Anything for Her Children. Darlene Gardner

direction was a young woman with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair who couldn’t have been much more than twenty-one or twenty-two. She dressed older, though—in dress slacks instead of blue jeans, and a three-quarter-length brown wool coat that hid her shape. She didn’t bother to hide her emotions.

      “I need to talk to you.” Her voice, like her manner, screamed urgency. Her color was high, somehow highlighting the freckles sprinkled across her small nose.

      She was too young to be a parent of one of the players and too old to be a girlfriend. Grady couldn’t figure out what her business was with him. A girl came and stood just behind her.

      Everybody else in the gym seemed equally curious. Conversation had ceased, with all eyes on them.

      “Yes?” he asked expectantly.

      She perched a fist on each hip. “Are you happy?”

      A weird question. “My team just lost, ma’am. I’m clearly not happy.”

      “You’d have won if you’d played Bryan. I want to know what right you had to suspend him.”

      Grady should have guessed. This was about Bryan Charleton, as everything else had been this night. He curbed an urge to walk away without answering.

      “Being the head coach gives me the right.” He kept his voice smooth and even, betraying none of the irritation percolating inside him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

      He moved quickly toward the exit, his long strides eating up the ground until he was through the gym door and in the parking lot. He unlocked the driver’s-side door of his car with his remote, looking forward to sliding inside and turning the radio way, way up. When he got home, he’d pop open a beer, put up his feet and watch Sports Center. After the train wreck today had been, he deserved to relax a little.

      “Hey, wait a minute.” The tap of heels on the pavement of the parking lot followed the sound of the woman’s voice. “I’m not through talking to you.”

      After casting a brief, longing look at his car, he stopped and turned. She was coming so fast, she would have slammed into him had he not put out a hand to stop her.

      Beneath the coat, her shoulders felt surprisingly delicate for somebody with such fierce determination on her face. He dropped his hand, but she didn’t step back.

      “Did you know there were college recruiters from Temple and Villanova in the stands tonight? Because of you, Bryan didn’t get a chance to show them what he can do.”

      Grady had known about the recruiters, but in his opinion Bryan was the reason Bryan hadn’t gotten to play in front of the scouts.

      “You’re wasting your time. I don’t care if you’re Bryan Charleton’s biggest fan, I’m not talking about him with you.”

      “You think I’m a fan?” Her eyes, as dark as the night around them, flashed. He noticed she had the thinnest of spaces between her two front teeth.

      “You’re not his mother,” Grady stated.

      She stood up straighter, which still put her at eight or nine inches below Grady’s height. “Oh, yes I am.”

      He took a closer look at her, noting her youngish face and smooth skin. “You can’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two.”

      “I’m twenty-five,” she snapped. “Bryan’s my adopted son. And you owe me an explanation.”

      He’d rather hear the story of how she’d come to adopt a teenage boy only eight years her junior, but she appeared in no mood to satisfy his curiosity.

      “You’d already have had an explanation if you’d introduced yourself before you lit into me,” he said. “I’m Grady Quinlan, by the way.”

      “I know your name.”

      “Yet I still don’t know yours.”

      For the first time since she’d approached him, she looked uneasy. “Keri Cassidy.”

      He hadn’t expected to recognize the name, but he was sure he’d heard it before. He searched his mind but couldn’t place where or when.

      “Well, then, Keri Cassidy, I’ll tell you what I told Bryan. I don’t care how good he is, if he cheats at school, he gets suspended.”

      “What?” The early January air was cold enough that her breath came out in a frosty puff. “Bryan doesn’t cheat.”

      “I say he does.”

      “He doesn’t need to cheat. He’s a good student. He’s getting at least a B in every class.”

      “Those aren’t necessarily the grades he deserves.”

      “That’s for his teachers to decide.”

      “I am one of his teachers.”

      He could tell the information surprised her. Bryan must not have told her he’d had a teaching as well as a coaching change.

      “Which class?” she asked.

      “Nutrition and exercise. I took over Coach Cartwright’s classes. The students are required to write papers. I have information that Bryan didn’t write his.”

      She angled her head, and he felt as if she was trying to see inside him. “Information? From whom?”

      “From the girl who wrote the paper for him, which I understand happens in his other classes, too.”

      “Did Bryan admit to this?”

      “No.”

      Her head shook, rustling her hair. “Then you can’t possibly know for sure it’s true.”

      “I wouldn’t have suspended him if I didn’t believe it.” He stamped his feet. The temperature felt to be in the twenties and dropping. His hands were cold, and he no longer had sensation in his ears.

      She opened her mouth to say something else, but he stopped her. “Go home and talk to Bryan. If you have more to discuss, I’ll be in my office after practice tomorrow. Noon.”

      She seemed about ready to protest, then a squall of wind whipped across the parking lot, blowing hair into her face. She brushed the strands back. “Oh, I’ll still want to discuss it. You can count on that.”

      She hurried off. Despite the cold, he stared after her, noticing the same girl he’d seen with her earlier now waited in the lighted lobby of the gym. A younger sister? Another adoptive child?

      He craned his neck, expecting to see a man with them, but they were alone when they emerged from the building. Keri Cassidy put her arm around the girl, as though shielding her from the world. They headed for a dark-colored Volvo across the lot from where he was parked.

      Halfway there, the girl looked up and stared at him. Keri Cassidy’s head lifted. He couldn’t see her expression or hear what she said but knew by her body language that it wasn’t good.

      The wind gusted again, this time carrying a few snowflakes. Grady became aware that he hadn’t moved since she left his side. He fought to keep his chin up as he walked through the wind-whipped parking lot to his car.

      After what he’d been through at Carolina State, he should be used to people thinking the worst about him. But somehow, he wasn’t.

       CHAPTER TWO

       K ERI FOUND B RYAN LYING on his bed, his earphones blotting out all noise except the songs on his MP3 player.

      She knocked on the open door, but he didn’t sit up until she stepped into his field of vision. His eyes were no longer red, but a few balled-up tissues littered the floor near the wastebasket. He wore a Springhill High basketball T-shirt and team sweatpants.

      She didn’t yet have all the facts, but her heart already ached for him. She hesitated, unsure of how to proceed, which wasn’t usually