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 footbalclass="underline" 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.