His mom reappeared on the front steps with her purse. Seth followed, and she kissed him good-bye, all business.
"Okay, Troy," she said, coming down the steps and past him on the walkway toward where her pale green VW bug waited in the driveway.
Troy wanted to go back to the party and reclaim the joy of the victory celebration. He opened his mouth to protest going home. His mom stopped where the stone walk met the driveway and turned as if she sensed his resistance. The look she gave him changed his mind. He said good night and thanked Seth for coaching the team to victory.
"Don't worry," Tate said, "we're going home now, too."
Troy hustled after his mom, his face hot with shame from some unknown source.
They rode in silence, exiting the Cotton Wood Country Club through massive gates and essentially circling a huge block of county highways to their own home down a winding dirt road. Their house, a single-story saltbox not much bigger than a cabin, sat amid a cluster of pines just the other side of the train tracks and a ten-foot concrete wall surrounding the exclusive development where Seth lived. When they pulled up into the red dirt patch just off their front porch, Troy's mom hopped out and went directly inside.
Troy didn't move.
It had been a wild week for them all. Seth had been suspected of illegal steroid use. Troy had been accused of being a pawn in the Falcons' scheme to steal the signals from opposing NFL teams. And both of them had to be cleared so that they could help the Falcons continue their march to the playoffs. At first the media frenzy worked against them, but ultimately Troy used an interview with Larry King to set things right.
Tomorrow they'd be back at it, Troy calling the plays so that Seth could adjust the Falcons' defense, making the team virtually unstoppable in much the same way as their junior league football team had been unstoppable in its own championship game.
But that didn't seem possible now.
Seeing his father, even for those brief minutes outside Seth's house, changed things for Troy. Suddenly none of it seemed to matter. Troy knew that wasn't true. He knew how deep and strong his dream of being a part of an NFL team now-and one day playing on a team himself-really was. He knew that in his head; but his heart, swollen and aching for the father he never knew, made even his lifelong dreams fade into the background.
Troy didn't know how long he sat there in the dark with the pine trees whispering overhead before the front door cracked open and a band of orange light fell out onto the porch. Without closing the door behind her, his mom shuffled down the steps and rapped her knuckle on the car's passenger side window.
Troy opened the door but didn't get out.
CHAPTER FIVE
" WHAT, MOM?" TROY ASKED , his voice dull.
"You've got a big day tomorrow," his mom said. "The Falcons need you. I've got about a hundred emails with media requests that we've got to make some decisions on. You need to come inside and get some sleep. How's that finger?"
Troy shrugged.
"Can I see it?" his mom asked.
Troy held out his throwing hand, wincing even though she held it gently, and clucked her tongue.
"Come inside, Troy," she said. "We need to put some ice on this, and you need to get to sleep."
"You said that already," Troy said.
His mom squatted down so that her eyes were level with his. She gently let go of his hand and touched his shoulder. She spoke in a soft whisper. "You have to forget him, Troy. He's not part of our lives. I'm sorry."
Troy's eyes brimmed with tears, and he shook his head. "All this time you said he didn't care, Mom. You said he wasn't a father, but he didn't know."
"Honey," she said, softer still, her fingers trailing through his hair, "he knew. Believe me, he knew."
"You said it was possible," Troy said, his voice hot. "I heard you; you just said that."
"Troy, 'possible' is a huge word," she said, still stroking his head, her voice still soft. "It's possible that the world could stop spinning, but it won't. Your father can twist things around-he's tricky like that; he always was. I'm not surprised he became a lawyer."
"I want to see him," Troy said, crossing his arms and dipping his chin.
His mother's hand stiffened, and she pulled it back and stood up so that he couldn't see her face outside the glow of the car's overhead light.
"That's not going to happen," she said, her voice cold now. "You come inside. It's bedtime."
Troy sniffed hard and swept the tears from his face. He jumped out of the car and glared at her.
"No," he said, "I won't, and you can't make me. I'm going to see my father if I have to hitch a train to Chicago, and you can't stop me!"
"Troy!" she yelled.
Troy didn't care.
His feet were already moving, flying across the tops of the needle beds, weaving through the pines and into the pitch-black of the night.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM THE MIDDLE OF the woods, Troy thought of something and went back to his house-not to return, but to retrieve the football he used to throw at the tire that hung from a tree on the edge of the dirt patch in front of the house. Troy had collected the signatures of the entire Falcons offense; if he was going to really go somewhere, he didn't plan to go without it.
He found the ball just inside the shed, closing its door quietly, with one eye on his house, before heading back through the pines and out toward the tracks. Up the stony bank Troy climbed. After the total darkness of the woods, he could almost see the shiny metal tracks and their straight path due north to Chicago or south to Atlanta, depending on your direction. Troy headed south-not to Atlanta, but to the Pine Grove Apartments where both Nathan and Tate lived. It was Tate's apartment he went to, scooping up a handful of pebbles from the landscaping and tossing them up at the second-floor window he knew was hers.
It took a dozen stones before her light went on and the window slid open.
"Who's there?" Tate said, hissing into the night, just the edge of her face appearing between the curtains and the window frame.
"Tate," Troy said, "it's me."
Tate stuck her head right out the window then and, looking down, still whispering, asked, "What in the world are you doing?"
"Can you come down?" he asked.
Tate swept her long brown hair behind her ears and said, "You really need me to? It's, like, almost midnight."
"I do," he said.
"Okay," she said with a forceful nod, "let me get out of these pajamas."
Troy circled the apartment building and waited in the shadows until Tate's form slipped free from her front door and down the steps. She held a finger to her lips, and they stayed quiet until they reached the railroad tracks in back.
"Are you crazy?" Tate asked, still whispering.
"You don't have to whisper," Troy said.
"Who doesn't whisper?" Tate asked. "It's the middle of the night. The last time we did something like this, you almost got gunned down by a security guard inside Cotton Wood."
"I didn't almost get gunned down," Troy said.
"He had a gun."
"You sound like Nathan," Troy said.
"Where is Nathan?" she asked.
Troy shrugged. "I needed to talk to you. A woman's perspective, I guess."
Tate went silent for a minute, and they began walking down the tracks before she asked, "About your mom and your dad?"
"I ran away," Troy said.
"From home?"
"I guess."
"You can't do that," Tate said, upset.
"Now you sound like her," Troy said, smacking the ball he held with his free hand, then firing it at the trees beside the tracks so that it took off like a rocket, nearly straight up into the air, "telling me what to do, treating me like a little kid when I'm not. I'm making ten thousand dollars a week. And now with me being cleared by the NFL to help the Falcons, agents are coming out of the woodwork wanting to negotiate a deal for me with the Falcons or even another team for millions. Think about that, Tate. Millions."