Lucy’s “Perfect” Summer

by Rue, Nancy

  Lucy thought she might know what they were talking about, but she still said, “I need more information.”

  “We told you we didn’t have enough proof to delve further into this situation with the soccer field.” Dad tilted his head back, as if he were looking at the ceiling. Lucy knew he was just seeing his next words. “But I think we’ve realized that shouldn’t have held us back from doing what was right. You showed us that, champ.”

  Lucy poked at her burrito and wriggled in her chair and just generally didn’t know what to say.

  “So about that award!” Mr. Auggy said. “I think it calls for a celebration — tomorrow night at Pasco’s — the whole team.” His small smile grew very big. “The grilled cheese sandwiches are on me.”

  “I thought he was selling the cafe,” Lucy said.

  “It’s still his until they close the deal. He has a few more weeks.”

  That wasn’t long enough for Lucy. She had to talk to J.J. They had to fix this.

  17

  The sun didn’t sink behind the mountains until almost 8:00 on those summer nights, so there was still plenty of light when Lucy begged Dad to let her go see J.J., with a promise to be back before dark.

  J.J. was already hanging out at his front gate, as if he knew she’d be coming. He was glaring at the stuff in his yard as if he hadn’t been living with it for twelve years and had just noticed it was all there. At least, all that his father hadn’t taken with him last Sunday. That seemed like a long time ago to Lucy now.

  “We goin’ somewhere?” he said.

  “Soccer field,” Lucy said.

  J.J.’s face darkened. “Why?”

  “I just want to see it. I want to tell it we can fix it.”

  He shrugged and lifted himself over the fence light as a hawk feather, but his brows were still stuck together in a frown.

  “How come you don’t want to go?” Lucy said as they hurried down Granada Street toward the highway. “Too sad there?”

  J.J. grunted.

  “That’s a no, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t even grunt this time, but Lucy let it go. She had to stay focused.

  The tops of the mountains were turning orange when they took the curve in the dirt road past the bridge, and Lucy expected to see the bent frames of the bleachers and the refreshment stand casting crooked shadows across the sad field.

  But there were no frames.

  Now even the metal was strewn about in pieces, like the toys of an angry, bratty child after a tantrum. Lucy couldn’t help herself. She screamed out loud. Maybe it was a scream she’d been needing to scream all day — she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she couldn’t stop until J.J. picked up a piece of the metal and forced it into her hand.

  “Throw it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Throw it, or you’ll never stop yelling. Throw it.”

  Lucy stared at the metal as she sobbed, and then she pulled it back like she was putting a ball back into the game and hurled it as hard as she could. When it thudded to the ground, the dust around it startled and settled. So did her screams.

  “Come on,” J.J. said, and he led the way into the mess.

  It didn’t seem to scare him the way it did Lucy. She wondered if that was because it looked a lot like his front yard. She herself stepped carefully around the random hunks and tried not to put her foot on any bolts . . .

  Lucy stopped and squatted down. There were a lot of bolts lying around, all separated from the pieces of metal. And the metal itself didn’t look any more mangled than it had the last time they were here.

  “J.J.,” she said. “I think somebody took it apart.”

  He glanced up from the chunk he was nudging with his foot and gave her a “du-uh” look.

  “No, I’m serious,” she said. “Not like they did before — like they did it with tools or something this time.”

  She heard her voice trail off, felt her eyes pop. J.J. didn’t look surprised at all. He just stood up, a metal rail in his hand, and yanked it back as if he were going to thrust it like a spear. And then he let it fall with a thunk to the ground beside him.

  “So they finally turned you into a wimp.”

  Lucy jumped at the voice that growled from the shadows of their lone cottonwood. And then she froze. J.J.’s father stepped out with the ugly smile splitting away from his yellowed teeth. He didn’t seem to see Lucy. His eyes were on J.J. as he walked right past her, close enough for her to see his jaw muscles twitching.

  “I thought you’d wanna pick that up and waste somebody with it,” he said, jerking his head toward the metal piece J.J. had dropped. “Somebody messed up your precious soccer field, son. Don’t you want make him pay?”

  You! Lucy wanted to scream at him. You’re the one who did this! With your evil tire iron and your nasty old tools!

  But she didn’t have to. Mr. Cluck was already driving his thumb into his own chest.

  “Bring it on,” he said. “Don’t be a wimp. Fight back like your old man.”

  J.J. shook his head.

  “No? You don’t want to fight me?”

  “No,” J.J. said. “I don’t want to be like you.”

  His voice was like a thread in the wind. J.J.’s father stepped toward him, his hand cupped around his ear.

  “I didn’t hear that, did I? I didn’t hear you say that to me.”

  He took the last step and pulled back his fist.

  “No!” Lucy screamed.

  Mr. Cluck whirled around, his eyes wild as they searched the almost dark for Lucy.

  “Run!” J.J. shouted at her. “Run like a mad dog!”

  His father whipped back toward him, where J.J. was picking up the metal rail at his feet.

  “Leave her alone,” J.J. said, and this time his voice was loud enough for all of Los Suenos to hear. Lucy stayed rooted into the ground as J.J. swung the rail out in front of him.

  “You think you’re gonna hit me with that, son?” Mr. Cluck said.

  “I’m not your son!”

  “Oh, yes, you are. You’re my flesh and blood, and you’re just like me.”

  J.J. looked at the rail and he looked at his father, and then he looked at Lucy. His eyes were brave, but they had tears in them. He didn’t want to do it. And she didn’t want to make him.

  “Hey!” she shouted.

  Mr. Cluck turned to her, and she pulled back her leg and kicked at the dirt like it was a soccer ball. A spray of dust came up from the ground and caught him full in the face.

  “Run!” J.J. yelled at her.

  This time she did, away from the swearing voice that split open on J.J. In terror she looked back over her shoulder, and saw J.J. hold out the rail just in front of his groping father’s shins. The man ran straight into it and smacked face fist into the ground, barely missing a hunk of his own handiwork.

  J.J. let go of the rail and tore toward Lucy, throwing both hands out to tell her to keep going.

  Pretend you’re going for the goal, Lucy said in her head. That and ‘God, help! Please help us get away!’

  She didn’t hear the footsteps behind them until they were across the newly-repaired bridge and tearing toward the highway.

  “Faster!” J.J. cried.

  Lucy nodded, but she could feel her legs slowing down no matter how hard she pumped. J.J. put his hand on her back and pushed her forward, almost into the path of a car pulling out of the side street.

  Sheriff Navarra’s car.

  His tires squealed at about the same time his door flew open. He was out of the cruiser before it came to a complete stop.

  “Mr. Cluck — !” Lucy said.

  But the sheriff just grabbed them by their arms and shoved them into the front seat of the car and slammed the door. J.J. tumbled on top of Lucy and she had to fight her way up to look out the window. The sheriff stood face to face in the road with Mr. Cluck, hands out to stop him. But J.J.’s father wasn’t going anywhere. His chest heaved and his face was the color of the last of
the sunset.

  “He’s the wimp,” Lucy said as she started to cry. “Not you, J.J.”

  J.J. looked away and Lucy didn’t say anything else. She just let him blink away his tears.

  It took a while to get it sorted out.

  There was the full examination from Dad, who, even after going over every inch of her, still wasn’t convinced that Lucy didn’t have a scratch on her.

  And there was the five-million question session with Sheriff Navarra, who made her repeat everything until she was practically hoarse. And then of course there was the lecture about going to the soccer field when he’d told them not to. Lucy managed to tell him that he needed to be more specific about his orders from now on. He didn’t seem to appreciate it.

  Finally somebody asked him how he happened to be there when the kids were trying to escape from Mr. Cluck.

  He planted his beefy hands on his hips and looked at Lucy the way Gabe did sometimes. “Somebody called in and said they heard a kid screaming over there,” he said. “I assume that was you.”

  “Thank the Lord,” Dad said.

  The sheriff made a huffing sound. “I never took you for much of a screamer,” he said.

  She wanted to scream right then. With all of the questioning and the grilling and the lecturing, she hadn’t had a chance to talk to J.J. alone, and that was all she wanted to do.

  But nobody would let her until the next morning. She was up with the sun, and she and Mudge were outside the gate almost before J.J. stopped throwing pebbles against her window. Mudge didn’t even growl at him when he came around the corner. It was like he knew J.J. had had enough creatures growling at him to last him for the rest of his life.

  “You okay?” Lucy said, though she knew he wasn’t. His eyes were puffy, and his mouth looked like he couldn’t trust it not crumple on him.

  “No,” J.J. said.

  “He’s really gone now,” Lucy said. “My dad said — ”

  “He wrecked our field.”

  “I know.”

  “I always knew it.”

  J.J. slid down the fence and sat miserably with his feet stuck out onto the dirt path. Lucy joined him.

  “You knew it was his tire iron that first day?” she said.

  “Yeah. And I saw the prints in the mud from his boots.”

  Lucy thought of the sheriff squatted by the refreshment stand. That must have been what he was looking at, too.

  “So he came to your house to get the tools to finish the job last Sunday,” Lucy said. “That’s why he was all smiling.”

  “He never smiles.”

  J.J. parked his forearms on his knees and let his hands and his head hang. Lucy sat up straighter.

  “Stop it, J.J.,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Stop acting like it’s your fault. It’s not.”

  “He’s my dad.”

  “No, he’s not. You said that yourself, right to his face.”

  “But he is.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Lucy shook her head so hard it hurt. “A dad’s somebody that would do anything for you and you would do anything for him. Mr. Cluck-Face might have given you a last name, but he’s not your dad.”

  Lucy wasn’t sure where all that had come from, but she was glad it had. J.J. brought his face up and looked at her. There was something like a smile in his eyes.

  “Mr. Cluck-Face?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I a Cluck-Face?”

  “Are you serious?”

  He slowly shook his head and leaned it against the fence, eyes closed. Lucy let him be quiet until he said, “Is that true?”

  “What?”

  “That your dad’ll do anything for you and you’ll do anything for him?”

  Lucy started to simply say, “of course,” but the words caught in her throat. That question still had to be answered — by her.

  So instead she said, “We have a party to get ready for. Today, at Felix Pasco’s. Hey — ” She poked him in the arm. “I still haven’t heard how everything happened yesterday.”

  J.J. just grunted. Yeah. They were getting back to normal.

  It was the best party ever. Not just because Felix had grilled cheese and tacos and a whole bunch of extra pickles — and let the team pick any ice cream they wanted from the freezer.

  And not just because Felix announced that he wasn’t selling his café to those banditos, even though they weren’t the ones who had wrecked the soccer field after the storm and that he was going to tell the other shop owners to do the same for these wonderful children even though they were a stubborn lot and wouldn’t listen to him yet. The tears were a little embarrassing, but the Rocky Road and Fudge Ripple made up for it.

  It wasn’t even the best party just because, once Felix stopped crying over their table, the Dreams finally got to talk about how they brought Rianna Wallace to justice. Everybody talked at once, but Lucy was able to sort it out —

  “I didn’t have any problem getting that Rianna girl to talk,” J.J. said. “She just wouldn’t shut up.”

  “I taped the camera phone to the ball and kicked it — ” Dusty said.

  “You kicked it crooked,” Gabe said. “I’m good, though, so I caught it — ”

  As the chatter went on, with Veronica smacking Gabe, which meant she liked him again, and Oscar and Emanuel pounding each other, just because they were Oscar and Emanuel, and Carla Rosa saying “guess what” every other minute, Lucy felt like she was getting one long hug — a hug she actually liked. A hug that helped her make a decision.

  She clanged her spoon against her soda glass. “I want to make an announcement.”

  “Listen up, everybody,” Mr. Auggy said. He was sitting in a chair backward, looking like he was everybody’s dad and proud of it. “What is it, Captain?”

  “Hawke said if there was anything that would make up for all the trouble, I should tell him. And I know what it is.” Lucy felt her smile spread so big it almost met in the back of her head. “I’m gonna tell him I want to play with you guys in the play-offs — with my real team.”

  The cheer that went up was almost as loud as it was when Lucy won the VIP award. Dusty, of course, had to hug her neck. Over Dusty’s shoulder, Lucy saw that Mr. Auggy wasn’t cheering.

  “Guess what?” Carla Rosa said when they started to settle. “Mr. Auggy doesn’t like that idea.”

  “How do you know?” Veronica said.

  Dusty started to buzz, but Mr. Auggy put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay — I think it’s a very generous idea. That’s just like our captain, right?”

  Lucy heard the “but” in his voice.

  “But that’s going to leave the Select Team two players short.”

  “So you’re telling me not to do it?” Lucy said.

  Mr. Auggy shook his head. “I’m just giving you information. Nobody has to tell you what to do.”

  Dusty gave a big sigh. “Yeah. It’s like she always knows the right thing.”

  Lucy was trying to make a list about that in her Book that night when Dad asked if he could come in. She was glad he was there, because she hadn’t gotten past: “Dear God: I Don’t Know What To Do” in her Book of Lists.

  “Are you in a good place?” Dad said.

  “Why?” Lucy said.

  “Aunt Karen’s back from her vacation. She’s coming here Sunday.”

  “Oh,” Lucy said.

  Dad’s eyebrows went up. “That’s it? Just ‘oh’?”

  “I’ve got a bigger problem than that, Dad,” Lucy said. “And I know you have a really big decision to make yourself, but Mr. Auggy said I should let the grown-ups be the grown-ups and let the kids be the kids. So could I talk to you about it?”

  Dad smiled his sunshine smile, for a first time in a very long while. “That Mr. Auggy is a prince. What’s going on?”

  Lucy told him about her soccer team dilemma. He nodded and made small sounds, just the way he did when he and Mr. Auggy were talking. If she wasn’t a grown-u
p, he sure made her feel like one. There was a lot of that going around.

  When she was finished, Dad leaned back in the rocker and let there be quiet for a few minutes. When he spoke, his voice was serious and low.

  “How did you decide what to do about Rianna?” he said.

  “Well, it’s kinda weird,” Lucy said, “but I used a story in the Bible that Inez showed me.”

  “That isn’t weird at all.” Dad’s face was mushy. “You are surrounded by adults who love you and teach you the things I miss.”

  “You don’t miss anything!” Lucy said. “You’re the best dad in the world!”

  “And I have a lot of help. They’ll be here for you if I have to go away.”

  Lucy nodded, but she suddenly couldn’t talk.

  “I don’t want to move you away from all this,” he said. “I do think there’s one person who would be willing to come and stay with you if I went to school, but — ”

  Lucy caught her breath. “You’re talking about Aunt Karen, aren’t you?”

  Dad’s eyes darted around. “I haven’t asked her, and I won’t if you absolutely say no. I know she’s hard on you.” He ran his hand over his fuzzy summer haircut as if he were waiting for Lucy to explode, or at least try to climb out the window.

  But she didn’t. Maybe there were just too many other things to do before she had the energy to say absolutely no. Or maybe . . .

  “I’m sorry, champ,” Dad said. “This isn’t helping you with your soccer problem, is it?”

  “Not exactly,” Lucy said. “But I think there’s something that might.”

  18

  “All right, seriously, what’s different about you?”

  Aunt Karen shook back her shiny bob of dark hair and looked Lucy over for about the thirteenth time since she’d arrived after church. She brought her iced latte to the kitchen table where Lucy was trying to read.

  “You had your hair highlighted,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “No,” Lucy said.

  “It’s blonder.”

  “Must be the sun.”

  Aunt Karen took a sip from her glass and studied her some more. Lucy went back to the page.