When the game was over, Sarah’s parents came over and told Cassie’s dad that Sarah had decided to quit the team.
TWENTY-THREE
Sometimes I’m the one who feels like quitting,” Cassie said.
“You know you don’t mean that,” Jack said.
“Don’t be so sure.”
It was the next afternoon. The Cubs had a game in a few hours. Cassie and Jack and Teddy and Gus were on the dock behind Brooke Connors’s house. The Connorses were away, having taken a trip to Cape Cod as a way of getting Brooke out of Walton for a couple of weeks, having seen how hard it was for her to be around the Red Sox now that she couldn’t play.
She’d told Cassie that getting a chance to take a step back and see from the sidelines what it was like around their team had made it even harder.
“Everybody seems to have forgotten what it was like at the start of the season and all we wanted to do was talk about making it to Fenway,” Brooke said before she left. “But I haven’t.”
“Remember something, though. If we go, you still go with us.”
“It won’t be the same.”
And Cassie said, “Hardly anything is the same as it used to be.”
She reminded Cassie again to go hang out on the dock whenever she and the guys wanted to. Now here they were. There were a few places in Walton where they liked to come and just talk about things. Chop things up, as Teddy said. Other than sitting above Small Falls, this was the place they liked the best, especially on a summer day like this, with the sun high in the sky and no wind to speak of and the water completely calm.
Except, Cassie thought, nothing was calm for long this summer, even when both their teams, Cubs and Red Sox, were winning. And both teams were winning.
“Well, one thing I know,” Cassie said. “I can’t let Sarah quit.”
“Not your decision, Cass,” Gus said.
“Not saying it is,” she said. “But I’m not going down without a fight.” She look over at Teddy. “I wouldn’t have if you’d gone ahead and quit your team.”
“That wasn’t the same,” Teddy said.
“Oh, like you not wanting Sam on your team is supposed to be different from Kathleen and the other girls not wanting Sarah?”
“But,” Teddy said, “those other girls didn’t make Sarah quit. She did that on her own.”
“It’s not like she didn’t have help,” Cassie said. “It’s like that thing you always hear about in sports, how even one big play at the end isn’t the reason you won or lost. A whole lot of stuff had to happen before that. Well, guess what? A whole lot of stuff happened with Sarah—and to Sarah—before that play at home plate.”
“Gotta say,” Gus said, “your play was better.”
“Heck of a tackle,” Teddy said.
“This isn’t funny,” she said.
“Come on,” Teddy said. “I’m just trying to lighten the mood, Miss Dark Cloud.”
“I know,” she said.
She rolled over onto her back and looked straight into what was pretty much a cloudless sky.
“Explain to me again,” she said, almost as if talking to the sky, “how come my team is winning and I feel like we’re losing.”
Jack said, “Because sometimes it takes more than winning for sports to make us feel the way they’re supposed to.”
“You guys seem to have figured it all out now that you’re coaching,” she said to him.
“Figured it out for now,” Jack said. “But we’ve still got our own stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Like I need for Sam to start pitching good,” he said. “Because if he doesn’t, I won’t be able to explain to the other guys why I keep starting him and not J.B. or Jerry.”
“How do you explain it now?” she said.
“When somebody asks, I just tell them to pay attention to when Sam does pitch good for an inning or two, because he’s got really good stuff sometimes.”
“Yeah, well the stuff I’ve got going on around my team is never good,” Cassie said.
“Gotta admit,” Jack said. “You got me there.”
“But you’d never quit in a thousand million years,” Teddy said.
“No,” she said, “I would not. But I still can’t let Sarah quit. It wouldn’t just be bad for our team. It would be really bad for her.”
“How would it be for you?” Jack said.
“It’s not about me,” Cassie said.
“Really?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Cassie said.
“It means,” he said, “that sometimes I get the feeling that you think that somehow if Sarah fails, you lose.”
Jack was sitting cross-legged. Cassie sat up so she was doing the same, and so she could look right at him.
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
“Don’t get mad,” Jack said.
“I’m not mad.”
“I meant don’t get mad when you hear what I’m about to say.”
“I won’t.”
“You swear?”
“No,” she said. “But man up and tell me anyway.”
“What I think,” Jack said, “is that you’re still trying to do right by Sarah and still trying to get her to fit in. But what I don’t get is why that’s been so important to you from the start. And why somebody you still hardly know is more important to you than a lot of people you do know.”
Cassie swiveled her head so she could see Teddy’s and Gus’s reactions to that. They were both shaking their heads. It meant that for now they were sitting this one out.
Then she turned back to Jack.
“What, you’re saying that the other girls are right and I’m wrong?” she said. “Tell me you’re not saying that, Callahan.”
“I’m not saying that at all,” Jack said. “What I’m saying, and maybe should have said before this, is that you’ve been acting like Sarah was some game you were trying to win.”
Cassie started to answer. Before she could, Jack put out a hand to stop her. “Only, it’s not a game with her. And even if things work out the way you want them
