Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  “What if we went to Grandpa’s?” Robbie said.

  “Grandpa lives too far away,” Dean said, carefully.

  “We could stay overnight,” Robbie said.

  “All week? No, that’s not going to work.” He couldn’t believe they wanted to go back there.

  “Maybe Grandpa could come live with us,” Bry said.

  “Grandpa would never leave his horses,” Robbie said.

  Dean had long since accepted that his father preferred horses to people, but it was still jarring to hear Robbie say it. At Nicole’s memorial, his father talked about how good she was with the horses, and how much they would miss her. It was as if he could only understand the loss by imagining the animals’ response.

  The Red Byrd was up ahead, with its row of cardinals perched on the roof and its old-fashioned marquee promising the best red velvet cake in Maryland. The parking lot was already crowded with cars. Dean snagged one of the last shady spots, next to a car with a bumper sticker that read MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT WILLOWBORO HIGH. They had four of those stickers at home, but Stephanie forbade their display.

  Inside the restaurant, the atmosphere was noisy and friendly. Dean eyed a corner booth and asked the hostess if it was in Stephanie’s section.

  “Steph’s not working tonight. I think she’s on tomorrow night.”

  “Are you sure?” Dean asked.

  “I can double-check the schedule—”

  “No, it’s all right. I must have gotten mixed up. We’ll just take the booth, if it’s free.”

  They followed the hostess across the dining room, past a couple of people Dean knew from the Boosters Club. He nodded in their direction. He knew he should stop and chat, but he didn’t.

  “Steffy lied?” Bry said.

  “Obviously,” Robbie said.

  Dean gazed at his placemat, seeking solace in its usual lists of presidents or cocktail recipes, but instead found himself staring at last year’s football stats, a nearly undefeated season. The Red Byrd had printed these placemats after they won the state championship—a triumph dampened for Dean by Nicole’s depression and Stephanie’s disdain. Neither of them had gone to many games last fall. As Dean read the old scores, numbers he could have recited in his sleep, he had a sudden, fervent wish for Nicole to return, to sit here beside him and put her hand on his leg. The wish radiated through him, through the whole of his day. Through every day.

  A waitress appeared, greeting him by name. “You like our placemats?” she asked. “We’re going to have to make another batch this year, I bet.”

  “I sure hope so,” Dean said, forcing a smile.

  “You boys ready to order?”

  Robbie and Bryan stared at her silently.

  “I think we’re going to need some more time,” Dean said.

  IT WAS STILL light outside when they got home from the Red Byrd, so Dean suggested a walk through the meadow behind their house and down to the creek. The boys agreed, picking up walking sticks in the backyard. They had been shy with him all through dinner, but by dessert they’d relaxed. Dean blamed himself for yelling at them earlier, but he blamed Stephanie, too. Her absence had put them all on edge. They were so fragile right now that any little thing worried them. Stephanie was a mother figure, whether she liked it or not. Dean thought she liked it, but it was hard to tell. Sometimes Dean got the feeling she was putting off her grieving until she was away at college, where she could be alone. Other times he thought she had decided to just put her mother’s death out of her mind, something to be dealt with later. It hurt him that she would not admit her sorrow to him; it hurt him even though it had been years since she shared anything true with him. He was accustomed to being shut out from her world.

  Down by the creek, the air was cooler. Robbie and Bry took off their shoes and socks and waded into the water. The creek was narrow here, no more than twenty feet across, and shallow, littered with hundreds of smooth, baseball-sized stones that created small disturbances in the current. The boys had spent much of their summer down here, industriously piling small rocks into dams, only to find them dismantled the next time they visited. But they didn’t seem to care about their progress—or at least, Robbie didn’t. At eleven, he wavered between adult interests and childish ones, capable of discussing current events and football strategies with Dean, but also still interested in building Lego cities or cuddling with his stuffed animals, which he arranged on his bed every morning, in a particular order. The image of Robbie in Nicole’s pale blue dress flitted through Dean’s mind before he could dismiss it. He could accept the behavior if it had been instinctual, if Robbie hadn’t really thought about it, if it was an act of grief, of confusion—not pleasure. But what if Nicole’s death had perverted him in some way? Dean was angry with Nicole for not thinking of this; he had to believe she hadn’t been able to fully imagine the consequences of her actions.

  He had to believe it, and yet he couldn’t.

  Dean tried to recall some of the strange things he’d done after his own mother left. But it wasn’t the same because his mother hadn’t died; she’d just married another man, a salesman she’d met in the hospital where she worked as a nurse’s aide—not even a nurse, Dean used to think, when he wanted to think ill of his mother. He’d taken his father’s side, calling his mother a self-loathing snob. He assumed she left because she was tired of being married to a borderline servant. His father had worked on a bigger farm then, and they’d lived in a small house near the training grounds of a pristine estate surrounded by white fences that were painted every spring. The farm was owned by one of the oldest horsing families in the state, not that Dean’s father would ever describe his employer that way. It was the horses Dean’s father admired, not the lavish properties, not the races, not even the status that went along with being the kind of person who stabled such beautiful animals.

  There were dozens of people like Dean’s father, people who humbled themselves in moneyed society in order to be close to horses. Why were all these men and women, possessed of beautifully calibrated efficient muscle and bone, wistfully gazing at horses as if their strength were somehow more mysterious? The one time Dean had felt close to his father’s horses was when he was in training for his first varsity season. He was out for a jog and the grazing horses broke into a run toward him, as if to say, It’s easy, don’t you see? As a teenager he’d seen his father as a weak person, a minor failure, not because of his job but because his mother had cheated on him. After she left, Dean’s father stopped working with racehorses, taking a more low-key job at the farm where he now worked. It was for Dean’s benefit, but Dean resented it. He did everything he could to be different from his father, starting with his body.

  In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, Dean bought a pair of running shoes and a set of dumbbells and got a book from the library called Speed, Strength & Agility. He did every workout in the book, marking each one with a penciled checkmark. Every two weeks he had to renew the book, and he would run the 4.7 miles to the library in town, carrying it in a backpack. It was easier each time, his muscles a little less sore afterward. In the barn, in one of the unused stalls, he set up a makeshift weight room. The barn was hot, a dry and dusty heat. The smell of hay and horseshit—sweet and fetid—seemed to make the place even hotter. Dean kept a canteen of ice water next to him, his reward between sets. Water never tasted so good. Cold never tasted so good. In the evening he took baths, his muscles aching and expanding. Sleep came immediately; it was like going into a dark cave. Dean doubted he’d ever been healthier. Whenever he got on a self-improvement kick, when he dieted or tried to get “back in shape,” it was this elusive time that he was chasing.

  Dean’s mother was athletic, and Dean would begrudgingly admit that he owed his love of sports to her. He remembered watching the 1964 Olympics with her when Billy Mills won the 10,000 meters out of nowhere, upsetting the race, the announcer screaming, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” and his mother jumping up and yelling, “Go! G
o! Go!” It was rare for her to show that level of excitement. He saw now that she was an unhappy person, perhaps wanting to escape her marriage for a long time before she actually did. On weekends she would take Dean for hikes on the Appalachian Trail, smiling back at him sometimes but mostly keeping her gaze ahead, fixed on the trail. Dean wondered now why his father had not joined them. His mother taught him how to swim, and she liked to tell a story about the time a diving instructor singled her out at a public pool and said she should train professionally. But her high school didn’t even have sports for women. At his most charitable, Dean imagined his mother had been born at the wrong time, unable to make use of her strong, muscular frame. She’d had so much energy. That was her best quality. She’d died of a heart attack while she was out picking up trash alongside the road. It was something she did every morning, walking three miles after breakfast. A state trooper had seen her collapse, with her garbage bag full of bottles and cans and fast-food wrappers. Dean had to explain to the police it was her Good Samaritan hobby, that she wasn’t some homeless person.

  He felt relieved after she died, like he had one less person to worry about. But he knew he wouldn’t feel that way when his father passed away. He still needed his father. He didn’t think of him as weak anymore. His father had been the one to cut Nicole down. Dean didn’t ask him how he’d done it, but he had seen the standing ladder and the hay bales next to it, draped with a horse blanket. He must have laid her body down on the bales. He must have done it fast. Maybe the ladder was already in place. It must have been. But it would have been hard to carry her down alone. Adrenaline must have flooded his body; Dean knew what it felt like to want to protect your children.

  His father came with him to the hospital, and he stayed up with him that night. They’d watched a baseball game because what else were they supposed to do? Stephanie came into the room in the middle of it, and the expression on her face was one of such pure disgust that Dean got a jolt back to his own adolescence, remembering those sharp, hot judgments that would seem to burn inside him. He hadn’t thought she would hold on to her resentment the next day, but he had been wrong. She held on to it all summer. After a while, he’d realized she was blaming him the same way he’d blamed his father after his mother left.

  Bry called to him, pointing, and Dean saw a heron standing calmly on the opposite shore, one leg drawn up. The bird had something of Stephanie’s stern regarding manner, the affect she’d adopted when she began to change in high school. After the new clothes and the new friends, she’d started quitting things: cheerleading, choir, student council, and even church. Her reasoning, that she wanted to concentrate more on academics, was foolproof. And she had the grades to prove it. How could they complain? Dean thought he understood, having pulled away from his own parents, but Nicole didn’t get it. She’d never left the town where she’d grown up. She’d married her high school sweetheart. College was her big adventure, and she talked about it like it had been a visit to a faraway place, even though she’d gone to a Christian school just an hour away. Sam had been at the same school, recruited to play football for their no-name team. Nicole remembered him as a big star, though—the whole town did. Sometimes Dean got annoyed and wanted to point out that he couldn’t have been that great if he ended up at a Division III program.

  He hated to think of the stories people would tell about Nic: the girl who was widowed too young. The girl whose broken heart had never quite healed. The girl who tried in vain to replace her football star husband with the high school football coach. People were already acting as if she were destined to be some perfect ghost, putting her alongside Sam in heaven, under the banner of First Love. It was offensive to Dean, the way it overlooked his and Nicole’s fourteen years of marriage—somehow four years with Sam surpassed that. People were invested in Sam because they’d watched him grow up. Dean understood that. But he’d thought that the town was invested in him, too. He’d become a father to Sam’s daughter, he’d taken care of Nicole, he’d coached a championship team. Everyone had seemed so grateful; he had felt so grateful. Those early years were easy, busy years. He could still remember the piles of gifts when Robbie was born: the baskets of food, the bouquets of flowers, the boxes of homemade fudge. He felt as if people were paying him homage, as if he were a minor king.

  The heron was still standing there, glowing more whitely now that the light was fading. Dean called to the boys, and they started, as if they’d forgotten he was with them. The heron was startled, too, and stretched its wings. Suddenly it was in flight, sailing low, just a few feet above the water. Its white form was like a streak of fresh paint against the muddy creek.

  Robbie and Bry waded back to shore, where their shoes and socks were waiting for them. Together, the three of them climbed the steep bank and walked across the meadow that led to their house.

  There was an aluminum-foil-wrapped pie pan sitting on their front step. People were still dropping off baked goods. Dean didn’t know how to make it stop.

  “Peach,” said Robbie, sniffing.

  “I wish it was chocolate cake,” Bry said.

  Dean brought it inside and found a note tucked beneath the foil. It was from Julie Frye, a woman from church. Most of the baked goods he received were from church ladies. Joelle said they were “on the prowl.” Dean couldn’t help thinking that each of these little offerings was meant to make him feel guilty for skipping services, week after week. He stuck it in the fridge with all the other leftovers, wedging it so tightly that he ended up knocking over something in the back. It was one of Nicole’s bottles of sunscreen. She liked it to be cool when she put it on her face. He gazed at the white bottle with its orange cartoon sun, little bits of the sun’s rays chipped off with use. The boys were staring up at him.

  “Can we watch TV?”

  “If you get ready for bed first,” Dean said.

  “But it’s still light out!”

  “Just do it.” Dean chose not to remind them that they fell asleep every night in front of the TV, a habit he hadn’t meant to foster but had stopped trying to resist. TV, along with snacks, worked like a sedative to get them past the precarious border between waking and dreaming. It worked for Dean, too, although his snack was beer or bourbon.

  “Can we have microwave popcorn?” Bryan asked.

  “Sure, sure,” Dean said. Outside, someone was pulling into his driveway. His first thought was Stephanie, but when he checked the kitchen window, it was Garrett’s shiny white Geo. He probably got it washed every week.

  “Garrett,” Dean said, meeting him at the side door.

  “Hey, Coach. I just wanted to drop off the playbook, like I said.” Garrett held up a manila envelope.

  Dean opened the envelope and flipped through the book. There were notes on almost every page. Dean couldn’t believe so many plays were going to be affected by Laird’s departure.

  “I got a little carried away and ended up staying late,” Garrett said. “And then Brett Albright stopped by.”

  “What did he want?” Albright was his QB and team captain. He was one of Dean’s favorites, a smart kid who had learned the game from his older brother, borrowing his playbook and memorizing it for fun. Dean had taken him out of JV his sophomore year even though he wasn’t quite physically ready.

  “His right shoulder is acting up, but we can talk about it later. I gave him some stretches. And, uh, I told him about Laird. I told him not to mention it.”

  “Okay.” Dean didn’t really feel like being annoyed with Garrett. “You want to come in for a beer?”

  “I would,” Garrett said, “but I have plans with Connie.”

  In the spring Garrett had begun dating a tennis instructor, a woman Dean had inadvertently introduced him to when he gave Garrett free passes to the country club where Nicole worked. Secretly Dean felt that Connie, who was fit and young and innocently pretty, was out of Garrett’s league.

  “Another time,” Dean said. As he watched Garrett leave, he felt jealous, not only of
Garrett’s night ahead, but for the entire phase of life that Garrett was in—the beginning phase, when everything was still unknown, but your goals were clear. If someone had told Dean last fall that he would be envious of his excitable assistant coach, Dean wouldn’t have believed it. But here he stood, in his own yard, wishing he were the one driving away in that spotless little white car.

  STEPHANIE STARED UP at Robert Smith, tacked to Mitchell’s ceiling. His pale face seemed to glow in the dim light of the room. Mitchell’s room was always dark and gloomy, the windows draped with layers of gauzy scarves from Goodwill and the lights turned down low. When Mitchell’s parents were gone, he burned incense and played music that his father did not approve of, bands like Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana and, if Stephanie was visiting, Tori Amos. The incense was purely theatrical; Mitchell wasn’t trying to cover the smell of anything. He didn’t smoke pot or drink, although everyone assumed he did, with his laid-back persona and baggy, patchouli-drenched clothes. It used to be that only Stephanie knew how smart and driven he truly was, but getting into MIT had changed that. Now everyone called him Doogie Howser.

  “You going to take all your posters with you to school?” Stephanie was trying, for what seemed like the tenth time, to get a conversation going. They usually talked easily, but they were having trouble tonight.

  “Nah, I’m starting fresh,” Mitchell said. “Maybe I’ll be a minimalist.”

  “Yeah, right.” Stephanie nodded to his dresser, crowded with a zoo of Tetley tea animals he’d inherited from his grandmother. Hung above them was his collection of black velvet paintings, scrounged from yard sales. “You’re like the king of kitsch in here.”

  “And you’re the queen in that dress.”