I toss her the ball. “What can I say? I’m a showboat.”
“Oh, I know.” She glances down then back at me. “What do you mean, they’re mostly good?”
I glance to the side door where my old man used to stand. “It’s nothing, just my old man.” I clap my hands, and she throws the ball back to me, and I make another shot. “He was never one to hold back when he thought I wasn’t playing the way he thought I should. It’s why I stopped playing basketball.”
“He didn’t do it when you were playing football?”
I replace the ball on the rack. “He did, but I couldn’t hear him on the field.” I glance up at the dirty windows above the bleachers. “It was just my poor mom and anyone sitting around them who had to endure it during those games.”
Her warm fingers wrap around my arm. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, you don’t have to feel sorry for me.” I give her my endorsement look, the one that looks happy, but means absolutely nothing. “I turned out alright.”
The expression on her face tells me that I haven’t fooled her. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend.”
“I wasn’t.”
She just stares at me.
“Okay, it wasn’t fun, but I’m not lying when I say my mom had it much worse than me, in every way.” Hot bile burns my throat just like it always does when I think of the night I laid my father out and told him I’d kill him if he ever put his hands on my mom again. It was a lucky shot. I was still smaller than him. But I’ll never forget the hate in his eyes, or the thrill that raced through me when the hate bled into fear. He knew I wouldn’t stay small forever. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t regret it either.
“Cash …”
I’ve got to get us off this subject. “You’re right, this place was great back in the day, and Coach Dave really kept me in line, kept us all in line.” I chuckle and scrub my hand over my head. “Now him, I miss.”
Her answering grin tells me that she knows what I’m doing, and she’ll allow it. “Tell me about him.” She leads me out of the gym and onto the practice field for football and soccer.
“Some days I can still hear him saying, ‘Cash, it doesn’t matter where you come from, at some point every man has to make a choice as to who he’ll be. Now drop and give me twenty.’”
Her expression is warm and genuinely interested.
“He died the year after I went pro.” Even after seven years, there’s still a stab of pain beneath my sternum. I chuckle to hide the knot in my throat. “He wasn’t very happy that I didn’t stay in college for my senior year, but he understood. The team has a rookie banquet every year, and Dave came in place of my dad. Of course, by then, my dad had been dead for years, but I wouldn’t have brought him if he’d been alive.”
“I’m sure Dave loved that you took him.”
“Yeah, he was like a kid in a candy store. If the kid was a crusty old coach with male-pattern baldness who lived for football.”
“He sounds great. You were lucky to have this place.”
The statement is wistful, and I turn to see her face. She’s staring off into the distance. She’s right, I was.
“Yeah, I learned most everything I know about football from Coach Dave, and being here kept me off the streets. I’d also come back while I was in college to help with football camps that Dave put on.”
“They used to have football camps here? That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, they used to do all kinds of things for Ryder East. Dance camps, carnivals … and everything was no cost or low cost for community members. I’d forgotten all that until right now.”
“I would’ve given anything to be involved in something like this when I was a kid, but all my activities were regimented and planned by my mom and dad.”
“There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve idealized this place, Tiger. It was great to have somewhere to go, but it didn’t change our lives. Most of us were still poor kids without a cent to our names. Of the kids that used to come here, me and Duke may have been the only ones that went on to do something with what