Adding to the strangeness was the fact that it was Homecoming Week and the school had been transformed. Every hallway was garlanded with streamers and blue and white balloons, and the doors were adorned with posters announcing the week’s events: the rally, the game, and the dance. Photos of the homecoming queen nominees were hanging in the cafeteria, and all week long there was a special menu of “pep” foods — basically, all the junky items that were sold à la carte at football games, plus cupcakes with blue frosting. Dean viewed the hoopla from a distance. He recalled Stephanie’s complaints, her idea that the football team got too much attention and adulation, and that it was all out of proportion to the actual accomplishments of football players. Dean had always argued that the institution of cheerleading was to blame, but he could see now that the entire school was in cahoots with them. His girls seemed somewhat cowed when he met them for practice in the big gym, lined up beneath a football banner that read WINNING IS A HARD HABIT TO BREAK.
“Let’s get off campus today,” he said. “Now that we’re all back in good health, we should do some hill work.”
They drove in two cars, his and See-See’s. Dean wasn’t completely sure where he would take them and told See-See to stick with him. His backup plan was to go to the battlefield, but as they turned onto the highway, he had an inspiration and changed course.
The Pleasant Valley Country Club was in the southwestern part of the county, a hilly wooded region close to West Virginia. It was a somewhat wild area, a place where well-to-do families bought large plots of land on the hillsides. They would cut down two or three acres of trees to create sloping yards with sunset views. Down low, on the road, there were shabby trailers and ranches surrounded by chain-link fences, usually to contain a bored, barking dog. Many of the people who lived in this area worked at the prison just over the border, and Dean remembered Nicole remarking that they had seemed to re-create their working conditions at home.
The club was situated in such a beautiful spot that it had become a place for tourists to visit in the midst of vacations to Civil War landmarks — a break from history to play a round. The course’s rolling hills were landscaped with swaying locust trees, pine copses, low limestone walls, and a narrow feeder stream that eventually emptied into the Potomac. In the midst of so much natural beauty, the putting greens did not seem quite so artificial, and even the turquoise-blue pool seemed semipastoral.
The pool had been emptied for the year, and its lounge chairs were pushed up against the fence, stacked and pillowless. It looked exactly as it had the last time Dean saw it, sometime last April, when he had picked Nicole up from work because her car was in the shop. Nicole didn’t play much golf and neither did he, which was why they never came here on the weekends and why the club still struck him as unfamiliar. He had always felt that management was not the best place for Nicole, that it stressed her unnecessarily, but she had been good at it, and the money had been good, and she had taken so many years off to be with the boys that it was the easiest thing to return to. She took pride in the club, having been there back in the early days, a part of its transformation from a random, out-of-the-way golf course to what tourist maps now referred to as a “family recreation retreat.” Dean could barely remember its prior incarnation; all he could really recall was seeing Nicole at the front desk and wanting to know her, wanting to make her smile, wondering about her thoughts and the world she came from.
As soon as Dean saw the expression on the manager’s face, he realized there was something awkward about his coming here. And he further realized that it was within the manager’s rights — in fact, probably his responsibility — to deny a group of random girls access to the grounds. But the manager — whether out of pity or a desire to avoid conflict — said it would be fine.
So the girls did their workout, with Bryan running to the tops of the hills and calling to them when they got tired. And as the girls ran up and down, up and down, their bodies disappearing and reappearing as they crested and descended, crested and descended, Dean found himself thinking of Nicole. How she was down when he met her and how he brought her up. How she was down after Robbie’s birth and how he brought her up. How they had not planned on Bryan, but there he was, beckoning to a bunch of teenage girls from the top of a hill, and how could he not have existed? Nicole hadn’t wanted to have Bryan. It was the first major fight in their marriage. Dean remembered thinking that he was lucky that it took them so long to have a big fight. That was his way of comforting himself. Because he was frankly shocked by the idea of abortion within marriage. “I think God would forgive me,” she said. As if that were the issue. He’d promised her that she wouldn’t regret having another baby, and she had cried and said, “I know, I know, I know.” After Bryan was born, she begged him to forgive her for even thinking of terminating. And he had. In fact, he rarely, if ever, thought about it. He wasn’t even sure that she had meant it; she was the kind of person who said extreme things when she got overwhelmed.
Their last big argument: June 26, 1995. Their thirteenth wedding anniversary. They’d made plans to go out. They’d been getting along. Not great, but getting along. Dean thought the summer would help them. He’d decided not to coach football camp, his usual occupation for the month of July. Stephanie had a full-time job. So it would just be him and the boys and Nicole most nights. Less fighting that way, without Stephanie around.
Their anniversary fell on a Monday and the plan was for Dean to pick Nicole up from work. She would bring clothes so that she could change out of her uniform at work, like she used to do when they were dating. It would be romantic, nostalgic, sexy. She would surprise him, he would surprise her. But when he got there, she was still in her uniform. She’d forgotten her dress. And when they drove back home, anticlimactically, so she could change, she said she really didn’t feel like going out after all, and would it be okay to just have dinner with the kids? And he had pulled over to the side of the road and said no, it would really not be okay, that it was their anniversary, and that she wasn’t even trying, she wasn’t even pretending to try, and if she wasn’t going to try, then he wasn’t going to, and when they got home, he sat on the porch and drank whiskey while she took forever to get ready, so that when she finally came down in her dress, he was too drunk to drive anywhere, and she was too angry to drive him. For thirty, maybe forty silent minutes they sat on the porch in their dress-up clothes, waiting there as if they’d both been stood up by the same asshole jock. Finally Dean gave in, his drunkenness lifting like a heavy fog, and he made them sandwiches. And then, while the kids were still awake, watching a movie downstairs, they had sex upstairs, quietly, furtively, the only way of communicating to move each other’s hands and bodies into place. And when it was over, Dean felt close to his wife again, and grateful that they could still be close, that they had this relatively easy fix at their disposal. But he also wondered if it was enough for him.
The next day the director of the football camp had called to say that one of the coaches had dropped out at the last minute. Dean accepted the job with relief. The summer became about logistics as he and Nicole balanced their schedules that revolved around other people’s leisure activities. They had one, maybe two dates. On one of them, they went to a movie that was supposed to be romantic, about a farmer’s wife who falls in love with a visiting photographer when her husband and children are out of town. Dean remembered thinking that he would never be drawn in by the attentions of a kind stranger, that he wasn’t susceptible to having an affair. He remembered feeling vaguely superior to all the moviegoers swooning in their seats. That fall, he met Laura.