Million-Dollar Throw (19 page)

“Yeah,” his dad said. “For everybody.” He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, pal.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“Other than acting like a jerk lately,” he said. “Or just a stranger. I’m sorry about that, sorry this has happened to our family, sorry your mom is holding down two full-time jobs now.”

“I don’t worry about you,” Nate said. “You’ve always taken care of us.”

“Till now.”

Now Nate was smiling. “Until we’re back on our feet.”

“Yeah. Until then.”

Nate put his fork down. “Are we going to lose our house, Dad? Really?”

His dad gave him a long look. “I hope not,” he said. Then he got up suddenly and did something he hadn’t done in a long time, pulled Nate out of his chair and hugged him and told him not to stop believing in happy endings, no matter what, no matter how hard that was sometimes.

Nate went upstairs and made himself do all of his homework, even some stuff for Friday’s math quiz that he could have put off for a night. Made himself do his homework before he checked his e-mail or even thought about IM’ing any of his buddies.

Or Abby.

He hadn’t been talking to her much lately, as difficult as that was for him, making him feel as if it wasn’t just his mom who wasn’t there for him right now—it was Abby, too. But he thought he might make an exception tonight because Abby hadn’t been at school today and nobody was sure why, not even their teachers.

It was when he went online that he saw the Google Alert he’d set up for himself.

Clicked on the link Google had sent to him.

Read the story.

Then read it again to make sure he understood it.

Then he printed it out and waited.

When his mom came home, Nate was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, printout in his hand. It was a few minutes after eleven, which meant way past Nate’s bedtime. Even his dad was fast asleep upstairs.

“Good,” his mom said. “You’ve printed out your explanation for why you’re up this late. Very official.”

Nate motioned for her to sit next to him.

“Been waiting for you,” he said.

“And whatever you’ve been waiting for me
for,
” she asked, “cannot wait until morning, when I have rejoined the ranks of the living and functioning?”

“No,” Nate said. “It can’t.”

She sat down and Nate handed her the printout. She read it. When she was finished, Nate explained why it was so important to them, and why she had to take him to Boston as soon as she could fit it in around her work schedule.

Nate said they had to do it even if he had to miss a day of school, and a practice.

“Mom,” he said, “this could change
everything
.”

She smiled. “This is the top secret project you’ve been working on?”

“My game-changer. Maybe.”

“The kind your dad is always talking about,” she said.

Now she was the one hugging Nate, on this night of hugs. Then she said, “A lot has changed around here, kiddo. A
whole
lot. But one thing sure hasn’t.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re still leading with your heart.”

T
his is the way Abby had explained her absence from school when she’d showed up on the bus Tuesday morning, wearing her special glasses to school for the first time:

“Had a bad day, is all.”

Nate knew the bad days were going to start coming more frequently.

The distance between them was still there. This was the new Nate-and-Abby, the world the two of them were living in now.

He wanted to talk about stuff the way they used to, talk about everything under the sun, make things the way they used to be. But he told himself that wasn’t going to do her any good.

It was Nate’s turn to miss school on Wednesday. He and his mom had raced up to Boston for the meeting she’d been able to set up.

Then Abby missed school again on Thursday. It was becoming routine now, routine for the two of them not to see each other or even speak to each other. When Nate arrived home Thursday from school, the package he’d forgotten he’d even ordered was waiting for him. And this time, he ignored what his head had been telling him and he led with his heart again.

He rode over to Abby’s on his bike, didn’t ring the doorbell, just left the package on her doorstep the way she’d left him the SportStuff target that day. Then he turned right around and went home.

There was no football practice on Thursday night this week, nothing until the Westboro game on Saturday. His dad, Nate knew, was on his way back to Valley from another job interview about an hour away. His mom was at The Clairmont Shop. So Nate was alone in the quiet, empty house, not bothered by that anymore, getting used to being alone. He used the quiet time to get his homework done, wanting to watch the Thursday night game on the NFL network between the Packers and the Jets.

He had just finished the chapter they were going to be quizzed on in history tomorrow when the phone rang.

Nate looked at the caller ID and smiled.

“You think you can just drop this off and run home like a weasel, you weasel?” Abby said.

“I think two
weasels
is a little strong,” Nate said.

“Get over here, Brady,” Abby said.
“Now.”

The book was called
The Story of My Life
by Helen Keller, and Nate had gone looking for it on the Internet after Abby had told him about Helen Keller that day at Joe’s Pizza.

It was Keller’s autobiography, described as a “restored classic” on Amazon, and Nate couldn’t believe there was an audiobook version of it. But there was.

There was a long review of the book posted on Amazon, and the guy writing it started by saying how “Helen Keller would not be bound by conditions,” and down near the end he quoted from the book: “There were barriers, it is true,” she wrote. “But barriers that could in time be swept away.”

The review ended with a sentence about how this blind, deaf woman opened people’s eyes and ears to the beauty of the world. When Nate got to that part, he realized it was like the guy was writing about Abby. He’d ordered the audiobook right there and then.

So much had happened since then, from Abby going to Perkins to Nate losing his starting job to his mom adding a job and his dad losing
his,
that Nate really had forgotten about the audiobook until it arrived.

When he got to Abby’s house, her mom told Nate she was waiting for him upstairs in her studio. And when he got up there, the first thing he noticed was that all the paintings she’d been working on the last time he was here were now covered.

Abby wasn’t wearing her glasses today, maybe because the shades were drawn, most of the light gone from the room, making it look and feel as if it were already night outside.

She had the box for
The Story of My Life
in her lap.

“Why’d you have to give me this?” she said.

“Uh, because I thought you’d like it?” he said. He smiled at her and said, “I know that sounds like an epically terrible reason . . .”

“No jokes,” she said. “Not today.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Do you think I’ve
already
gone all the way blind, Brady? Do you think I can’t see what you’ve been doing lately?” She raised an eyebrow at him now, one of her signature moves. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Okay,” Nate said. “I’m the one in the dark now, and not just because of the crypt light you’ve got going in here.”

“The light’s been hurting my eyes more and more, and I hate wearing those geek glasses, even when I’m alone,” she said. “And don’t try to change the subject.”

“Not sure what the subject is, Abs.”

“You and me,” she said. “Me and you.
Us
. And the way you’ve been pushing me away so it won’t be hard for me to leave
you
when I leave
here
—if I do end up at Perkins full time—and don’t even think about trying to deny it.”

“I can’t,” he said. “Busted.”

“You were doing it and I was letting you do it because I thought you might actually be right,” Abby said. “So why’d you have to ruin everything by dropping off
this
?”

She held up the box and shook it at him like she was shaking a fist.

“Because I don’t want you to go, whether you do or not,” he said. “And I couldn’t keep lying about that, because I thought the lying might be hurting you more than the truth.”

Now she smiled.

Nate didn’t want to say this to Abby, not today. But all of a sudden Nate felt like he was seeing things better than he had in a long time, even if the opposite was true for her.

T
he house was empty again when Nate got home from school the next day.

When he went into the kitchen for his snack, he discovered homemade chocolate chip cookies on the table, which explained why the house smelled like a bakery. Somehow his mom had found time to bake on a day when he knew she’d been there to open The Clairmont Shop at nine in the morning and would be going straight from there to her hostessing job, which meant she wouldn’t get home until ten tonight, if she was lucky.

“Maybe the best chocolate chip cookies in all of world history!” was the way the note on the table read.

The note didn’t say that the cookies were his mom’s way of saying things were still normal in the house, even though they both knew differently.

His dad, Nate knew, had a couple of houses to show to prospective buyers and a job interview after that.

So the house that Nate figured they were on the verge of losing, the house he’d grown up in, the only
home
he’d ever known, was Nate’s private property. Again. He wasn’t going to be alone that long because Malcolm’s mom was picking him up around six, taking him and Malcolm and Pete to Joe’s for pizza before they all went to a movie.

His weekend homework could wait until Sunday.