The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome by Shonda Schilling, Curt Schilling Read Free Book Online Page B

would run and hide behind the large curtains in our kitchen and stay there forever. If the kids ratcheted it up a notch, he would go into a highpitched frenzy, at times almost tearing the curtains from the ceiling. Needless to say, it would ruin everyone’s day.
    While I noticed differences like this, I didn’t make too much of them. Grant was proving himself to be his own person, I thought. Sure, he was harder to control than his siblings, but still he was an incredibly kind and generous child.
    Complicating things in that fall of 2003 was the fact that there was onlya year left on Curt’s contract, and we knew our time was up with the Diamondbacks. A trade was going to happen sooner or later, but the Diamondbacks management could not make any decisions without Curt’s sayso. Curt had something called a notrade clause in his contract, which stipulated that the management could not trade him without his consent. We’d heard whispers of a deal with the New York Yankees, which I would have been fine with because that meant going back to my beloved East Coast. Even if we were traded to the Yankees, we would still be able to live in Philly. We had just sold our house in Philadelphia and bought a new one with the plan to live there after Curt retired. Moving to the Yankees would have allowed us to start living there sooner rather than later.
    On November 23, we had a big event at our house for the SHADE Foundation that I’d been working on for months. It didn’t matter that it was my birthday—I worked all day. The party went well. The house was beautiful, and we had tables with candles set up out by the pool. One of the forty or so guests was Jerry Colangelo, who at the time was the owner of the Diamondbacks. He had been incredibly supportive of the SHADE Foundation from the beginning, and in addition to being a generous donor, he was instrumental in getting other people in Arizona signed on to help. However, that night at the party something about him kept distracting me. Throughout the night, he and Curt kept disappearing and talking secretively.
    “What’s going on?” I finally said, poking my nose into Curt’s office, where they were talking alone. The two of them just smiled mischievously.
    “I’m trading you,” Mr. Colangelo joked, and Curt found this hilarious. Ha, ha, ha. They were like two little bad boys plotting something that they might get in trouble for.
    Despite this strange behavior on their part, by the end of the night we had raised two hundred thousand dollars, which meant we could build at least twenty more shade covers, a huge number for us. When it was all over, everyone left except the twelve people who had been most involved in helpingme plan the event. I stood on a chair in my kitchen and thanked them all. Then my husband stood on the chair.
    “We’re getting traded to the Red Sox!” he announced.
    My jaw dropped. “The Red Sox?” I yelled. “Where the hell did that come from?”
    The answer was simple: At the party, Mr. Colangelo had asked Curt’s permission to trade us, Curt agreed, and then Mr. Colangelo told him that they had already begun working on a deal to trade us to the Red Sox. He couldn’t have timed it any better.
    Ordinarily this kind of decision would not have been announced or decided at a charity dinner, but Curt has never been one to do things in an ordinary kind of way. He didn’t have agents, and in his contract decisions he represented himself with a little help from me. When Curt and I finally spoke after the last of the guests had left, he told me that Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, general manager Theo Epstein, and assistant general manager Jed Hoyer were coming to talk to us—the next day!
    To add to the chaos, I was getting ready to cook my first Thanksgiving dinner. It was going to be a full house: my parents, my brother Michael with his wife Shelby and their new daughter, Delaney, and Curt’s cousin Clarence and his family would all be joining