Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  He didn’t notice Karen Coulter coming into the bar. She sat down next to him, ordered an Amstel Light, and then nudged him with her elbow.

  “Looks like you’re having some deep thoughts,” she teased.

  “Hey, you.” He was flirtatious without exactly meaning to be. There was something relaxing about her presence; she was the kind of person who made you feel more casual about life. “Ready for tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I’m not the one running. Thanks for talking to See, by the way. She’s applying to University of Maryland. She said she might get in free because her grades are pretty high. Is that true?”

  “Yeah, it’s to keep the smart kids in state. To prevent brain drain.”

  “Do a lot of kids take it?”

  Dean shrugged. “Most of my football players didn’t qualify.”

  Karen smiled and sipped her beer. “I would love for her to stay in state. It’s crazy, she barely talks to me these days. Sometimes I think she’s trying to prepare me for next year, when she’s gone.”

  “Stephanie kind of did the same thing.” Dean didn’t know why he was bringing up his daughter. He didn’t really want to talk about her. It was too painful.

  “How’s she doing, by the way?”

  “She’s good . . .” he began, vaguely. He was going to give a quick gloss. But then, to his surprise, he told Karen everything.

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” Karen said. “She’s going through a rough time. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Considering what she’s dealing with.”

  “I know. It just kills me that I can’t do anything.”

  “What do you think your wife would do? If she were alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Dean said, a little taken aback by the question. “This wouldn’t be happening if she were alive.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Dean tried to imagine the scenario. Right away he saw Nic sitting on the front porch with her tea, pushing the lemon back and forth with a spoon, not saying a word while he stood there waiting. They would argue, eventually, the same argument they always had about the way she withdrew, and how this was his fault, because he didn’t understand what she was going through. But how could he understand if she didn’t explain?

  “You’ve done what you can do,” Karen said. “She’s not in danger. Now you have to wait.”

  “Thanks,” Dean said. He felt a little ridiculous. “Let me buy you a beer. Where’s your friend James, by the way?”

  “He dumped me!” Karen said it with a certain amount of relish. “I was too old for him, I guess.”

  “If you’re old, I’m old.”

  “I have news for you: you’re middle-aged. Unless you’re planning to live past ninety.”

  “Maybe I am,” Dean said. Life already seemed long. One day, his marriage to Nicole would be just one part of his life, not the whole of it.

  They talked for a while longer. Karen worked at a company that manufactured aboveground pools as well as lawn ornaments, but her own yard was unadorned. She preferred gardening. She talked a little about her divorce, and a little about her dating life. She kept things light, but Dean could see that it was a learned lightness. He admired her way of being in the world; she protected herself without being guarded. He had the sense that she would come home with him, if he wanted. And he did want it. He needed to sleep with another woman in his own house. It was an obstacle he hadn’t yet acknowledged to himself.

  When it came time to order another round, he told her that he couldn’t drink any more and still drive. She said she felt the same way.

  “But I’d like to keep talking,” he said. “Do you want to have a beer at my place? I have a nice porch.”

  She laughed and said, “I like porches.”

  Chapter 12

  The next morning, Dean drove to Joelle’s house to pick up his kids and Megan for the meet. But when he arrived, only his boys were ready to go. Megan was still in bed. She was sick.

  “I am so sorry, Dean, but she’s running a fever,” Joelle said. “Whatever it is, I want to nip it in the bud.”

  “Uncle Dean?” Megan called down from upstairs. “I think I could run if you really needed me. Maybe I could sleep a little more now and run later—”

  “You can’t run in the cold! Are you crazy?” Joelle yelled upstairs. She turned to Dean, irritated, as if he’d infected her daughter with athletic ambition.

  “I don’t want her to run if she’s sick,” Dean said. And he didn’t. But it was as if something had been taken from him when his back was turned. In an irrational way, he felt he was being punished for his dalliance with See-See’s mother.

  Karen and See-See were waiting at the school when Dean arrived. Karen was dressed in a zip-up sweatshirt and jeans. She had brought a cup of coffee for Dean, but nothing in her demeanor gave away their new intimacy. Beside her, See-See looked sleepy and childlike without her usual heavy eyeliner and jewelry. Her bleached hair was growing in naturally now, the same sandy blond as her mother’s. Dean had been nervous about seeing them, but now he felt nothing but relief. He told them about Megan, and they both frowned in the same way.

  “We still have enough to score,” See-See said.

  The meet was at St. Luke’s Academy, a small private school near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. It reminded Dean a little of Stephanie’s school, with its winding sidewalks and brick buildings. She hadn’t called to say she’d gotten the jacket. FedEx said it had been delivered. So he had to assume she’d gotten it and decided not to respond.

  All the girls’ parents attended. They stood in a small crowd near the tarp, drinking hot cider and commenting on the beautiful weather and the changing leaves. Dean had sent the girls off on a warm-up run with Robbie and Bry tagging along. Meanwhile, he busied himself with the racing bibs.

  Karen came over to him. “Would you like me to take splits again? I can stand at the second mile.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Dean said, catching her eye, trying to read her mood. She’d been so discreet up to this point, barely even smiling at him.

  “I really don’t,” she said, taking a stopwatch from his box. “I’m feeling pretty single right now, with all these married couples.”

  She said it confidentially, as if he in particular would understand, and it threw him off balance.

  “Even with me here?” He meant that he was single, too, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized they could be taken another way.

  “Especially with you here.” She held up her stopwatch. “I better get to my post.”

  The girls came back from their warm-up and stripped down to their uniforms to pin on their bibs. Dean gave them a racing strategy as they jogged toward the starting line. Missy would lead on the first mile, then See-See and Aileen would run as a twosome for the reminder of the race.

  “What happens to me?” Missy asked.

  “Hopefully you’ll keep running,” Dean said, lightly sarcastic. He turned to Lori and Jessica. “You two are my snipers. You stay together for the first mile. Don’t go out too fast. Stay in the back of the pack. Relax, enjoy the scenery. Okay? But when you hit mile two, I want you to start picking people off. You’ll flank them on either side, and then you’ll pass them at the same time. You know how demoralizing that is?”

  They had reached the starting line. The other teams were gathered there, many from private schools they’d never raced against before, large teams that were two, three, and four times the size of theirs. One team with green-and-white uniforms formed a ring, the girls holding hands and laughing, the ring getting larger and larger as they stretched their arms to their full length. The girls kicked their long legs into the center. They all seemed to be long-limbed, with long ponytails. They were like horses.

  Aileen said what they were all thinking: “I wish Megan was here.”

  “You’ve run without her before. You can do it again.” Dean gathered them together into a huddle. “Treat this like a practice, okay?”
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br />   The girls nodded without saying anything.

  “Can I get a hell yeah?” Dean asked, now desperate to loosen them up. Other teams were beginning to chant and yell their pep-talk slogans. They were surrounded by jittery energy. Over by a tree, a girl was holding her side, throwing up. Dean recognized her as Adrienne Fellows, one of the top competitors.

  “Look!” Dean said, pointing. “She’s nervous, too, okay? Harness those nerves and get out there and run hard. It’s a beautiful day. You’re a strong team. You’ve got everything going for you.”

  He had to leave them at the line so he could get to the first mile in time. St. Luke’s was basically an out-and-back, and the first mile was at the end of a long dirt road. Dean heard the starting gun go off while he was still jogging toward it. He was barely in place with the other coaches when he saw Missy coming down the lane. On either side of her were Aileen and See-See. They were in the top twenty, better than he’d expected. He called out their splits and they quickly glanced at him, barely turning their heads. He could hear them breathing, the soft thuds of their feet hitting the ground.

  Jessica and Lori came by two and a half minutes later. They were several yards behind a big group of runners. “Go get them!” Dean pointed. They looked ahead warily and then Lori accelerated. Of all the runners, she had improved the most. He watched as she passed one girl and then another. Jessica lagged behind. They rounded a curve and disappeared behind a stand of pine trees.

  That was it. His runners were gone, off to finish the race on their own. He began to jog toward the finish, cutting diagonally across an open field. He was struck by the silence. He recalled going to horse races with his father, the way the horses seemed so far away when they were on the backstretch. His father stopped going to races after his mother left. Dean never asked him why. He was too busy being angry with his parents for splitting up. A few years after their divorce was finalized, he’d had a choice of moving to Ohio with his mother and starting over in another high school. Or he could stay in Pennsylvania with his father. He chose to stay because he’d made varsity as a sophomore. He hadn’t wanted to prove himself all over again at a new school. It was such kid reasoning. Sometimes Dean wondered how much that one decision had set the course of his life.

  The draft ended a year before he turned eighteen. He wondered about that, too. During her junior year, Stephanie had visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a field trip to D.C. Before she left she asked Dean for names to search for. She said her teachers had told her to ask. How morbid, Nicole said. But Dean was moved when Stephanie brought home a piece of paper with the name of one of his old teammates—a rubbing showed the etched letters. Dean remembered his friend’s big hands, how they held the ball so casually. At the end of every practice he would take off his socks and cleats and lie on his back with his legs up in the air; he’d heard this was the best way to recover after a hard workout. Sometimes Dean would lie next to him, the two of them looking up their outstretched legs, their bare feet foregrounded against the sky’s expanse, their bodies relaxing into the grass. It doesn’t get any better than this, his friend would say. He was named Bruce, after his father, but everyone called him Dash because he was so fast.

  Robbie was waiting for Dean near the finish line. “Dad, Bry is hot but he says he’s cold. I think he has a fever.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s lying down on the tarp.”

  Dean hurried back to the warm-up area, leaving the race behind. He heard Adrienne’s finish, the crowd yelping with delight. Bryan was lying on his side on the tarp with Dean’s fleece jacket wrapped around his narrow shoulders. His blond hair was damp, and his cheeks were flushed. Dean realized he’d shown signs of sickness earlier, when he’d dozed off on the bus. He must have caught whatever Megan had.

  “Daddy, I’m okay. The sun is giving me vitamins,” Bryan said.

  In the distance, Dean could hear the girls finishing their race. See-See and Karen were the first ones back. See-See had gotten a PR and her face was still blotchy with exertion. She seemed disappointed to find Dean at the tarp instead of at the finish, but when she saw Bryan, she softened.

  “You have to get him home,” Karen said.

  “We rode the bus,” Dean said. “We’re stuck until the end of the boys’ race.”

  “Take my car,” Karen said. “I can get a ride. Or I’ll take the bus back with the kids.”

  “We can stay; he’s not going to get any worse.”

  “I insist—as a mother,” Karen said. She pushed the keys into Dean’s hand.

  Both boys fell asleep on the car ride home. Flu was going to sweep through his house; Dean could see it coming. He felt stranded. It was being in a different car and driving unfamiliar roads. It was having to accept favors from a woman he barely knew. It was realizing he was truly alone in the care of his sons. His heart began to beat crazily, and he had to pull over to the side of the road to steady himself. Cars sped by; nobody stopped to see if he was okay. Eventually, he pulled back onto the highway.

  THERESA’S PARENTS, STEVEN and Candace, were physicists. They worked in a lab at Johns Hopkins where they studied laser technology. Stephanie could tell by their vague description that this was a significant generalization of what they actually studied, and she pressed them for more details. Theresa interrupted. “They make weapons,” she said. “It’s a government lab.”

  “That’s an exaggeration,” Candace said, pointing a long, manicured fingernail. She had touches of femininity, but you had to look for them. “There are military applications for some of what we do, yes, but we’re hardly making weapons.”

  “Whatever you say, Mom.”

  Stephanie couldn’t get a read on Theresa’s sarcasm, whether it was politically motivated or if she thought there was something square about working for the government. Stephanie was slightly dazzled by Theresa’s parents; they were easily the smartest people she’d ever met. Maybe Mitchell would be like them.

  “What does your father do?” Steven asked Stephanie.

  “He’s a football coach.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about football,” he said.

  “For me, football is too much stop and start,” said Candace. “And I don’t like the tackling.”

  “My dad doesn’t let people hit during practice,” Stephanie said. “Only games. And only certain kinds of hits.”

  “Still, I would be wary of letting Andrew play,” Candace said.

  “No danger of that,” Theresa said. “Andrew’s arms are like twigs.”

  Andrew was Theresa’s older brother. He was in the sciences, too, studying epidemiology, a word Stephanie didn’t know, but she was too embarrassed to ask for a definition.

  “Andrew’s a runner,” said Steven. “Just a fun runner, like me.”

  Stephanie nodded. She could say that her father was a running coach, too, that he actually wasn’t coaching football anymore, but it seemed like too much to explain. She had the sense that Theresa’s parents knew about her mother, that Theresa had briefed them. She’d probably also told them not to bring it up. That made things easier, in a way, but at the same time Stephanie wanted them to acknowledge that she was missing something important.

  Her depression hangover was starting to lift. It was fall break, a mysterious interlude that did not correspond with any holidays. Stephanie’s plan had been to spend the long weekend studying and picking up extra cafeteria shifts, but when Theresa extended an invitation, she felt such relief that she realized she was desperate to leave campus.

  It felt luxurious to be in a house, to have so much domestic space to move about in. Everything about Theresa’s house was soft and personal, from the gently curving road that delivered them to Theresa’s driveway, to the carefully pruned shrubberies that concealed their house from the road, to the wall-to-wall carpeting and blond wood furniture. Theresa’s parents explained that Columbia was a planned community, and that all the roads and property lines had been mapped out in advance.
There were no houses on the main road; everyone lived on a small side street, each house arranged at the perfect distance from its neighbor, uninterrupted by random expanses of field, broken-down barns, or hastily constructed prefab homes. The overall effect was one of extraordinary calm; it also felt opaque. Stephanie had no way of reading the landscape; she couldn’t see in it a history of the town’s rising and falling fortunes. She couldn’t tell what anyone did for a living or for fun. It was disconcerting and yet she liked it. It gave her a feeling of privacy, which she badly needed—not only to grieve, but to figure out who she was in the wake of her grieving. She was becoming someone, or maybe she was figuring out who she had always been.

  Her father always said that people revealed their character on the playing field, and she had always thought it was such an old-fashioned belief—both the idea of character and the idea of sports as some kind of crucible. But now she thought she had taken him too seriously. All he was saying was that if an athlete was determined or lazy or bold, you saw it in his actions when he was challenged physically. And here she was, being challenged physically—she saw her depression as something physical—and she knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to break her. She wasn’t like her mother. There was relief and sadness in this realization, the two feelings mixed together in a way that was so different from her high school years, when she would feel one emotion so strongly it was like an engine in her chest. Was this adulthood, she wondered, or was it grief? Was grieving how one became an adult?

  After dinner, she and Theresa hung out in Theresa’s room, where Theresa showed Stephanie photos of her high school boyfriend, Jason. He was tall and pale, with a long dark ponytail. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look smaller.

  “He went to Brown,” Theresa said. “He broke up with me the first week of school. I think he was planning to do it all along. He wanted to keep having sex up until the last minute, I guess.”