But she was restless. What she’d told herself was the most difficult part of the year—the season—was over, very respectably handled for her first year of coaching, leaving behind only the banquet honoring the coach she’d replaced, and the team members.
She shifted uncomfortably. That was the cause of her restlessness, if she cared to admit it. Instead, she blamed the night, the sky’s deep evocative color peeling back her carefully constructed defenses and opening up a well of memory and longing she thought she’d processed long ago. During her player days in Connecticut and Europe, spring didn’t bother her, the smells and colors unfamiliar enough to keep memory at bay. She’d returned to Lancaster in September, threw herself into patching up a program that had fallen into disarray, meeting players and parents, working out a practice schedule with the boys’ coach, and preparing for the classes she was teaching. Fall became winter, and bus rides to games in the dark, sketching plays while hunkered down in the aisle, ponytailed heads nodding in understanding, music tinnily streaming from earbuds looped around necks. Then the tournament, rallies and the pep band, the ongoing high school drama between one of the cheerleaders and her starting point guard, then a couple of weeks of nothing but sleep, eat, teach. She’d forgotten that winter came and winter left.
But the earth traveled around the sun, and spring was here, royal skies and chilled air making her remember the sensation of game-warmed muscles and hot skin cooling under sweat, kisses stolen in the darkness between lights around an outdoor court …
Don’t do it. Don’t go there, mentally or physically.
“The hell with that,” she muttered.
Avoiding the night wouldn’t help, because there would be another, and another, until summer came. She’d been avoiding more than the night. She’d been avoiding the court, playing indoors at the school or the Y where she taught a fundamentals class to grade-school kids. No more.
She pulled on a thin hoodie over her sports T-shirt and performance leggings and grabbed her phone and earbuds for the walk, spinning up one of her upbeat playlists to get herself in game mode and set off down her front steps to the cracked sidewalk, dribbling as she went.
The neighborhood was settling in for the night, bikes abandoned behind chain-link fences enclosing front yards, the light from televisions flickering in windows until she cut over to Second Street and walked the rest of the way along the railroad tracks. To her right loomed the steep, heavily wooded rise separating Lancaster’s working-class East Side from what was known prosaically as the Hill. Back when trains were the town’s lifeblood, railroad workers lived by the tracks. Railroad executives lived on the Hill, a separation that continued to the present day. The town had more industry than the railroad now, so all kinds of white-collar workers bought the old Victorians and renovated them, CEOs and entrepreneurs, doctors and architects and finance wizards.
She refused to look up the Hill in search of the windows of a particular house. Back in high school she’d been too proud to do that, broadcasting the attitude of the ashamed as she practiced on the court, located in the DMZ between the East Side and the Hill. Now she coached high school students, which meant she couldn’t afford to act like one, dreaming that maybe he’d be there, waiting for her like she’d made him wait all those years ago, refusing to let him come over or to call her house, much less to climb the steep wooden staircase cut into the trees and bushes growing wild and thick up the Hill to his house.
Wait for me at the court. Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I won’t.
The lights were on at the basketball court, one lone player shooting around at the far end. A man. Too big to be Jamie, taller, broader through the shoulders, wearing track pants and a body-hugging T-shirt when Jamie wore baggy 90s gangsta shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut to the hem just to piss off his father a little. Short hair, when Jamie’s had skimmed his jaw, because his mother hated it, and when you grew up the son of the town’s police chief, you took your rebellion where you could get it.