Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories

by Craig Lancaster

  Mendy sniffled. “I told her that she knows the offense better than I do, that there’s the possibility of a shot on every pass. What a dumb thing for her to say.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “She asked me if Coach told me that, and asked me if he also told me that I’d win a state championship. She said, ‘He told me the same thing, and I haven’t won one yet.’ ”

  Dirk’s gut tightened, as if gripping and metastasizing around a brick. The whole blessed town was going overboard with this thing, in his estimation. This basketball season had commenced in a perfect storm of amplified civic pride. It was the city’s 125th anniversary, the 25th season as coach for Paul Wainwright and ten solid years since Wainwright’s team had won state, and Dirk’s daughter was openly expected—destined, some believed—to make it a coronation. He could see the manifestations of overhyped interest along Main Street in the banners proclaiming Bronco Pride, in the silly newspaper article that morning that relived the ancient history and put the expectations of an entire county on the shoulders of the scared girl beside him. Reese Cacciola, a senior down to one last shot at a legacy, no doubt felt the pressure, too, and it had put her at loggerheads with Mendy.

  Needing a lifeline for his daughter, if only for a day, Dirk went to the well of his own considerable, and largely forgotten, athletic career as a reserve on dominant UCLA teams in the ’60s.

  “Baby, what did Coach Wooden always say?”

  Mendy looked up and saw her father’s grin, and that did it. She smiled back at him.

  “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out,” she recited.

  Dirk reached out and rubbed the top of her head. “Learn it, love it, live it.”

  Paul glanced up from his computer screen and saw Eric Embry on the other side of his office door. The sportswriter held up his left wrist, showing Paul his watch, triggering the memory: Paul had told him to come by around five-thirty. In eighteen years of dealing with the guy, Paul had found Embry to be many things, some of them not so good. But damned if he wasn’t persistently punctual.

  Paul held up a hand, asking for a minute. He was done inputting the day’s grades and didn’t really need the time, but he enjoyed needling Embry. Sure enough, the reporter rolled his eyes and paced down the hallway. Paul counted off ten seconds, twenty, thirty, then walked to the door and opened it.

  “Come on in, Eric.”

  The sportswriter, now at the far end of the hall, turned and came back at a half jog, a belly roll loosing the grip of his golf shirt and spilling over the waistband of his Dockers. “Thanks, Coach. I’ll be quick. I’ve gotta get back and start laying out the section.”

  Paul ushered him in. “Have a seat.” Settling into his own chair and rolling it back from the desk, Paul put his feet up. “What can I do you for?”

  “How’d the first day go?”

  “Good. Real good.”

  “Do you have the varsity picked out yet?”

  “Yep. We’ll go with the Newmans, Ford, Samples, Grunwald, Plummer, Lundquist, Madsen and Cacciola, at least to start the season.”

  “Who’ll be starting?”

  “You’ll find out a week from today, just like everybody else.”

  “Oh, come on, Paul.”

  Paul put his feet on the floor and leaned in. “Come on, nothing. We go through this every year, Eric. I’ll pick the starters when I’m ready. We’ve had one practice.”

  “Can you at least tell me if Mendy Grunwald will start? I mean, she has to, right?”

  “Says who?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Is there some law about who starts that no one told me? I mean, I’m only the coach.”

  “Paul, Jesus. Stop busting my balls here.”

  Paul threw his hands up. “No, I’m serious. I read your story today, and I figured we didn’t even have to play the season. I imagine they’re hanging the state championship banner right now, and you’re in here with me, missing it.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Paul pulled open his desk drawer and retrieved the clipped-out article he’d stashed that morning. “Here it is right here: ‘Folks around here expect the Broncos to end a 10-year state title drought and hang banner No. 9 from the rafters.’ ”

  “Paul, you know as well as I do what people are saying and expecting. I didn’t write anything that isn’t true. You know everybody’s been waiting for Mendy to get here. It’s pretty disingenuous to act as if you don’t.”

  Paul stood up and moved to the front edge of his desk, towering over the sportswriter.

  “No, I’ll tell you what’s disingenuous: For anybody to elevate a girls basketball team—and a freshman kid—to a matter of civic import. They pay me a $3,200-a-year stipend to run an athletic program, and my job is to make it a positive experience for twenty-some-odd girls, not to turn one girl into a superstar. So I’m telling you the God’s honest truth, Eric. I’m still evaluating the team. And if you print any of that except ‘I’m still evaluating the team,’ I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Okay. Jeez. Take it easy. This is going to be thin.”

  Paul sat down again and shuffled some papers on his desk, trying not to break out in laughter.

  “I understand the tough spot you’re in, Eric. Here’s something you can use: I’m really heartened by what I’ve seen from the team so far”—at this, Embry for the first time began scribbling in his notebook—“and I’m eager to see how we come together in the next few weeks and months. These student-athletes have been well-schooled at every level of basketball, and we have a good mix of returning kids and new talent. If we work hard and develop the way I think we can, we’ll have a chance to do some really good things.”

  Embry wrote down the final few words, clicking his pen against the notebook when he was finished. “Great. Thanks, Paul.”

  When the sportswriter was halfway through the door, Paul spoke again.

  “Hey, Eric, off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  Paul gave him a look that was half smirk, half knowing grin.

  “We’re going to be really, really good,” he whispered.

  Paul reached for the handle to the front door and then pulled his hand away, his fingers tickling the air in front of his face as if he had received a shot of static electricity. Sighing, he grabbed the brass knob and turned it.

  A faint hint of what must have been dinner glanced across his nose.

  “I’m home,” he called into the dark of the house.

  No answer.

  He closed the door and set his gym bag down in front of it on the tile landing.

  “Let’s not start this again so soon this season,” Valerie said, peering at him over the railing from above. “If you leave it there, I’ll trip over it tomorrow morning. Put it somewhere else.” And just like that, she was gone. Paul kicked the bag two feet to the left, onto the carpet, and bounded up the stairs.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  Valerie wielded a spatula to scrape the remnants of something—enchiladas, maybe, or a casserole—out of a Pyrex dish and into the garbage. “What was for dinner was lasagna,” she said. “Where were you?”

  “First day of practice, Val.”

  “I know that. Linda Grunwald called two hours ago, asking us to dinner Sunday. She said Mendy was home.”

  Paul opened the refrigerator and shoved his head in. “Mendy doesn’t have to log grades or talk to the guy from the Bugle or a lot of other things I do.”

  “Don’t get cute with me, Paul. I’m just saying that I wish you would call if you’re going to be late.”

  “Fine, all right? Is there any left?”

  “Top shelf.”

  While his late dinner bubbled under the glare of the microwave, Paul fished his wallet out of his pants and stacked it, along with his school ID badge and car keys, on the edge of the breakfast nook for easy retrieval.

  “Hey, Hugh, how’s it going?” he said,
nodding at his son. The boy had receded into the sectional in the living room, quietly wrestling with homework.

  “Dad,” Hugh acknowledged.

  “Where’s Zoe?” Paul asked.

  By now, Hugh had floated back into his math text, leaving his mother to field the question.

  “Where do you think?”

  Paul stroked his goatee and squinted at his wife. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, his voice contorted into a comic impression of Inspector Clouseau. “Could it be London? No, no, no. She was there last week. How about Omaha? No? Casper, Wyoming? Gosh, dear wife, it could be so many places. Won’t you help a husband out?”

  Valerie closed the dishwasher, hard. “Your dinner’s ready. It’s been a long day. Why don’t you just eat?”

  Paul reached into the microwave for his plate, and then pulled back, his fingers burned. “Goddammit!”

  “Come on, Dad, I’m trying to work here,” Hugh said.

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  Valerie came over, pot holders in her hands, and shooed Paul away. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll bring it.”

  Paul skulked to the dining-room table and took a seat. When Valerie set the plate before him, he reached out and held her wrist and felt her flinch.

  “Sit down and keep me company?”

  “Paul, it’s late.”

  “Just for a minute?”

  She pulled her arm away and moved to the seat opposite him, at the other end of the table. She smoothed her skirt across her thighs as she sat.

  “Don’t you want to know how practice went?” he asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, I will: It was fantastic.”

  “That’s great. How did Mendy do?”

  “Fantastic! Mark my words, Val. She’s going to be the best player I’ve ever had.”

  Valerie no longer looked peeved, as she had since Paul walked in, but rather hurt. “I thought I was the best player you’ve ever had,” she said, and Paul knew that (a) she wasn’t kidding around and (b) he’d stepped in it.

  “Oh, baby, you’re better than the best. You’re my favorite.”

  The storm rolled across Val’s face again, and now she pivoted to concern. “It’s great that you’re excited. Just don’t get carried away.”

  “Who’s carried away?”

  Valerie smoothed the tablecloth, pressing her hands against the fabric, her arms extended at a flat angle. “You are. Everybody is.”

  “No …”

  She cut him off. “Just … Paul, I’m tired. Let’s talk about this another time.”

  She stood. He rose to meet her.

  “What’s up with you, Val? It seems like you’re pissed off about more than my missing dinner.”

  Valerie moved to the other side of the table. Paul moved with her, cutting off the path she intended to take. “Paul, just drop it.”

  “No, come on. Talk to me.”

  “Give me your plate.”

  Paul picked up the dish, a way-back wedding gift, and handed it across the table to her. Valerie carried it into the kitchen, where she ran hot water over it and scrubbed at the barnacles of stubborn food. “It occurred to me just today that this happens every year, and yet I forget about it until it’s upon us again,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Basketball season. We won’t see much of you. I can just about count on your not doing much of anything around this house for the next three months.”

  “Our father, the ghost,” Hugh tossed in. Paul turned his head, annoyed, but Valerie started up again, retrieving his attention.

  “You were supposed to go get Buster’s nails trimmed this week. Did you do that?” Paul opened his mouth to answer, and she interrupted him again. “No, of course you didn’t. Don’t worry. I’ll do it. If that dog has to wait for you, he’ll sound like a tap dancer when he walks.”

  “Well,” Paul said. “I had no idea I was such a disappointment around here.”

  “For you to be a disappointment, we’d have to have expectations,” Hugh said, bobbing back into the conversation.

  “Hugh, hush,” his mother said.

  “That’s enough for me,” the boy said, closing his textbook and standing. “I’ll see you in the morning, Mom. See you in March, Dad.”

  Paul took a step toward following his son, but Valerie reached out and grabbed at his hand, shaking her head vigorously when he looked at her. Paul had never known such bitterness from the boy, although he also immediately conceded that they’d been headed to this patch of discontent for a while. It wasn’t just that Hugh seemed to favor his mom; that had been true from the very beginning. But recent years had pushed them further away from each other, like continental drift. In eighth grade, three years earlier, the boy who came into the world as Paul Jr. opted to go by his middle name, which had wounded Paul more deeply than he had ever let on. Any common ground between father and son had long since eroded. Hugh played football, a game that Paul found to be unduly violent. The boy’s nascent sense of politics and culture fell in line with that of Valerie. He had worn out her Stephen Covey books and various autobiographies of titans of industry. (The latest, a tattered copy of Iacocca, had sent Paul into solitary peals of laughter, imagining such obvious and uninspired titles for his preferred reading: Jay G.! Or maybe Hemingway’s Really Big Fish!) His wife and son’s blue-chip-stock reading left Paul to share his love of Flaubert and Nabokov with Zoe, who might have evened things up in this little domestic quarrel had she not employed the good sense to stay upstairs and out of the fray.

  “Where does he get the idea he can talk to me that way?” Paul asked.

  Valerie smiled slightly, causing him to wonder if it was meant to calm him or reveal her endorsement of their son’s jibes. “Give him a little space on this one. He’s just frustrated.”

  “Well, so am I, now.”

  “I’ll just be glad when this one’s over,” she said. “I’m going to bed now.” She leaned across, giving Paul a peck on the lips. She pulled away as he tried to slip his arms around her.

  In a house gone abruptly silent, Paul caught the late news out of Billings downstairs in the den, his mind a tangle of thoughts on three fronts—work, home, basketball. As ever, it was the latter that seemed easiest to figure out. He etched X’s and O’s into his gray matter, moving them around as he considered the possibilities that Mendy had opened up—overloaded offensive sets, give-and-go inbound plays, defenses that he might once have considered gimmicky but now saw as viable options. When he turned off the light and headed again for the stairs, it was with a self-satisfied grin splattered across his face. In a few hours, he would commit the plays to paper. In the weeks ahead, he would see them play out in practice and, if they worked there, in games.

  Under Zoe’s closed door, he saw light seeping into the carpet. He gave a knock.

  “Go away, Hugh.”

  “Honey, it’s me.”

  Next came the audible bounce of Zoe’s bed as she moved, and in the several seconds that followed, Paul wondered if she might be stashing something. Just as quickly, he scolded himself. Suspicions about Zoe and what she did when she wasn’t around the rest of the family (which was most of the time) certainly found purchase, but they were owned mostly by Valerie. Paul’s policy with the kids—by design with Zoe and by the boy’s choice with Hugh—had been to give them latitude and remain available to talk. So far, knock wood, Zoe hadn’t let him down.

  The door opened. Zoe stood impassively, in a black T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. The shorts were his, Paul noted, another manifestation of Zoe’s annoying, yet somehow charming proclivity for taking whatever she wanted from the community laundry.

  “What’s up, Daddy-o?”

  Zoe smiled as she said it, but her black fingernails thumped insistently on the other side of the door.

  “Just saying hey.”

  “Hey!” She smiled again, wider this time, and Paul surmised that she was being playful. He hoped so, anyway. It had become increasingly harde
r to tell.

  He stepped through the open door, surprising his daughter, who stumbled backward a bit as she yielded the path. “Working on homework?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I guess. Carlson has us reading The Grapes of Wrath this quarter. I’m trying to get into it.”

  Paul sat on the bed and flopped an arm over Buster the bulldog. “One of the greats. You’ll love it.”

  Zoe crossed the room to the nightstand and gathered up the book. Paul looked at the walls of her room, spotting a concert poster for the Feds and the Diablotones, whatever those were. Zoe had brought it back from Oregon, where she had spent a few weeks the previous summer with her cousin on Val’s side.

  “You really loved it in Portland, huh?”

  She tossed the book to him, hitting him in the chest. “Oh, Daddy-o, it was the best.”

  “I thought Seattle was the—what do you say?—the bomb.”

  “Not anymore. Now come on, talk to me about this book. Like, what’s the deal with Chapter 3? This guy gets out of prison and tries to find his family, and then there’s a freaking turtle. That’s weird.”

  Paul patted the bed, inviting Zoe to sit. She plopped down.

  “That chapter is intercalary,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Intercalary. I-N-T-E-R-C-A-L-A-R-Y. Remember it. It’ll blow Mr. Carlson’s mind if you ever say the word. Basically, what it means is it’s been interposed in the book to illustrate something that illuminates the theme of the story. In this case, it’s a metaphor for Tom Joad and his family and the migrants in general: They keep going, no matter how hard or how slow. They’re tough and tenacious, just like a turtle.”

  “And they’re literally carrying their home with them,” she said.

  “That, too.”

  “Sweet! I think you just did my homework. Thanks, Daddy-o.”

  “Why you …” Paul reached across the bed and looped an arm around his daughter’s neck, pulling the girl into a headlock and applying a weapons-grade noogie to her amid a cacophony of giggles.

  “Dad, stop it.” She laughed harder, and he bore down. Buster clambered to his feet and nipped playfully at Paul’s sleeves, trying to join the fun.