by Jessica Pack
“I am.”
“I’m on my way over.”
Steve hung up, slid open the back door, and called to his mother that he was leaving for a bit but wouldn’t be long.
“I used up the last of the bread this morning—pick some up on your way home?” she called back.
“Yep.” Steve slid the door shut, considered changing into a clean shirt, and grabbed his keys off the hook instead.
* * *
Steve didn’t realize that he’d been slowly leaning forward throughout Coach’s narrative about his encounter with Amanda until he lost his balance and pitched forward a fraction of an inch. He caught himself from face-planting into the brown carpet that had probably been here when Steve was a member of the Skyline High football team. Coach paused while Steve sat back in his chair and wiped his sweaty palms on the thighs of his jeans. Coach finished explaining how Amanda had cleaned his kitchen and made him dinner. “Some kind of hamburger gravy she served over rice, good stuff.”
Steve nodded, tensely primed to hear more until several seconds passed without additional information and he realized that Coach was done. Steve looked up and met Coach’s eyes. “She never told you who she was.” It wasn’t a question. Coach would have included the info if he’d known it. To Coach, she was just a woman who’d lost her son and who was looking for the owner of a ring she’d found. And made him dinner.
“She was Amanda,” Coach said with a grin. Steve envied him the comfort of such simple information.
“Amanda Mallorie.” Coach shrugged as though the emphasis on her last name meant nothing to him. “Her son was Robert Mallorie. He was executed last week in South Dakota.”
Coach pulled his bushy gray eyebrows together, then shook his head in disbelief. “Nah.”
Steve got up and went into Coach’s kitchen, where a cardboard box held several weeks’ worth of newspapers, some of them still in their rubber bands. He shuffled through until he found one with the right date, still rolled up. With a snap, he released the rubber band and turned back to the living room, where he smoothed it out on his lap. It wasn’t the lead story—Kentucky politics held that spot—but it was on the front page, bottom left corner: ROBERT MALLORIE’S FAST TRACK TO EXECUTION COMES TO A DEAD END. Steve cleared his throat and started reading the article, having to turn to A7 to finish it.
“Well, I’ll be,” Coach said when Steve refolded the paper a few minutes later. “What on earth did he have your class ring for?”
Steve explained, sticking to the details he’d given Amanda. It seemed unfair to share more with someone else. He thought of the sobriety chip now on top of the dresser back at his condo. Had she dropped it on purpose?
Coach took a turn staring at the carpet now, absorbing this new information. Reassessing. After nearly a minute he looked back up at Steve. “That explains her . . . reticence, I guess. Got better as the afternoon wore on, but she seemed nervous and never did talk about herself much. I asked about her son a few times and she shook her head or directed the conversation a different way. I’d never have guessed.”
“Who would?” Steve looked past Coach into the kitchen that Amanda had cleaned a week ago. Things had been hard on the coach since his wife had died. Steve often took out the garbage after his visits, and he’d mowed the lawn last summer when he stopped by to find it mid-calf. It gave him a funny sort of connected feeling to think that Amanda had seen a similar need and addressed it. Steve pulled himself away from visualizing her scrubbing out Coach’s coffee mugs.
“You said on the phone that you had a feeling. What did you mean by that?”
For perhaps the first time since Steve had known this man, Coach got a sheepish look on his face. He looked away from Steve’s gaze and picked at where the leather was cracking on the arm of his recliner. “Maybe the romantic in me got the better of common sense,” Coach said with an embarrassed shrug. “But I thought about how much Kate would have loved a story about a woman tracking down the owner of a ring—sounds like a book she’d have told me about during one of our Sunday drives.”
“I never pegged you as a romantic, Coach.”
Coach smiled with half his mouth. “Well, I have my moments and, you know, I’m getting old. Old men tend to get softer. In the head and in the heart both, I suppose.”
“And, so, well, now that you know who she really is . . .” Steve couldn’t finish and felt a flush in his cheeks. Steve cleared his throat. “I mean, now that you know the truth of it, you don’t still have a . . . a feeling.” He was careful not to phrase it as a question; he didn’t want to encourage any particular direction for Coach’s answer.
“Honestly, I don’t know.” Coach leaned back in his lounger and it rocked slightly. “But the more I think on this, the more I wonder why her son should have anything to do with my feeling.” He paused as though considering his own words and when he spoke again his tone was a bit more animated—the way it would get when he told the team about an upcoming game against a school he knew they would beat. Eager. Anticipating a win. “She was a nice woman; a good woman. I sensed that in her and when I learned she was looking for you, I had this kind of feeling like—Isn’t fate a funny thing? I thought about how long you’ve been alone, Steve, and how hard you’ve worked to get your life back but how there’s something missing. Surely you feel it.”
Steve looked away from those eyes that locked on to him. Steve found himself staring at the newspaper he’d put on the ground. The tattooed face of Robert Mallorie looked back at him. He couldn’t find Robbie in that face no matter how many times he saw it. “What I feel,” Steve said, his tone thoughtful, “is regret for what I’ve done to the people I love.”
“Still?” Coach said in surprise. “After all these years?”
Steve was surprised at the other man’s surprise. “I can never make up for having left, Coach. Never.”
“No, you can’t. That’s what forgiveness is for, and you’ve got that. You can’t make what you did right when it was wrong, but the fact that you’ve done such a solid job of being there since you came back says more than your failure.”
Steve kept staring at the newspaper. The tattoos on Robert Mallorie’s—Robbie’s—face blurred together.
“Remember how hard it was in football to change course?” Coach continued.
Steve looked up.
“You’d be running full out down the field, then have to take a sharp turn—that’s when most runners lose balance or slide out or whatever—most injuries happen then too. There’s science to support this, I’m sure, but basically whatever direction we’re going is the one that’s easiest to keep. It’s the turning or, bless us, going back the way we came that’s so daunting. But that’s what you did. You saw your mistakes—that’s humility—and you stopped making them. That’s the first step toward redemption.” He paused and an unexpected smile lit up his face. “Wouldn’t Kate be proud of me for all this church talk.”
Steve smiled, too, still reviewing the words.
“You took a hard left and changed your course and then worked harder in that new direction than you ever had before, and you’ve kept it up. You should be proud of that.”
Steve nodded. “I am proud of that.” But . . .
“And stop thinking that if you do it well enough, you can fix the years you were gone. You can’t fix them, Steve. It requires mercy on the part of the other people for those years to be made right. You can only do what you can do.”
Steve nodded, but he still felt uncomfortable.
The coach leaned forward. “The point of all this is that I hope you’re not putting your future on hold for the past. That would be a shame.”
Steve sat with that a moment. “I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, Coach. I’m just trying to live in the now, ya know? I just want to live one day at a time and really be there for it, so that it doesn’t slip away again.”
“But I bet you’re avoiding things that might make you happy, aren’t you? Are you seeing anyone? Have you
dated at all since you came back?”
Steve wanted to lie, but he didn’t dare—slippery slopes and all that. He shook his head. He had gone out a handful of times, usually at the suggestion of someone who knew just the right woman for him. But he hadn’t had a single second date. He told himself it was because the woman wasn’t right or he wasn’t ready, but he knew it was more than that. The future scared him. What if he made a choice that ended badly? What if he created a relationship with one of these women and ended up making her miserable?
“You’re still a young man, Steve. You shouldn’t give up on yourself.”
Steve glanced at the newspaper again, then met Coach’s worried expression. “I appreciate that, Coach. And I’m touched that you thought Amanda might be a fit for me, but now that you know who she is, you can surely understand why that’s out of the question.”
“Maybe that makes her exactly what you need.”
Steve laughed, in part to cover his nervousness and in part to react to the absurdity of this situation. “She’s the mother of a mass shooter—he killed nine people that day.” Yet he was also Robbie. She was Robbie’s mother too.
“Well, she’s a good woman from the impression she made on me. She’s got some baggage, sure, but so do you and . . . and maybe she’s looking for a new start herself. She said she was moving to Cincinnati to live by her daughter. They haven’t had much contact in several years—probably because of her son.”
Steve shook his head again; this was so ludicrous, and yet he grabbed hold of the confirmation that Amanda had moved to Cincinnati. Fifteen minutes away from Florence. Seriously?
“She’s certainly not going to judge you,” the coach said. “And she seemed like a decent woman to me, a woman in need of a second chance just like you are.”
Suddenly Steve remembered something Robbie had said about his mom one day—she and Robbie had gotten in an argument the night before about him not telling her where he was and Steve had pointed out that she must really care about him to be that worried.
Robbie shrugged. “I guess.”
“You guess? What if she didn’t come home when she was supposed to and you didn’t know where she was or who she was with? Wouldn’t you be worried about her?” Oh, the irony of his saying that to someone else’s kid when his own kids had no idea where he’d been for years.
“I’d figure that she could take care of herself.”
“Really?” Steve had said, giving Robbie a hard look, and after a few seconds, Robbie had dropped his gaze. Steve nodded toward the lunchbox open on Robbie’s lap. “She make you that? Even though she was mad at you last night?”
Robbie nodded and Steve had felt the shift.
“She must love you a lot.”
Robbie nodded again and picked up his sandwich. “My mom’s really great,” he mumbled, as though not really wanting to say it out loud but unable to help himself.
“Yeah, I bet she is.”
And Steve had believed that was true. He’d imagined Robbie’s mom being a lot like his mom—kind, hardworking, dependable. When Steve had returned after ten years of deadbeating, his mother had hugged him, cried, and then told him to sit down and explain himself. She was the kind of mom to chew him out in the evening and make him a lunch the next day. The kind of mom he knew would still love him, no matter what he’d done. If Amanda were that kind of mom, what had it cost her to love her son these last years?
Steve didn’t know how long he’d been lost in his thoughts, but when he looked up, the coach had laced his fingers and rested them on his belly as though content to wait all day if necessary for Steve to plug back into their conversation. “You’ve given me a lot of food for thought, Coach.”
“I know a change of subject when I hear one,” the coach said, smiling again. He looked to his right at the clock by the kitchen doorway and pushed himself up from his chair. “And, well, I gotta get to the store and fill these cupboards before Darryl and his family get here so that my son doesn’t know I’ve been living off of canned soup.”
Steve smiled as he got to his feet. “I hope I didn’t set back your day.”
“Nope,” Coach said with a shake of his head. “They’re flying in to Nashville in about an hour, then renting a car to drive down here. His fancy-pants job has its perks, I guess. I don’t expect them until about five, and it’s always a pleasure to see you.”
They’d reached the door and Steve stepped outside before turning to face the old man. “Well, thanks for calling, Coach. You gave me something to think about.”
“Good,” Coach said. “And don’t give up so easily.”
Steve smiled, nodded, and then headed back to his car, but stopped partway across the lawn and turned back. Coach was still standing on the porch, and Steve decided to confess. “I’ve been looking for information about Amanda for almost a week now, Coach, and I had no idea where she was until you told me she was going to Cincinnati.”
Coach’s face lit up as though Steve had divulged a secret. “Have you now?”
“She dropped something when she was at my place. I just wanted to get it back to her, but I think she’s maybe gotten used to hiding. She didn’t leave you with a forwarding address, did she?”
Coach’s expression fell. “No, she didn’t.”
“Phone number?”
“I didn’t even have her last name.”
Steve kept his smile in place, not wanting Coach to feel bad. “Well, I’ll keep looking, but maybe it’s just not meant to be.”
Coach smiled back. “And maybe it is.”
25
Clara
Thirteen years, ten months, thirty days
After the four-hour flight to Nashville and then a two-hour drive to Decaturville yesterday, Clara had expected to sleep late, but she was up with the birds—birds! The morning sounds in Sioux Falls had gone south months ago. Maybe they all came to Decaturville, which at fifty degrees felt like a tropical paradise compared to South Dakota. She smiled at the thought, then slid to the side of the lumpy full-sized mattress in her father-in-law’s guest room. Darryl didn’t stir as she shuffled around for the running clothes she’d brought—she hadn’t run outside for months. Two weeks ago, she didn’t think they would make it to their fourteen-year anniversary; now she hoped they would be house-hunting back here in Tennessee by then. If she’d ever doubted that God answered the prayers of desperate wives who pleaded for their husbands, she would never doubt again.
She tiptoed out of the surprisingly clean house, careful not to wake the kids, who were cocooned in sleeping bags throughout the living room, then texted Darryl when she got to the car so that he’d know where she was when he woke up. It made her nervous to leave the kids at the mercy of Darryl and his father for breakfast, but she thought two grown men were capable of cereal and milk. And it would be good for all of them to see Darryl involve himself more than he had been doing. She headed for her favorite section of the Tennessee River Trail, letting the crisp-but-not-cold morning air, flowing river, and Southern charm infuse her with confidence. They could make this work, couldn’t they? Come back to the life that had once felt provincial and take hold of the beautiful things they could now appreciate? Darryl could be happy working contract law again with the occasional litigation to keep his skills sharp? A middle-class life in a middle-class neighborhood where the kids chose one activity a year would be all right, wouldn’t it?
She knew she’d make any trade necessary to have Darryl a part of their family again, but would he? She wasn’t so naïve to think that the effect of that man’s death could change everything, and yet she wanted to believe that the humility she’d seen in Darryl’s face the morning of Robert Mallorie’s execution was real. She needed to believe that, like her, he realized how truly broken everything had become and was desperate to fix it.
When she returned to the house, red-cheeked and invigorated, the chaos was in full tilt. Apparently, Coach had decided the kids needed eggs and bacon. Something had burned and the windows
were all open while the kids flapped cookie sheets to help move the smoke out of the house. They were in their element, Darryl looked frazzled, and Coach was trying to find a new pan. Clara expertly put herself between the men and the stove and put them to work cracking eggs and preheating the oven—she always baked her bacon these days. Forty-five minutes later, they were seated at Coach’s table with the chrome legs and eating a real family meal. As an actual family, instead of pieces of what used to be one. This can work, she told herself, catching Darryl’s eye across the table. He smiled at her—a real smile.
It was another hour before Clara was showered and the kids were dressed. Coach had a treehouse in the backyard and even though she’d always seen the thing as a death trap, the boys couldn’t be kept out of it. They’d be filthy in no time, but she told herself that was okay. She didn’t have brand-new wool carpets to protect from dirty shoes here.
“Well, I’m off,” Darryl said, coming into the kitchen where Coach and Clara were finishing the dishes—the dishwasher was broken. He kissed Clara on the cheek.
“Good luck,” Clara said while offering a prayer that the lunch date with his former boss would be everything they’d hoped. He’d need more money than he’d made before, but then he had two years’ high-level experience to use toward convincing Jason it was a worthwhile investment on behalf of the firm.
“I sure do hope this works out,” Coach said after Darryl had left.
“So do I, Coach,” Clara said, feeling nervous again. What if Jason wasn’t interested? But then, would he have agreed to a lunch on Saturday with only two days’ notice if he weren’t? She heard her phone chime from the counter and pulled her hands out of the water before drying them off.
It was a text message from Darryl.
Darryl: I meant to grab a package from my laptop bag. Are you going to be running errands? If so, could you take the package to the post office for me?
Clara: Sure thing
