Read Online Gracie by Suzanne Weyn - Free Book Online Page A

as I couldn’t care about school, maybe he couldn’t bring himself to care about his job anymore. I understood that.
    â€œI need a break,” he insisted. “I’ll find something new.”
    â€œWhat are we going to live on?” Mom demanded.
    â€œRight now, I’m coaching Grace,” he replied firmly. “I’m not losing another kid.”
    The back door slammed shut as he went out into the yard, ending their conversation.
    I sat there thinking about what I’d heard. It was a lot to take in. I knew Mom was right to worry about how we’d live, but that wasn’t the main thing on my mind. The thing that really grabbed me was that Dad was putting
my training before his job. He was going to give it everything he had—everything.
    It meant I couldn’t let him down, not even for a second. I promised myself, then and there, that I wouldn’t.

    So the training continued. Even though my brothers still thought we were “delusional,” they helped me repair the goal Dad had torn down on the day of Johnny’s funeral.
    Dad put together a weight room in the garage. He got a lot of the equipment from stuff he’d found during bulk pickup day, when people put out their big furniture and anything else big that they wanted the garbage trucks to take away. “It’s amazing what people throw away,” he commented as he dragged in a leg-press weight board.
    I figured part of not letting Dad down was to avoid summer school if at all humanly possible, and I wasn’t sure that it was. Summer school would eat up precious time that we needed to train if I was going to be ready for tryouts in September. With all my class cuts, the blank test, and the zero for cheating, my current grade was completely in the toilet. But Mr. Clark was a decent guy, and I had to give it a try.
    One day after class, I approached him. “I need to pick up my grade,” I said. “Can I write a paper or something?”
    He handed me a textbook about the Civil War. “Read a chapter every day. Summarize it and bring me your summary at each class,” he said.

    A few weeks earlier I would have just walked away from an assignment like that. Now I had a reason to be happy about it. He was giving me a chance, and I appreciated it. “I’ll be here,” I assured him with a smile.
    â€œWith your summaries,” he emphasized.
    I nodded, thanking him as I backed out the door. If I had to read the chapters in the middle of the night with a flashlight, I was determined to get the summaries done and avoid summer school.

    Dad and I trained well into the evenings. Some nights he put on the big outdoor lights and I ran through a tight obstacle course of orange cones that he’d set up. I was slowly improving, each night knocking over fewer and fewer of them.
    Sometimes I played scrimmages with Mike and Daniel while Dad coached from the side, just as he’d done with Johnny.
    Mom wasn’t home in the evenings anymore because she’d picked up a second job at the hospital. In the mornings, she looked tired. It wasn’t easy on her. I knew she was doing it so Dad could train me without worrying about looking for work. She was another person I couldn’t let down.
    One evening, while we ate frozen dinners Dad had heated up, he set up his reel-to-reel projector and the stand-up screen. He put on a movie of a soccer game. “Is that Johnny?” I asked, seeing a player who looked a lot like him.

    â€œIt’s me,” Dad said.
    I leaned in, looking closer. It was Dad at about nineteen, dressed in a soccer uniform and playing in one of his college games.
    â€œIt was my junior year,” he said. “You’ve seen this before.”
    I shook my head. “Never.” He might have shown Johnny, but I would have remembered if I’d ever seen it.
    â€œThis was before I hurt my knee,” he added, leaning back in his chair to watch the play