Beyond Lucky Read Free Page B

the bottom, which he swears are a delicacy. “It is never too early to start thinking about lunch.”
    Crunch.
    With a big let-me-be-your-hero, I-understand-what-you’re-going-through smile, he turns his chair around and rests his hands on the top of the bars, like he’s Sam and not Dad, and he wants to talk sports and not failure. “So. Could you put your old man out of his misery, and tell me what happened? How did it go?”
    I shrug. “It was fine.”
    â€œFine, fine?”
    â€œJust fine.”
    â€œNot fine as in great?”
    â€œNo, Dad. Just fine. As in fine.” As in, let’s talk about something else. He has to know that fine is the word people use when they don’t want to talk. “Did you know that Grover Cleveland was a draft dodger?”
    â€œWhat is the world coming to when we can elect someone like that?” My mother walks in, kisses his cheek, my head, and throws her keys on the table. “What a day!” She slumps into her seat and shakes her hair out of the blue nurse practitioner’s net. “Three accidents. One facial laceration. And a pretty ugly grade three concussion.” She zeroes in on my muddy footprints, takes the rag, cleans up the mess, and goes to the stove to boil water. “Adrenaline junkies.” Her yellow scrubs are stained. Dark under the pits. A splattering the color of rust on the front. She washes her face in the kitchen sink.
    My dad hands her a cookie. He no longer asks her where the stains come from. “Try this.”
    She eats the chocolate side first, gives it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Do you realize that’s sixteen accidents this month? All men. Eighteen to twenty-four. It makes me crazy.” After a few more case reports, she either smells me or notices my dirty soccer jersey. “How was the scrimmage?”
    Dad shoots her the don’t-ask, I’ll-tell-you-later look, but she doesn’t get the message loud or clear. “Well? What happened?”
    â€œIt was a disaster.”
    She squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know soccer means a lot to you. You worked hard for today. And I know you thought that you had a real solid chance.” I stare at Gerald Ford’s large forehead. “But if your best isn’t good enough for Coach,” she says, letting go and picking up another cookie, “well then, so be it.”
    So be it—the loser’s mantra.
    The teakettle whistles.
    Dad jumps up to pour her a cup. He says, “I know you won’t believe this, but Sam used to go through the same drama every season. Remember, Marjorie? Every year, he’d sit by the phone, sure he’d messed up and that he was going to be cut. He would tell us about some other player who was bigger or stronger, and he looked exactly the way you do now. But the point is: He never was cut. He was always—”
    â€œDad, don’t you get it? I lost. Five to two. To Parker Llewellyn.” They should understand how bad that is. “All my friends are going to start except me.”
    My dad sighs in defeat. Mom sips her tea. She tells me, for about the hundredth time, that people excel at different rates and at different times of their lives and that it would be awful if the best time of my life was happening right now. When this does not perk me up, she says that just because Sam did something well doesn’t mean I have to follow in his footsteps. And that if I don’t make the team, it could be a blessing in disguise, which, in my opinion, is one of the worst, most overused expressions in the entire English language.
    I say nothing.
    So she tells me that there are things more important than soccer. Like school. And Hebrew. “You need to call Rabbi,” she says. “Have you even started studying your Torah portion?”
    I should just say yes. Yes, I have. I should say I am well on my way to making them the proudest parents in Temple Emanu-El