“I won’t have time to get them before tomorrow,” Megan said. “Can’t I just wear the old shorts?”
“We’ll figure something out,” Dean said. He could see this was a Joelle issue, probably something to do with their new church.
Megan came over to him after he dismissed everyone. She apologized for being so picky.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you some bike shorts tonight,” Dean said. “I was going to take the boys to the mall anyway.”
“We’re going to the mall?” Bryan said. “We haven’t been there since before Mommy died!”
Megan answered Bryan casually. “What did you get the last time you went?”
“Bathing suits. But we got a winter coat on sale, too. Do you remember, Dad? It was for me, for this year. I wonder where Mommy put it.”
“I don’t know, buddy, we can look for it tonight. C’mon, we have to go pick up Robbie. We’ll see you tomorrow, Megan. Get a good night’s sleep.”
They found Robbie sitting outside in the chilly air with the theater kids, as well as See-See, who was catching up with her friends. They were all dressed in layers of dark colors, a style Dean associated with Stephanie. It had been almost a month since he’d spoken to her, and he was starting to worry again, but he told himself not to, that he’d been exactly the same when he was her age. Especially those first weeks of college.
“You smell like cigarettes,” Bryan said when he and Robbie got into the backseat. Sometimes they sat together in the back, giving the car a feeling of expectation, as if they were saving the passenger seat for Nicole.
“Cory and Seth smoke,” Robbie said. “Seth is like my stage dad.”
“He’s a bad dad,” Bryan said. “Bad dad! Bad dad! Bad dad! Bad dad! Bad dad!”
“Will you knock it off?” Dean said.
“Say it!” Bryan demanded. “It’s like a tongue twister.”
Robbie began to chant: “Bad dad bad dad bad dad bada bada bada bada bada batta batta batta batta sa-wing!”
“That’s from Ferris Bueller!” Bryan said. “Can we watch it tonight, Daddy? With popcorn? Please?”
“After we go to the mall.”
“We’re going to the mall?” Robbie leaned forward between the seats.
Dean hadn’t been avoiding shopping, exactly, but the Pleasant Valley Mall had to be one of the most ironically named places in the world. It was built on a wetland, and its low-lying buildings, planted in a field of asphalt, always looked as if they were sinking. It was Nicole who had first identified the specific nature of their ugliness, the way they resembled the nearby prison. At some point the bleakness got to be too much, and they stopped going. Instead, if they needed to do a big shop, they drove an hour and a half to a large mall in one of the D.C. suburbs.
Luckily, Robbie and Bry were far less particular, and only associated the PVM (as it was referred to by the locals) with fun and new clothes.
They went to Dick’s Sporting Goods first. Both the boys needed new winter boots. They got their feet measured and to Dean’s surprise, Robbie had gone up a size. Dean winced to think of him walking around in ill-fitting shoes and bought him two pairs of sneakers, one practical and the other a pair of blue Chuck Taylors that Robbie found fashionable. Passing the Nike display, Dean saw Megan’s “air ponies.” Nearby were thin-soled racing flats in fluorescent colors. Dean had noticed that Adrienne Fellows had a bright yellow pair that she always wore. He wished he had the girls’ shoe sizes; he would buy them new shoes to go with their new uniforms. Remembering Megan’s request for something to wear beneath her shorts, he asked a salesgirl for help. She sold him a pair of dark blue aerobics shorts made of thick spandex.
They had dinner at a popular chain restaurant of the boys’ choosing. The restaurant was lively, and the boys loved the novelty of eating at a place they’d seen advertised on television. The waitress doted on them, giving them plastic souvenir cups and extra french fries. Dean was glad to see them so happy, but, personally, he felt lost and uncomfortable in the world. He often felt this way on Friday nights — there was always the knowledge that the white lights were shining down on Garrett, not him — but tonight his regret went deeper. He felt as if he’d gotten marooned in the wrong life, as if his real life, not just his career, was going on somewhere else. It was a feeling of loss so diffuse he didn’t know how to pin it down.
After dinner he and the boys shopped some more. In a camping store, a display of polar fleece jackets caught Dean’s eye and he tried on a dark blue one with white piping. It was what the other running coaches wore. He decided to get one for himself and asked Robbie and Bry if they wanted them, too.
“Are we going to get one for Steffy?”
“Sure, why not?” Dean said. “Pick a color you think she’d like.”
Bry chose a lavender jacket, but Robbie said it was too pretty, that Stephanie would want black. They compromised and got dark purple.
Their last stop was JCPenney, for the very practical purchase of underwear, something the boys had not thought to tell him they needed but that Dean was sure was lacking. He sent the boys to the boys’ section to pick out the ones they wanted while he retreated to the men’s department to replenish his own stores. The perfume and cosmetics department lay between these two worlds and as Dean passed by the mirrored displays he caught a scent of whatever flowery essence Laura wore. The thought of her, of her warm skin, caught him. He was pulled back to her small, windowless office, to her tears, to the anger she’d provoked. He had to apologize. He couldn’t let things end — not yet. Because when he said good-bye to her, he would have to say good-bye to Nicole, too. Somehow the two of them were connected in his mind.
Chapter 10
Hawk’s Peak was the smallest school in the district, nestled in the westernmost corner of the county, high in the foothills of the Appalachians. It was so small that the middle and high schools were combined in one building. Even more telling was the fact that it didn’t have a football team. Dean had never seen the campus, and when the bus began to ascend the bumpy corridor of a road that led to it, he joked with the girls that they should have done altitude training. He was actually somewhat concerned. Megan was the only one who had run regularly on trails and hills, on her family’s farm.
See-See and Jessica had run the course before, so they stayed back to set up the tarp that Dean had brought to stow everyone’s stuff. Lori had run it before, too, but she wanted to accompany the ones who hadn’t. She pointed out certain tree roots and rocks and muddy spots, as if Megan couldn’t see them herself. She was being protective, Dean realized, because Megan was so talented. All the girls deferred to her now, even See-See. Megan bore it lightly, in part because she didn’t go to school with the others, so she didn’t have a sense of her accomplishments beyond what happened on the day of the race. The other part was that Megan had that athlete’s way of shutting out the world. Dean saw it in all his best players; they could make their mind a field of nothing. It didn’t require a huge amount of intelligence, yet a lot of intelligent people couldn’t do it. Dean still recalled the bliss of it, when he was younger and deep into his training. He couldn’t remember what it felt like, though.
Missy and Lori walked slightly ahead of him. The two had become friends, an odd pair, physically, with Lori’s rounded, soft limbs in direct contrast to Missy’s broad, blunt shoulders. But they were both strong, able to lift more than the other girls on the team. They’d started as weight room partners and now were pacing partners, although Dean expected Missy to pull ahead of Lori soon. She’d turned in a respectable 24:14 for her first race, finishing second to last for the team, but well ahead of Jessica, which had brought up their team score considerably. Still, Missy had run the race badly, going way too fast in the first mile and then getting crushed during the second and third miles, when dozens of runners passed her. Dean worried about her on this course, with its shrouded second mile. These woods were made for giving up. They were hilly, with difficult footing. You lost your sense of distance when you were inside them. Dean kept looking for landmarks to mark their progress, but every stand of dark-trunked trees was the same, and every craggy root was the same craggy root they’d stepped over two minutes before. When they finally emerged onto a large, weather-beaten field, Dean felt a visceral sense of relief. The final leg of the course took the runners on a long, sloping downhill, leading back to the school.