Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  “So where’s your car?”

  “It’s parked at Sarah Auerbach’s. She had a party, okay?”

  He noticed now that she was dressed up, wearing a flowered sundress. It was the kind of modest, feminine dress Dean preferred for her to wear—or would have been, if Stephanie hadn’t cut it short, leaving the edges ragged.

  “Is that one of your mother’s dresses?”

  “Yeah.” Stephanie tugged at the hem of her skirt, pulling on a loose thread. “It’s not like Mom cares. She’s gone. The dead don’t care, that’s what Mitchell says.”

  Robbie’s phrase, dead-lady clothes, came into Dean’s mind. Along with Robbie and his flushed cheeks, Nic’s pale blue dress.

  “I don’t care what Mitchell has to say,” Dean said.

  “You’ve always been hostile toward him. What’s that about? He’s really smart. He’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. Just because he doesn’t care about football doesn’t mean he’s not worth your time.”

  “Steph, I don’t want to talk about your friend right now.”

  “I’m just trying to have a conversation,” she said, slurring as she navigated conversation’s four syllables. “But if you just want to walk around all stoic, that’s fine, we can pretend everything’s okay. Just like we did with Mom.”

  “That’s something, coming from the girl who barely spoke to her mother for a year.”

  Stephanie got up and put her juice glass in the sink. She stood there and Dean could tell by the way her shoulders were hunched forward that she had begun to cry. It had been so long since he had seen her cry that he was almost heartened by her tears, by their intimacy. But then, seeing her pale face reflected in the darkened window above the sink, he felt as if she had eluded him yet again, as if the cheerful girl he had once known—the girl he hoped would be restored to him at the end of adolescence—had been displaced by this ghost of a girl.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry, I’ve had a rough day. I lost one of my best players, a linebacker, and we don’t have a good replacement. I have to rethink everything.”

  “That sounds pretty stressful,” she said drily.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you, but if you knew about football—”

  “I know about football. I just don’t find it especially interesting.”

  Dean turned away to gather up his notes, as well as Garrett’s. He was tired; his eyelids burned. He couldn’t understand why his kids were giving him so much grief. He wasn’t the one who’d left them.

  “Where is it written that I have to like football?” Stephanie said.

  He faced her again. “Look, I don’t expect you to care about the holes in my playbook, I really don’t. But I do expect you to give a shit about your younger brothers, who really need you right now.”

  “I’m so sick of this. I go out, I let loose for one night, and you make me feel guilty. I’ve been babysitting them all summer long.” Stephanie swiped at her eyes, smearing her already smudged makeup. “Aunt Joelle says I’m the one holding this family together.”

  “Don’t bring Joelle into this.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? You’re just going to dump Robbie and Bry on her when I leave.”

  “I’m working on getting a sitter,” Dean said, straining to keep his voice even. “I was going to ask around at church tomorrow. I was hoping you’d come with me.”

  “I’m supposed to help with Aunt Joelle’s barbecue.”

  “So am I. We can go after.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to go.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not going.”

  He matched her stubborn gaze. She didn’t like church; he didn’t like Joelle. He had her in a bind. She couldn’t say no without making him look like a better person.

  “Fine, I’ll go.”

  She turned the lights off as she left the kitchen—out of habit or spite, Dean couldn’t tell. The darkness was a relief. Cool air came through the window above the sink, a hint of autumn. It was something Dean noticed every August, that unexpected hint of crispness, like a pocket of cold water in a sun-warmed lake. Dean had met Nicole in August, just a few weeks after he’d moved to Willowboro. He’d gone to the country club to inquire about membership, and she had been at the front desk. The club was in the midst of a renovation; it was being changed from a small, family-run golf course to an “outdoor recreation facility” with a pool, tennis courts, driving range, and, for the winter months, a small gym with racquetball courts and a sauna. With her fresh, makeup-free face and her optimistic smile (a willed optimism, Dean realized now), Nicole seemed a part of that transformation. She seemed like the future of this new place that he had moved to. Later he told people that he knew he wanted to marry her at first sight, because that was what people said about their brides, but the truth was, his wish on that night was just to be near her again. It was unbelievable to him that she was single; later he learned that everyone still thought of her as Sam’s girl. People warned him to be careful, that she was on the rebound. She came to every game; she knew about football. Dean didn’t care how she’d learned it. All that mattered was that she seemed happy when she was with him. She had been so sad when they met; she had been sad and he had made her happy. Dean couldn’t understand why he was never able to do it again.

  Chapter 2

  The sun felt like an assault when Dean woke up the next morning. He had slept through his alarm. Downstairs, he found Stephanie making breakfast for the boys, without a trace of the night’s excesses on her pale face. Youth. His players displayed the same imperviousness.

  Everyone needed a shower, and by the time they left the house they were late. They arrived at church midway through the opening hymn, and Dean felt self-conscious as he walked down the side aisle, looking for space for the four of them. On the way in, he had noticed a sign-up sheet in the foyer that said, “Support for the Renner Family”; beneath it was a list of the foods that had appeared on his doorstep over the past two months. He wanted to take it down but knew he should go through the proper channels, whatever they were. Church politics had always been Nicole’s domain.

  They filed into a pew in a hurry, without noticing who was sitting nearby. As the hymn ended and everyone got resettled, Dean tried to guess his neighbors by looking at the backs of their heads. The family in front of them was most definitely the Schaffers, and to the right of them, the Hochstedlers. To the left was the Ashbaugh family, the dead giveaway being Roger Ashbaugh’s moon-white bald spot, ordinarily covered by a baseball cap. He was a short, round-shouldered man, while his wife, Susie, was angular and tall, with aggressively permed hair. Dean and Nicole used to joke that she looked like a poodle, which was funny because Roger was a dog trainer.

  A few rows ahead, a woman’s long neck caught his eye. Her hair was drawn up into a messy bun, and he could see the backs of her dangling silver earrings. His first thought was Laura, but that was impossible. Laura didn’t go to church. He kept staring at the back of her neck, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t her. But then she turned to whisper something to the man sitting next to her, and he saw her familiar profile: her long, almost pointed nose; her smooth brow; and that warm, wry half smile. It was Laura, all right. Ms. Lanning to the boys at school. Miss Laura to him, at first. Then, when they got to know each other better, when he could finally stop teasing her, could finally stop making up excuses to see her, when she was part of his routine, when she was his friend, she was just plain Laura. But not plain, never plain. What was she doing here? Was she dating the man next to her, the tall guy with a sunburned neck? Was this the inconstant Tim, the young man whose employment as an elementary-school teacher had somehow made him desirable instead of emasculated—so desirable that he’d needed to take some time off from Laura to play the field? (What field?, Dean had wondered when Laura tearfully repeated the callow phrase to him during one of their morning chats. Did Mr. Timbo honestly think he was going to find anyone better than Laura in Willowboro?)

/>   Dean glared at the back of Tim or whoever’s head and tried to convince himself that he wasn’t jealous. He had worked so hard to forget Laura. And now his memories were all tumbling out, not forgotten but merely stored behind a door. So much mental energy had been devoted to her. He could admit that now. Last fall, he’d organized his days around her comings and goings like a schoolboy. He had, in fact, first heard about her from the boys on his team. They were all wannabe Lotharios, boasting loudly of the girls they’d like to claim. One day he heard them discussing a certain Ms. Lanning. At first he thought it must be an especially prissy girl, but then they began to guess her age. Thirty, one said. No way, said another. Twenty-five, tops. They began to discuss her body, which she apparently tried to disguise with modest clothing. But they were not fooled by her turtlenecks and blazers. She taught honors English and one of the typing electives. Most of Dean’s players knew her from typing.

  Dean had felt the need to investigate. He searched for a Ms. Lanning in the staff directory and found none. Then he checked the database on the library’s computer, which was more up to date, and found her name, but not her photo, under the list of long-term subs. But he couldn’t figure out whose class she had taken, and other than wandering around the English department or the computer lab, places he had almost no call to be, he didn’t know how to find out.

  They finally met at the October faculty meeting. By then, it felt like he’d been waiting a long time, although it had only been a couple of weeks. He immediately saw why his players liked her; she had a young, girlish way about her, although she kept a straight face. Her slim wrists and ankles gave her away, as did her bright eyes, and the vigorous way she walked down the hallways. When Dean first approached her, his excuse was that he was trying to recruit some new female staff to help with the girls’ athletic program. But the only thing she’d ever played was field hockey, a sport Dean associated with preppy girls. As it turned out, her previous teaching position had been in New Hampshire, where she was originally from. “How did you end up down here in the boonies?” he asked her.

  “Love,” she said.

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a woman?” Laura asked, with a half smirk that Dean couldn’t read.

  And then he had started backtracking, embarrassed mainly because he had just attended a mandatory schoolwide workshop about sexual harassment and gender-neutral language, a workshop that scared the crap out of him because he did not always—or, honestly, ever—use the most neutral language when speaking to his players, and in the midst of this backtracking, of cursing himself for even asking about her personal life, she started laughing.

  “Relax! I’m just messing with you!”

  She smiled widely, delighted with her joke. She hadn’t realized that he was the football coach, the high school’s number one authority figure after the principal, and that no one messed with him. But he found that he liked being messed with, that it felt good to relax his grip.

  “The guy,” she said, sarcastically, “wanted to be an organic farmer. We moved here so he could work on a raspberry farm—you know, Schulz Acres? But he didn’t like farming after all. So he left.”

  “But you stayed,” he said.

  “I got this job. It’s only subbing, but still. Good teaching jobs are hard to come by.” She shrugged. “It’s beautiful here, too. You’ve got the Appalachians. I like mountains.”

  By coincidence—and it really was coincidence, at first—he talked to her the next morning in the cafeteria, where he occasionally went for coffee. She called to him, and when he saw her standing by the tall cafeteria windows, the morning light shining on her hair and through her skirt to reveal long, slender legs, he realized it had been fourteen hours since they’d met and he hadn’t stopped thinking about her.

  Over the next few weeks, and then months, they got to know each other. Dean began to stop by the cafeteria in the mornings, where Laura monitored the kids who qualified for free breakfast. No one who got free breakfast wanted to draw attention to that fact, so he and Laura were left undisturbed. At first Dean only stayed for a few minutes, chatting with her on his way out after buying a cup of coffee. But when he felt confident that she enjoyed his company, he began to stay for longer periods. He sympathized with her because he was attracted to her, but also because she, like him, was not originally from the area. He liked hearing her impressions of the town and the people she met, and she liked to pry bits of gossip from him. He surprised himself by how much he knew and by how opinionated he was. No one had ever really asked him what he thought of local politics and personalities. People only wanted to know what he thought about football: his analysis of last night’s game, tomorrow’s scrimmage, next year’s recruits, so-and-so’s college prospects. Laura wanted to know about him.

  He felt guilty about visiting her, but not guilty enough to stop. As their friendship developed, he decided his motives were less questionable. Sometimes he even thought of himself as Laura’s mentor, because of their age difference, but also because she seemed lost. He had the sense, when he talked with her, that she wasn’t going to stay in Willowboro forever, that the town was just a way station, a place for her to organize her ambitions. Still, he never mentioned her to Nicole. Looking back, he saw that he was lonely in his marriage. Nicole had distanced herself from him—no, that wasn’t fair. She had been distracted. Stephanie, who had already rebelled once, with her black clothes and her oddball friends, went through a second rebellion, what Nicole called an “identity crisis.” To Dean it looked like a drama concocted for the sole purpose of upsetting her mother.

  In the fall of her senior year, around the same time Dean met Laura, Stephanie wanted to know more about her father’s death. Nicole obliged her, going to the attic and bringing down a box of Sam’s mementos that Dean had never seen before. It was full of papers, mostly newspaper clippings documenting his athletic career, but there were also letters and medical records. Stephanie stayed up all night, reading every word. When Dean and Nicole came downstairs the next morning, they found her asleep among the papers. Dean couldn’t resist stroking her cheek, the way he used to do when she was a toddler. Her makeup was faded, her face soft and calm. She seemed at peace.

  But for weeks afterward, Stephanie hounded Nic, asking the questions she couldn’t have formulated at the time of Sam’s death. She wanted to know why Nicole hadn’t taken her father to an oncologist right away. And, why, after getting surgery, hadn’t they gone to Johns Hopkins or D.C. or wherever it was that people went to get the best treatment? Why, in short, had Nicole let her father die? And what about her grandparents, the Shanks? Why weren’t they a bigger part of her life? Was Nicole trying to erase her father? Nicole promised that she had never tried to do any such thing; that, in fact, she had often asked the Shanks to visit. But the Shanks had moved shortly after Sam’s death. They’d used the excuse of their business; they were expanding beyond Shank’s Produce, they had invested in a gourmet grocery franchise, the kind of store that was popular in well-to-do suburban areas but not in small towns. Nicole had felt abandoned. And then, when she’d announced her engagement to Dean, they’d told her, in no uncertain terms, that they thought it was too soon. That hurt, it hurt a lot. Nicole stopped making an effort.

  Sam’s illness had taken everybody by surprise. It was hard to convey to Stephanie just how young her father had been. To her, twenty-seven sounded like someone well into adulthood. But Sam hadn’t even settled into a career, other than managing his father’s stores. And the symptoms of this particular cancer, fatigue and muscle soreness, were so common for athletes that he had overlooked them for months. And then it was too late. The disease had spread too far.

  It was impossible to say whether or not these answers helped. Sam’s box went back up to the attic, and Stephanie’s interrogation of her mother ended. Her anger seemed to dissipate, and she began to concentrate on her college applications. The only change was that she got in touch with the Shanks and be
gan to visit them on her own. They never came to Willowboro, despite Nicole’s renewed invitations. Sometimes Dean worried that he was the reason for their absence, that they just didn’t like him, but mostly he was grateful for their influence on Stephanie. She opened up to them about her plans for the future—she wanted to be a doctor, maybe—and they encouraged her to apply to schools that her teachers wouldn’t have thought to mention.

  Nicole wasn’t as grateful. Stephanie’s rummaging had sparked something deeper than passing melancholy in his wife. She became restless, staying up late to pore over old photos of Sam from high school and college. In the mornings she would sleep in, and Dean wouldn’t see her until dinnertime. She started taking weekend shifts at the club even though she was management and didn’t have to. She said it was to make extra money for Stephanie’s college tuition—money they wouldn’t need, since the Shanks had volunteered to pay whatever Stephanie’s financial aid package didn’t cover. Dean knew Nicole was avoiding him and the kids. He tried to be patient. When she got depressed, sometimes it helped if she stayed busy. Then he turned forty and it struck him as unfair that Sam got to stay young and perfect in her mind, the athlete extraordinaire, while he aged like an ordinary man.

  Talking to Laura made him feel younger. She was dating, caught up in an on-again, off-again relationship with a fourth-grade teacher, Tim, whom she’d met at a football game, “of all places” (to Laura, the fervor over football was bizarre) and who she liked quite a bit but was nervous about getting serious with, because she had more education than he did and her mother had told her never to marry a man with less education—an old-fashioned dictum, Laura said, but one she couldn’t get out of her head. She had a master’s degree in psychology, in addition to her B.A. in English. Her ultimate goal was to be a school therapist, but she thought it was important to try teaching as well. Dean would ask her for advice about Stephanie—to keep her psychology skills fresh, he joked. But he was genuinely relieved when she said she thought that Stephanie’s curiosity about her biological father was a good thing, maybe even the beginning of the end of some of the more perplexing aspects of her rebellion.