-legged. He leaned over and checked his phone. It was still a half hour, at least, before they'd start seeing any of their teammates. But he was good with that. It was easy being with Gus, unless you wanted him to change the subject.

“You want my opinion?” Gus said.

“So I guess we're not changing the subject.”

Gus rolled over and sat up, so he was looking directly at Teddy. “I think you need to start trusting him. Your dad.”

“Not there yet,” Teddy said. “Not even close. Not even sure I'll ever get there.”

“Why?”

“Why?”
Teddy said. “Because he hasn't earned it, that's why.”

“How does he do that?”

“By not leaving again.”

Gus just stared at him.

“Wait a second,” he said. “He can't leave. He just moved back.”

“He left before.”

“But that was, well, that
was
before,” Gus said. “And when he did leave, he stayed in one place all that time.”

“Maybe he won't like ESPN and want to go back,” Teddy said. “Or go someplace else.”

“But why are you expecting something bad to happen?” Gus said. “You can't go through your life expecting bad stuff to happen. That's no way to be.”

“You don't know anything about bad stuff,” Teddy said. “Your life has always been good. It's why you're
you
.”

They were quiet again. Teddy knew the field would get loud as soon as their teammates started piling out of their parents' cars. Just not yet.

“I get why you started off being mad at him,” Gus said, “especially when he just sort of walked in and became part of our team.”

“You
think
?”

“But now you both got past that and things are good,” Gus said. “Or at least a lot better.”

“I'm happy that you're happy,” Teddy said.

“Go ahead and be sarcastic,” Gus said. “But I'm right about this. You need to trust your dad.”

“I do,” Teddy said. “As long as we're on the field.”

“Dude,”
Gus said, stepping on the word. “You gotta listen to me. You don't see the look on his face when you make a good throw to somebody besides me. Or you make a good run. The guy looks like he's over the moon.”

“I understand he wants me to do well.”

“Dude!”
Gus said again. “Do you trust me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then trust me that you gotta start trusting him.”

After practice ended, Teddy's dad asked if he wanted to do a little extra work. Teddy said sure. Then he asked Gus the same thing, and Teddy knew what the answer was going to be. Gus would stay until it was dark if you asked him to, and even after that.

David Madden wanted Teddy to work on what he called his “arm slot.” He was constantly telling Teddy that if you were serious about being a good quarterback, you could never get loose with your mechanics, and he'd seen Teddy dropping his arm down tonight without even knowing he was doing it.

“I love Tony Romo's heart,” Teddy's dad said. “And the kid from Detroit, Matthew Stafford, he's got a world of talent the way Romo does. But the two of them have awful mechanics, to the point where I don't even want to watch sometimes.”

“Then watching me must be like watching a horror movie,” Teddy said.

“Quite the contrary,” his dad said, shaking his head. “You usually have a beautiful throwing motion.” He winked at Teddy and said, “Sometimes I feel like I'm watching myself when I was your age. You know, back when it was all still ahead of me.”

He had that faraway look on his face he'd get sometimes when he'd talk about his playing days.

“You still miss it, Mr. Madden?” Gus said.

“Only every day.”

“Even now?”

“Let me tell you both something about sports,” David Madden said. “You never know how good you have it until you don't have it.”

He put his big smile back on then and said, “But you guys, you've both got it going on. Now let's run some of our stuff and fix what I saw from my kid tonight.”

They stayed out there until it did start to get dark. When they finished, Teddy's dad said, “Okay,
now
we're ready for Saturday.”

“Best day of the week,” Teddy said.

“You better be ready,” his dad said. “Because we're going to open this offense up. Spring training is over. Time for you to cut it loose.”

•  •  •

They beat Clements. Teddy did get to throw more, even after a couple of early interceptions, coming back to throw two touchdown passes to Gus and one to Jake. The final score was 19–7. They were 4–0.

They won again the next Saturday, in a heavy rain, against Ridgeway. It was a mess of a day and a mess of a game. But somehow the Wildcats made it down the field in the fourth quarter, and Teddy got enough of a grip on a wet ball to throw a touchdown pass to Mike O'Keeffe with two minutes left.

As soon as Mike caught the ball, Teddy turned around quickly enough to see the look on his dad's face that Gus had talked about. His dad was soaking wet, the way everybody else was, his old Walton High cap pulled down tight over his eyes.