A Hopeless Game

by Daniel Carson

  As I looked over the assembled group, I felt my throat tighten up.

  “Why?” I said.

  Granny waved her hand at me. “Why? I say all that nice crap and you ask me why?”

  “I told her it’s best never to ask you that,” Alex said.

  “Listen to the sheriff, Granddaughter. Not everything is a why. Just enjoy yourself, okay? Because I sure plan to.” Then she turned around and yelled, “And now for the presentation of the gifts!”

  The group formed a line, and one by one, in a very strange and surreal fashion, each person came up to me, thanked me for coming home to Hopeless, and then handed me something. Stank gave me a brand-new hammer and said he hoped I’d be building stuff here in Hopeless for a long time. Cup gave me a box with four pink champagne cupcakes. Zeke gave me a business card with numbers for his barber, his accountant, and his mortician… just in case I needed a good referral. Flo gave me a coupon for a free blow-dry and wash at her shop… and she whispered that she’d also give me a few five-card stud pointers, because she wanted me to learn from a real card player instead of from Granny.

  And then Katie gave me a packet of papers she’d apparently printed off from the internet. I read the headline on the first page. “Ten Ways to Not Get a Urinary Tract Infection?”

  Katie shrugged. “Granny didn’t give me much time to prepare a gift. And I mean, seriously, who wants a UTI? Don’t say anything now. You can thank me later.”

  “Have you even followed any of these steps?”

  “No. Remember, I’m the friend who sets an example of what not to do.”

  Celia gave me one of the best gifts of all: a slobbery kiss on the cheek. Lucy gave me two polished rocks that she had named Curly and Moe. And Dominic gave me a signed copy of his favorite film from the Fast and Furious franchise. Signed by him, that is. He spelled his name wrong, but it was the thought that counted. And he hugged me so long I thought I was going to cry.

  Bess grabbed me by both cheeks and kissed me on the lips. Fireman Bob gave me a T-shirt that said “Firefighters Do Everything Better.” And Alex handed me a single piece of paper.

  He grabbed my hand and said, “But don’t open it now.”

  Mr. Mysterious strikes again.

  Then it was Mr. Tanaka’s turn. He held in his hands a small pot containing a single, beautiful yellow rose. “Thank you, Hope, for everything.” He handed me the pot, then bowed and walked away.

  Granny’s turn came last. In her hand was a brown envelope. And on her face was an expression of worry.

  “Granny,” I said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because it’s possible that I wasn’t completely truthful with you.”

  “About what?”

  “About this party. I mean, we did want to get together to show you how much we appreciate you. But the real reason for the party… is this.”

  She handed me the envelope.

  “I see you’ve opened it,” I said.

  She shrugged. “The government talks about a right to privacy, but I sure don’t.”

  “Okay, so, what is it?”

  “It’s a letter you received yesterday. Overnighted so I knew it was important. It’s from that fancy TV guy, Petterast.”

  “Pendergast.”

  “That’s the fella. Anyways, before you read this, just remember… well, all of this.”

  She gestured to the crowd. Once again the line formed, and everyone in the bar said came by and said goodbye to me, until at last it was just Granny and me.

  “Well?” Granny said. “You gonna read it, or are we just gonna stand here?”

  So I opened up the letter. And I read it through. And then I read it through again.

  “Is this for real?” I said.

  Granny nodded. “It appears so.”

  The letter was from Mark Pendergast. He said he wanted me to come out to New York to do that screen test. But he said a lot more than that. He said that, at this point, the screen test was nothing more than a formality. Because he’d already convinced his bosses at the network that I, Hope Walker, would be the next star of a TV newsmagazine.

  A national TV news magazine.

  And now I know why all these people had come to see me tonight.

  “It’s your dream,” Granny said.

  “But is it?” I asked, my voice starting to shake.

  “That’s not something I can decide, Granddaughter. All I’ve ever wanted… and I mean ever… is what’s best for you.”

  “But how do I know what that is?”

  Granny put a hand tenderly to my cheek, then patted it with love. “That’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself.”

  And Granny left me alone.

  I sat down and stared at Mark Pendergast’s letter, and I had never felt so torn in all my life. I had dreamed of an opportunity like this ever since I was nineteen, when I first left Hopeless to make it in the big city. And now… that opportunity was here.

  It was knocking.

  And I felt… confused.

  Then I remembered the small half sheet of paper Alex had given to me. I had put it in my pocket. I put Mark Pendergast’s letter aside, pulled out Alex’s paper, and unfolded it.

  It was short. Simple. And handwritten. Just three words.

  But hopefully, someday.

  I still had that note in my hand as I walked out into the crisp November night and stared up at Moose Mountain, standing guard over this weird little town and its weird little people I had once again come to love.

  And at that moment I did something I hadn’t done much of over the last thirteen years. Something I wasn’t very good at. I looked up into the night sky… and I spoke a simple prayer.

  “God, wherever you are… I’ve got a decision to make. Please, please help me get it right.”

  THE END

  Dear Reader: A Note From Daniel Carson

  Thank you for reading A Hopeless Game, the fourth book in the Hope Walker Mysteries. The fifth Hope Walker Mystery, A Hopeless Christmas, will be released in December of 2019. If you sign up for my newsletter, I will send you an update when the fifth book is available.

  Daniel Carson Newsletter Link:

  http://eepurl.com/dtZWfH

  My family and I had a smooth and uneventful summer. But uneventful in a good way. We avoided raccoon infestations of our home (that was the previous two summers). Nothing major in our house broke down or was destroyed (you’ve already heard about some of this). And not one trip was made to the emergency room (we probably should have but after all these years we’ve learned that glue and duct tape can work miracles). The kids played a lot. Swam a lot. And we laughed a lot. It wasn’t perfect by a long shot. But it was perfectly us. And that’s just fine. At the end of July, we took a family vacation where for the first time in our family’s history, no significant punches were thrown. And in late August we dropped my oldest daughter off at college.

  And that brings us to fall. You’ll see that Hope Walker 4 is about football, and that gives me a chance to tell you an odd little football story right now that didn’t quite fit in the book. But this isn’t just a story about football—it’s also about the brain. This is the story of the first varsity football game I ever played, a game I played in September of my junior year, a game that I can’t and won’t ever remember because I received a fairly significant concussion. So I can’t tell you what happened firsthand, only what others have told me. And, spoiler alert, the punchline of this story isn’t that I once played football or am tough or anything like that… the punchline is that at my core, I am a gigantic nerd.

  I don’t remember anything from the day of that game or anything at all really until the next day. In total, I lost about thirty-six hours of memory. Wiped clean. No idea. The first thing I remembered was waking up Saturday at noon with my older brothers staring at me. I was on the couch of my mother’s apartment, and my brothers had, been positioned there all night to watch me while I slept. To make certain that nothing bad
happened. When I finally became coherent they explained to me what had happened. That on the opening kickoff of the second half, I went to block someone, my head went down, the top of my helmet hit some other helmet, and at the end of the play… I got up slowly and started walking to the wrong sideline. One of my teammates had to spin me around and bring me back to my team. People around me could tell something was wrong immediately. I was asking all sorts of crazy questions. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  They took my helmet away and stuck me on the end of the bench and told me not to move until the end of the game. Again, so they tell me. But as the game wound down, and as I continued to ask annoying questions about who I was and what we were doing, occasionally and quite out of nowhere I would blurt out one word: Pie!

  My brothers were very curious about this detail, because they said when they came to get me from the locker room, when they escorted me to the hospital, and when they brought me home, I would continue, quite out of nowhere, to blurt out Pie!

  Did I have a good piece of pie that day? they asked.

  I didn’t think so.

  What could it mean?

  I had no idea.

  They continued to fill in details. How the coaches left me alone in the locker room because I was going a bit crazy, throwing helmets and shoulder pads all over the place. And the cussing? Holy moly! Though I had let out a few curse words in my day, cussing on a grand scale wasn’t really my thing. But on this night? I took the art to a whole new level, stringing together combinations of obscenities that challenged even the sensibilities of my otherwise salty football coaches.

  The fact was, I had no idea who I was and what had happened, and in this long stretched-out moment of cognitive darkness, the evidence suggests that I was awfully frustrated by that fact. And then, out of nowhere and quite at random, I would, without warning, blurt out that one word.

  Pie!

  It wasn’t until I was reading the sports page an hour later that everything finally fell into place. You see, I was reading the little recap of the game and examining the box score for our team’s statistics. And that’s when I saw it.

  The final score of the game.

  For those who’ve already tried to put it all together, you’re probably guessing that the “pie” I was talking about may have actually been that other pie… the number pi. And if you guess that… you were right. And thus, you’re probably guessing that the final score was something like 3 to 14 since the first three digits of pi are 3.14.

  But like I said, I’m a much bigger nerd than that.

  Because you see, the final score of the game was actually…

  22 to 7.

  And when you divide 22 by 7, what do you get?

  You guessed it…

  3.14.

  You get some other decimals after that as well, and 22 divided by 7 is not equivalent to pi in the strictest sense… but who cares? At a time when my brain was completely lost and searching for meaning… it somehow found meaning in the score on the giant scoreboard in front of me. It found meaning in pi.

  And lest you think my nerd factor couldn’t grow any more, consider this. I was born on the same day as Albert Einstein. March 14.

  3/14.

  But many people just call it… Pi Day.

  Now back to my book-writing update. We are getting close to the end of the first season of the Hope Walker Mysteries. Book 5, which is due to be released in December of 2019, will conclude season one, and I’m really excited for how this first season is going to wrap up. As always, I hope you enjoy reading about Hope, and Katie, and Granny as much as I enjoy writing about them!

  Remember to sign up for my newsletter if you want updates, or you can always come over to my Facebook author page and say hello. I would love to hear from you.

  Daniel Carson Facebook Author Page:

  https://www.facebook.com/AuthorDanielCarson/

  And remember that Hope Walker Five: A Hopeless Christmas comes out in December!

  Thank you so much for reading!

  —Daniel

  PS. Reviews are awesome. More awesome than you can possibly understand. If you could leave a short review on Amazon, I would be thrilled. If you could leave a review on the front page of Google, I would be overjoyed.