Chapter 7

Monday, May 21

Surprisingly, the whole family had breakfast together Monday morning. Mom and Dad were heading off to conduct their business, Kacie and her gang had another shopping excursion in the works — one of the other moms was providing transportation — and I apparently had not gotten the memo that this wasn’t a school day.

I was putting a bowl of cereal together when Dad mentioned he’d like to see the yard mowed — i.e., do it or you’re toast, Gary — and that it’d be a good idea to get started before it got too hot. Mom needed to check on some deliveries for the picnic at the club, but said she should have an idea of what she would need me to do by this evening. I heard a car honk out front and Kacie was out the door in an instant. In the span of maybe five minutes, it went from all of us around the table to just me.

Draining one last glass of OJ, I headed out into the garage to organize all the yard tools. Our lawns weren’t particularly large — the front was eaten up with a circular drive and rock garden, while much of the back was a patio — but all the other tasks added up. There was edging and trimming, raking and sweeping, bagging and whatever else Dad could think of. I was just glad we didn’t have room for a pool. It wasn’t that far over to the club and its Olympic pool, and I didn’t have to worry about being responsible for its upkeep.

I had just finished mowing the back and was dumping the bag of clippings in the dumpster in the alley when my phone pinged with a text from Kacie.

“What size waist are you?”

I thought that a bit odd because she never bothered with my clothing. Who knew what she was up to today?

“28-30,” I sent back and resumed my task. Before I could get on to the next chore, my phone pinged again with a message not from one of my contacts, but I thought I recognized the number as Morgan’s.

“What’s your collar size?”

“18½.” That was another side effect of weight training with Jed Richards. My neck wasn’t as thick as his, though. I think his was as big as my thigh, which it needed to be in his line of work. That reminded me, I needed to get in touch with Jed and see if we were lifting this week. His training never really stopped, just shifted focus from season to offseason.

I was done with the yardwork by 11 a.m. with the temperature already edging above 90. I went in to get a cold drink and called Jed. He picked up on the third ring.

“Yellow,” he answered.

We spent a few minutes on the typical teenage bullshit about how the first weekend of vacation had gone — Jed was newly single after his latest girlfriend decided she would be happier dating a baseball player (our high school team was still in the playoffs, which stretched on nearly a month after school was out; I think they had just played the third of seven rounds this past weekend), but wasn’t too torn up about it. As a varsity football player, Jed was seldom without feminine companionship, but as a lineman he was always viewed as something lower on the social scale than the skill-position players.

I never pretended to understand the subtleties of the social dynamics at our school. The quarterback dated the head cheerleader and everything flowed from there. The system seemed to work well enough until the first time we had a black quarterback. Efforts to have a black head cheerleader worked right up until a white guy won the starting quarterback job. It wasn’t like there were any strictures against interracial dating at our school, even here in a southern state, it was just that perception meant so much to the morons in charge. But what did I know? I didn’t even have a steady girlfriend.

I, of course, left out most of my news — not that Jed would have believed I’d gotten laid three times since school let out on Friday.

I finally got around to asking him about the lifting schedule.

“I’m cutting back for a few weeks,” Jed said. “Maybe two days a week, one upper, one lower. I’ll probably do only three circuits instead of five or six. It’s more about maintaining where I’m at for the next month or so, then get back to hitting it hard in July.

“I need to do more roadwork if you’re interested in getting in a couple of miles every morning. Got to build up endurance for when Coach hits us with those gassers in two-a-days.”

Jed did have one other thing I could help him with.

“Coach wants me to try deep snapping this year,” he said. “I need someone to catch the snaps at eight yards and 14.”

Jed explained the different distances (eight yards was for extra points and field goals, 14 yards was for punts), then went into a long discourse on how deep snapping would improve his chances of getting recruited and he wouldn’t have to bulk up as much as he normally would to play in the offensive line. The guy who deep snapped for our high school team last fall was barely bigger than me and was listed on the roster as a tight end, even though he never had a pass thrown his direction. I think the only other time he even got on the field was mop-up action in blowouts.

I understood where Jed was coming from. The local NFL franchise had just announced the re-signing of its deep snapper. The guy had been in the league 14 years, was going to make more than $1 million this season and had never done anything else in his career. He still had two Super Bowl rings and was a perennial Pro Bowler. I told Jed if he could get a gig like that, I’d be his personal jock washer for a modest fee.

We agreed to meet in the morning and do a couple of miles through the neighborhood, then do weights in the evening on Tuesdays (upper) and Thursdays (lower) until further notice. We could spend about a half hour a day working on the snapping, we just needed about 50 feet of space in which to work.

Before Jed hung up, I asked him about the upcoming weekend at the club. The pool would open Saturday and the picnic was set for Monday. He said he’d make it over if he could, but he was also in the process of finding a summer job. Once he signed with a college, NCAA rules would prevent him from doing much work and the time requirements of playing college football (and attending college classes) would make having a job all but impossible.

Not that Jed was hurting for money. His dad was a lawyer and the family lived just a few blocks away in the same subdivision, which wasn’t cheap. Jed actually had a shorter hike to the club than I did. But if he wanted to have a little extra spending money, he needed to earn it now. I got the feeling Mr. Richards was a lot like my dad when it came to instilling a work ethic in his son.

Kacie, with Morgan in tow, came in just as I was finishing the sandwich I’d made for my lunch. From the level of giggling when they saw me on their way to Kacie’s room, I could only imagine what they might have in store for me today.

I finished cleaning up after myself — no need to piss off Mom if I didn’t have to — and was putting my plate in the washer when the girls came into the kitchen.

The way they singsonged “Gaaaar-ryyy” in harmony further convinced me they practiced this stuff in private.

“Hey, ladies,” I said, making sure my back was to the fridge door just in case one of them tried to get behind me. They were up to something, I just wasn’t sure what.