Free The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick Page B

have sex with her daughter, and say, “Listen, I’m married. I just want to be Tiffany’s friend, okay?”
    Mrs. Webster looks a little surprised by my answer, which is odd because I was sure that was the answer she wanted to hear. But after a moment she says, “Go around back and knock on the door.”
    So I knock on the back door, but no one answers.
    I knock three more times and then leave.
    I’m halfway through the park when I hear a swishy sound behind me. When I turn around, Tiffany is speed walking toward me, wearing a pink tracksuit made from a material that swishes when one pant leg rubs against the other. When she is about five feet away, I throw her a light, girly pass, but she steps aside and the football falls to the ground.
    “What do you want?” she says.
    “Want to have a catch?”
    “I hate football. I told you this, no?”
    Since she doesn’t want to have a catch, I decide I’ll just ask her my question: “Why do you follow me when I run?”
    “Honestly?”
    “Yeah,” I say.
    She squints her eyes and makes her face look mean. “I’m scouting you.”
    “What?”
    “I said I’m scouting you.”
    “Why?”
    “To see if you are fit enough.”
    “Fit enough for what?”
    But instead of answering my question, she says, “I’m also scouting your work ethic, your endurance, the way you deal with mental strain, your ability to persevere when you are unsure of what is happening around you, and—”
    “Why?”
    “I can’t tell you yet,” she says.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I haven’t finished scouting you.”
    When she walks away, I follow her past the pond, over the footbridge, and out of the park. But neither of us speaks again.
    She leads me to Haddon Avenue, and we walk by the new stores and swanky restaurants, passing lots of other pedestrians, kids on skateboards, and men who raise their fists in the air and say, “Go Eagles!” when they see my Hank Baskett jersey.
    Tiffany turns off Haddon Avenue and weaves through residential blocks until we are in front of my parents’ house, where she stops, looks at me, and—after almost an hour of silence—says, “Did your team win?”
    I nod. “Twenty-four to ten.”
    “Lucky you,” Tiffany says, and then walks away.

The Best Therapist in the Entire World

    The Monday morning after the Eagles beat the Texans, a funny thing happens. I’m doing some initial stretching in the basement, when my father comes down for the first time since I have been home.
    “Pat?” he says.
    I stop stretching, stand up, and face him. He’s on the last step, stopped as if he is afraid to set a foot down on my territory.
    “Dad?”
    “You certainly got a lot of equipment down here.”
    I don’t say anything, because I know he is probably mad at my mother for buying me a gym.
    “There’s pretty good Eagles coverage in the papers today,” he says, and then extends the sports sections of the
Courier-Post
and
The Philadelphia Inquirer
to me. “I got up early and finished reading both so that you could keep up with the team. By your commentsyesterday during the game, I could tell you don’t know all of the players, and I thought maybe you’d like to follow along this season now that you’re home and—well, I’ll just leave them on the top step from now on.”
    I’m too shocked to speak or move, because my father has taken the sports pages with him to work ever since Jake and I were little kids. Jake used to fight with Dad all the time about this, asking him to at least bring home the sports sections after work so we could read the articles after we finished our homework. But Dad always left with the papers before we were out of bed, and he never brought the sports sections home for us ever, saying he forgot or lost them at work. Jake finally subscribed himself when he got his first job stocking shelves at the local Big Foods, and this was when we started reading the daily sports pages together every morning before school. He was twelve; I was