Anything for Her Children

A LL BUT ONE OF THE PLAYERS in the locker room sat on the benches with their legs spread, their hands dangling between their knees, staring down at their high-tops as Grady delivered the postgame talk.

The exception—a tall, barrel-chested kid named Hubie Brown who was easily the second-best player on the team—openly glared at him.

The game had gone about as well as Grady expected. Springhill stayed close until the other team pulled away in the last two minutes of play, handing Springhill its first loss of the season.

Close, Grady was quickly discovering, wasn’t good enough at Springhill.

“Practice is tomorrow morning at nine, so think about what I said and be ready to go.” Grady spoke with authority, one of the many things he’d learned while on the coaching staff at Carolina State. Before his future had blown up in his face. “The harder we practice, the better we’ll get. Okay, everybody up.”

The boys reluctantly stood. Grady put his hand in the middle of an imaginary circle. A few seconds ticked by before the hands of the boys joined his.

“Let’s say this together. One…” Only Grady’s voice rang out in the quiet locker room. He stopped.

“Try it again,” he ordered, looking at each boy in turn, few of whom looked back. “One, two, three, team.”

This time all of their voices joined in, even if some were so soft they weren’t audible. Grady let his hand fall, signaling the players were free to go. They pulled on black-and-gold Springhill sweat suits and picked up gym bags before filing out of the locker room. Hubie moved more slowly than the others, his silence speaking the loudest.

“Hubie, come over here,” Grady said.

The boy grudgingly complied, moving toward Grady as though his feet fought quicksand. Hubie wasn’t quite eye to eye with Grady but probably had fifty pounds on him, most of it muscle.

“You got something to say?” Grady asked.

The boy compressed his lips, his struggle to hold back his thoughts obvious.

“Go ahead.” Grady didn’t break eye contact. “We’re the only ones here. I won’t bench you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“We’d have won with Bryan on the floor.” The words burst from Hubie like water from a geyser.

“Might have won,” Grady corrected.

“We lost by six and Bryan’s averaging twenty. We need him, Coach.”

“Then tell Bryan he’s letting the team down. Tell him it’s up to him when he comes back.”

“You’re the one who can lift the suspension. Bryan doesn’t even know what you want from him.”

“He knows.” Grady turned away, effectively ending the conversation. He wasn’t about to go into the details of his beef with Bryan with one of Bryan’s peers.

Too many of Grady’s own peers, from teachers at the school to fans in the stands, were demanding answers.

Grady pulled on his fleece-lined jacket, stuffed his clipboard into his gym bag and left the locker room. The game had ended thirty minutes ago, but the gym wasn’t empty. The custodial staff picked up trash from the bleachers. Some parents remained, either talking to players or one another. As did a couple of cheerleaders and other girls who’d waited around for their boyfriends.

Everybody seemed to look up at once when Grady emerged, giving him the uneasy feeling that he’d be walking the gauntlet to his car.

He half expected to be accosted by an overzealous booster, but the only person headed in his direction was a young woman with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair who couldn’t have been much more than twenty-one or twenty-two. She dressed older, though—in dress slacks instead of blue jeans, and a three-quarter-length brown wool coat that hid her shape. She didn’t bother to hide her emotions.

“I need to talk to you.” Her voice, like her manner, screamed urgency. Her color was high, somehow highlighting the freckles sprinkled across her small nose.

She was too young to be a parent of one of the players and too old to be a girlfriend. Grady couldn’t figure out what her business was with him. A girl came and stood just behind her.

Everybody else in the gym seemed equally curious. Conversation had ceased, with all eyes on them.

“Yes?” he asked expectantly.

She perched a fist on each hip. “Are you happy?”

A weird question. “My team just lost, ma’am. I’m clearly not happy.”

“You’d have won if you’d played Bryan. I want to know what right you had to suspend him.”

Grady should have guessed. This was about Bryan Charleton, as everything else had been this night. He curbed an urge to walk away without answering.

“Being the head coach gives me the right.” He kept his voice smooth and even, betraying none of the irritation percolating inside him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He moved quickly toward the exit, his long strides eating up the ground until he was through the gym door and in the parking lot. He unlocked the driver’s-side door of his car with his remote, looking forward to sliding inside and turning the radio way, way up. When he got home, he’d pop open a beer, put up his feet and watch Sports Center. After the train wreck today had been, he deserved to relax a little.

“Hey, wait a minute.” The tap of heels on the pavement of the parking lot followed the sound of the woman’s voice. “I’m not through talking to you.”

After casting a brief, longing look at his car, he stopped and turned. She was coming so fast, she would have slammed into him had he not put out a hand to stop her.

Beneath the coat, her shoulders felt surprisingly delicate for somebody with such fierce determination on her face. He dropped his hand, but she didn’t step back.

“Did you know there were college recruiters from Temple and Villanova in the stands tonight? Because of you, Bryan didn’t get a chance to show them what he can do.”

Grady had known about the recruiters, but in his opinion Bryan was the reason Bryan hadn’t gotten to play in front of the scouts.

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t care if you’re Bryan Charleton’s biggest fan, I’m not talking about him with you.”

“You think I’m a fan?” Her eyes, as dark as the night around them, flashed. He noticed she had the thinnest of spaces between her two front teeth.

“You’re not his mother,” Grady stated.

She stood up straighter, which still put her at eight or nine inches below Grady’s height. “Oh, yes I am.”

He took a closer look at her, noting her youngish face and smooth skin. “You can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“I’m twenty-five,” she snapped. “Bryan’s my adopted son. And you owe me an explanation.”

He’d rather hear the story of how she’d come to adopt a teenage boy only eight years her junior, but she appeared in no mood to satisfy his curiosity.

“You’d already have had an explanation if you’d introduced yourself before you lit into me,” he said. “I’m Grady Quinlan, by the way.”

“I know your name.”

“Yet I still don’t know yours.”

For the first time since she’d approached him, she looked uneasy. “Keri Cassidy.”