Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (15 page)

But when J.J. biked across Highway 54, she stopped at the corner and called out to him, “I don’t know if I’m allowed this far.”

“Just a little farther,” he said over his shoulder.

A car swished by and then left only the sound of the cottonwood leaves chattering under their breath. Only because an almost-smile teased at the corners of J.J.’s mouth did Lucy follow him across and past a pistachio grove and onto a gravelly road she’d never been on, tasting the dust he spewed out from his tires. When they rounded a sharp curve, she was glad she had.

At first, she saw a chain-link fence with dents where cars had missed the road and bounced off of it. But that disappeared at the sight of a long, long brown-grassy rectangle with a rusty metal frame and tattered net at either end. On one side was a set of bleachers, empty but expectant, and on the other was a cement block building with a boarded-up window that begged to be opened for refreshments.

“This is a for-real soccer field,” Lucy said.

“I know.” J.J. pointed to a sign, taller than they were, that stood as if one leg were shorter than the other. The letters were chipped and faded, but Lucy could still read what was left of “LOS SUENOS SOCCER FIELD.”

“It was worth my dad — ” J.J. stopped.

“Grounding you,” Lucy said.

“Nobody owns this — I asked Pasco.”

“He knows everything about the whole town.”

“Duh.” J.J. pulled his front wheel up. He didn’t look at Lucy.

“Then I say we take it over,” Lucy said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s like a sin to let it just sit here. Look at it.” Lucy got off her bike and let it fall against the battered fence. “It’s begging us to bring it back to life.”

J.J. didn’t answer. But he did smile, an actual smile.

He said he wanted to round up Emanuel and Oscar immediately and start playing. But inside the fence, Lucy took one step across a now almost-invisible painted sideline on the weeds and heard a crunch. The remains of a brown bottle smashed under her foot.

“We have to clean up,” she said, hands on hips. “This place is a mess.”

It felt good to say that, made it feel like they were grown-ups surveying a room little kids had trashed. Somebody obviously didn’t know what a sacred space a soccer field was, and they did.

“First, we get it in shape,” she said. “Then, we play.”

They spent the rest of the day picking up crumpled wrappers and broken glass and withered plastic bottles. J.J. went on his bike to the Mini-Mart on Highway 54 at noon and brought back two Twinkies and a 16-ounce Coke for them to share for lunch.

Lucy was too excited to take more than a bite and a sip. The more she collected into a pile for future trash bags, the more there seemed to be to pick up. But all she had to do was look behind her at the cleared dirt, litter-less and waiting, and she could almost hear the smack of a soccer ball against a foot and someone calling, “To me, Lucy!”

They stripped off their jackets and sweatshirts after lunch, the way you could sometimes on a New Mexico winter afternoon, and let the sun soak into their T-shirts as they yanked out the biggest weeds and clumps of sagebrush.

“Somebody will definitely trip over those in pursuit of a goal,” Lucy said.

J.J. flipped his hair back. “Sometimes you talk like your dad. Like, smart.”

“He’s a radio announcer,” Lucy said. “He has to talk smart.”

She flung a hunk of sagebrush onto the pile and felt comfortable with J.J. He was really talking to her. “I never hear your dad talk that much,” she said.

“Me neither,” J.J. said. “I don’t listen to him that much.”

“Is that why you get grounded a lot?”

J.J. grunted. End of conversation.

Lucy had that all-by-herself feeling again. She pulled the last of the big weeds and wiped off the falling-down sign with the bottom of her T-shirt and kicked a clump of dirt from the bottom row of bleachers. Then she felt better.

The sun was settling down behind the mountains when Lucy untied her sweatshirt from around her waist and pulled it on and retracted her hands into the sleeves. The goal frames made shadows across the clear space of dirt.

“We could play tomorrow,” she said.

J.J. walked along the bench behind her, arms out like he was on a tightrope. “What time?”

“After church. And after lunch. And after I go to the station with my dad.”

“Too late.”

He was right. It would be 2:00 by then, and that would only leave a couple of hours of sunlight and warmness. But Sunday was her day with Dad.

“I’ll get Emanuel and Oscar,” J.J. said. “And Carla Rosa. Januarie’s not coming though.” His voice went up and away like it did when he was really into something. She hadn’t heard it that way in a while.

“I’ll hurry after I get done with stuff.” Lucy swiveled around and looked up a long leg. “Don’t start without me though.”

“’Kay.”

“Swear?”

“Dude, I swear.”

They got their bikes then and put on their jackets and headed down the gravel road that, to Lucy, was now the best street in town, even without nut trees and rose bushes and sleepy shops. At the curve, J.J. stopped, and so did Lucy. He shaded his eyes with his hand as he twisted back toward their soccer field.

“Pretty cool,” he said.

“Very cool,” Lucy said.

Reverend Servidio’s sermon the next day was the longest ever. Maybe because he talked about Jesus healing a blind man, which Jesus seemed to do about sixty times in the Bible and which was Lucy’s most un-favorite story of all of them, since Jesus hadn’t chosen to heal Dad. Hello.

Besides, she had things to do. Reverend Servidio went on for so long about whose fault it was that the guy was blind in the first place that Lucy thought she would stand up and shout, “What difference does it make? He can’t see — there’s your problem!” Dad put his hand on her arm, which made her wonder if she’d actually said it out loud.

“So what was up with you in church?” he said when they were settled at their usual table at Pasco’s with a pile of chicken nachos. “You haven’t squirmed that much since you were four.”

“He just kept saying the same thing over and over.” Lucy caught some melted cheese with her finger and twirled it around. “I got it the first five times he said it.”

“And what exactly did he say, do you think?” Dad got his smooth-faced, we’re-about-to-have-a-good-conversation look.

Lucy opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She stuffed a hunk of tortilla chip and chicken into it.

“Pretty deep,” Dad said with a chuckle.

“It was something about Jesus spitting in some dirt and putting it on a blind guy’s eyes to make him see, which doesn’t work now, so what does that have to do with me?” She glanced at her watch. It was already 11:15. J.J. probably had the team at the field by now.

“Lucy.”

She looked up at her father. His face was sober.

“You don’t see what Jesus’ healing love has to do with you? Seriously?”

“Dad, I’m eleven. I don’t exactly need any healing.” She didn’t mention that he did, and so far, Jesus hadn’t shown up with it. “You done?” she said.

“Done? He’s barely started.” Pasco was standing at the table, giving his automatic smile. “First you ditch my grilled cheese — now you’re boycotting my nachos.” He smiled again, that quick thing he did at the end of every sentence. “I’m deeply wounded.”

“Not to worry, Pasco,” Dad said. He didn’t raise his face. “We’ll finish it up.”

Pasco gave Dad a long look before he left their table. Lucy didn’t blame him. Dad was being very un-Dad at the moment. His voice was serious, like they were talking in the bank.

“The Bible,” he said. “You don’t see anything in there that you can use in your life?”

“I think I’m supposed to say ‘yes, I do’.” Maybe if she did, she could move this along.

“But you don’t?”

“I will when I grow up,” Lucy said.

“And right now you’re in a rush to get off somewhere.”

She stole another glance at her watch. If she could hurry him to the radio station, they could still do their thing, and she wouldn’t hurt his feelings —

“Maybe your Aunt Karen is right about one thing,” Dad said. “I’ve neglected a lot more than I thought with you.”

Lucy’s backbone went prickly, and suddenly she didn’t care about his feelings so much. “I want to go play soccer,” she said. “J.J. found a real field — ”

“Where?”

“Over across 54. We got it all cleared off, and I CAN get across the highway without getting run over by a truck because I’m not a stupid little baby — ”

“Whoa, whoa.” Dad put up his hand and darted his eyes all over the tabletop. “Where’s all this coming from?”

It’s coming from you treating me like a bad kid when I didn’t even do
anything wrong
, she thought. But for once, she kept her lips pressed together so it wouldn’t come out where he could know it.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

There was a silence, like a stranger had suddenly sat down at the table with them. Lucy didn’t want to be there with it.

“Okay,” Dad said finally. “Go play soccer.”

“After we go to the station.”

“Go now. I’ll be fine.”

Lucy looked hard at him. There was no pointy anger around his nose, no sharpness to his mouth.

“I’ll be back before dark,” she said.

“Take care of what I love,” he said.

Lucy ran all the way down Granada Street and collected her bike and her soccer ball and raced across the highway with her mind tumbling over itself. Only when she saw them — her team — all lined up on the bottom row of the bleachers, waiting, did it fall into a soft, good place.

“Hey!” she said. “Let’s play soccer!”

10

One hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. It was so big, even Lucy couldn’t kick the ball far enough for them to use the whole thing.

It was enough space to shout across and not be heard. To swing a kicking leg for a long instep pass or take a running start and slide into the ball. There was room to play, and no one was blowing a whistle to stop them every seven seconds.

Even Carla Rosa could pass the ball a couple of inches — and Emanuel dribbled without getting tangled up in his long legs — and Oscar threw himself in front of the goal like he was trying to stop a train.

“This is the best, the best, the BEST!” Lucy cried — just after she smacked the ball past Oscar’s fingertips and sent it right into the ragged net. It didn’t matter that the frame leaned like the old men at Pasco’s, or that there was no one but Oscar to try to keep her from scoring a goal. She did it, on a real soccer field, for the very first time. A hundred people cheering in the bleachers couldn’t have made it better.

Unless her mom had been there. Lucy turned for a second toward the team bench and imagined her, the tip of her nose like a cranberry from the cold, Lucy-blonde hair whipping in the wind —

“Aw, man — what are you doing here?”

J.J.’s voice brought Lucy straight back to now. Had Gabe and the Gigglers found them?

“I followed you,” Januarie said. She looked small on the sideline of the big field, swallowed in the greenness of her scarf and hat and gloves, with only a scarlet face showing.

“I been waiting under there.” She pointed a wooly finger toward the ramshackle bleachers.

The others gathered around her.

“Guess what?” Carla Rosa said. “You have snot coming out of your nose. It’s frozen.”

“Waiting for what?” J.J. shook his head. “Never mind. Just go home.”

“If you make me go home, I’ll tell Daddy where you are.”

Everyone’s heads swiveled from Januarie to J.J. and back again. Lucy felt her middle sag. J.J.’s dad didn’t know where he was? That never turned out to be a good thing.

“I was waiting for Lucy,” Januarie said.

“Why?” J.J. said.

“’Cause I knew she would let me play.”

“You don’t know nothin’ about soccer,” Oscar said. “At least we been learnin’ from Mr. Auggy.”