The Gap Year

NOVEMBER 21, 2009



At Paige’s house, we watch Tyler’s favorite movie, Never Back Down, about a football star who moves to a new school and becomes a champion freestyle fighter. Colt O’Connor, the tight end who says that the person he’d most like to have dinner with would be Megan Fox, is there too, since he and Paige are kind of together now. So are Madison and Cody Chandler, the leprechaun ghetto wannabe.

That whole group hasn’t accepted me so much as they put up with me because of Tyler. I don’t feel any more or less out of place with them than I do anywhere else. Being with Tyler is its own space. Whenever I am with him I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Plus, I like thinking about the mad sex that they imagine Tyler and I are having.

We are all flopped around on Paige’s long leather sectional couch like puppies in a litter, lying on top of one another, legs hanging over the back of the couch, half our bodies sliding over onto the floor. Tyler is semispooning me from behind but not really touching me. Then the star executes a flying kick to someone’s face, Cody bellows, “Oh no, you dinnit!” and Tyler laughs in a way that presses his crotch firmly against my butt.

He is hard. Like, industrial-strength hard.

Is it because of the freestyle fighter in the movie who has an amazing body? Or me?

“Hey, Ty-Mo!” Paige’s father comes in and we all sit up. Mr. Winslow is a project manager on big construction sites. He and Madison’s father are in a group that trains for marathons together. I gather that all the marathon training is causing trouble at Madison’s house. Madison’s eyes are always red like she’s been crying and I heard her say something about staying at her father’s place, like maybe he’s not living at home anymore.

Tyler stretches like he is working the kinks out of his back, casually grabs a pillow, and drops it onto his lap. Mr. Winslow is holding a platter of chicken wings in one hand. He balls the other into a fist and holds it out to Tyler, who obligingly bumps it, then takes a wing.

“What’s shakin’ with the recruiters?”

“Not much.”

“Not what I hear. I hear those scouts have been out there watching you since preseason scrimmage.”

“There’s been some interest.”

“Yeah, like they’re flying you all over. So what are you thinking? Southeastern State?”

“Southeastern’s a good school.”

“Goddamn effing great school’s what it is.”

“So you’re a Timber Wolf?”

Mr. Winslow holds his hand up like a paw and growls like what I assume is a timber wolf.

Tyler tips his forefinger toward Mr. Winslow. “Go, Wolves.”

“The athletic director was a Pike with me. I’ll put in a good word for you. Not that you need it, but can’t hurt.”

Tyler nods. “Can’t hurt.”

Mr. Winslow puts the platter down. “I’m going to send him an e-mail right now.”

“Cool.”

After he leaves Cody says, “You didn’t tell me you were going with Southeastern.”

Tyler tosses the untouched wing back on the platter. “Southeastern can suck my dick.”

When he takes me home, Tyler asks me to stop coming to practices. He says he wants to keep us completely separate from football. Us. The word sings through my brain.

I like to think that Tyler doesn’t want to talk about college because it means we’ll be separated. It is what I like to think, but I know that is not the real reason. Maybe, like me, he doesn’t even know the real reason.

Before he lets me out, I glance down at his crotch and get my answer: It was not the freestyle fighter in the movie. It was me.

I not only stop going to practices, but I make a point of never even asking about the games.

Simple. Like the quarry.





SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010



Near dawn, I sit up in bed, heart hammering like I’ve been reanimated, and grab for my phone praying that Aubrey has left a message. Nothing. The reanimation motif turns out to be apt, since, in the bathroom mirror, I behold the Bride of Frankenstein. My hair is frizzed into a corona arching above my head, and mascara remnants raccoon my eyes. I cup my hand under the running faucet, sluice water down my parched throat, then jump in the shower.

In the great room, Martin, covered by my afghan throw, pajama suit in a heap on the floor, is asleep on the couch. Everyone, even your own child, is a stranger when they sleep, strange in their quiet unguardedness. But Martin is more than that. For a second, I don’t recognize him at all, this young man who is no longer young. His hand drapes off the edge of the couch and rests on Pretzels’s head. He’s made a bed for her beside the couch. A blanket is carefully folded and arranged in the large doggie-bed basket she sleeps in, replacing the pillow that’s usually there. Martin noticed what I hadn’t: that the cushion I’ve been making my sweet girl sleep on has been smooshed flat, offering not the tiniest bit of fluffiness to cushion her old bones.

Noticing the soft bed he made for Pretzels derails me long enough for that stupid crack cocaine/rekindling effect to hijack me: I want to lie down next to Martin. Badly. I’m like a shipwreck victim who’s been lost at sea for days, weeks, years, and Martin looks like dry land.

Didn’t Dori tell me that an incredibly high number of divorced couples sleep together after the breakup? How many? Eighty, maybe ninety percent? At that moment, watching Martin, his bottom lip still plump, there is kindling. Which is why I’m embarrassed when his eyes open and he sees me staring at him.

Groggy, not quite awake, he nods at the phone in my hand. “Any word?”

The instant he speaks, all kindling ceases. Plus, when he sits up and tucks the afghan under his armpits like a granny getting out of the shower, it is clear that he’s kind of let himself go. A bizarrely pro-prietorial tweak of annoyance stabs me, as if I’d lent someone my car and they returned it sixteen years later with the fender crumpled. He used to have some seriously admirable shoulders, broad and with a lovely upholstering of muscle. Now they are bonier and slump forward a little like an office worker’s. Someone who’s spent too much time in front of a computer.

“No word,” I answer, and an awkward silence falls. Minus the beer, I never would have let him in my house. The beer and the total f*cking collapse of my life.

“Hope you don’t mind me crashing here. No car. Exhaustion.”

“No, actually you could prove useful.” Prove useful? I am trying a little too hard to sound unkindled and all business. “I need a male voice. Someone who can sound like a hard-ass. You can do that, right?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods?” Martin answers in his snappiest tone. It makes me remember how, once he was really awake in the morning, he was always at his peppiest. He adds, “Maggot!” and I almost smile.

There had been entire days back at Sycamore Heights when we hadn’t called each other anything but maggot.

I wave my hand in the direction of the condiment-print shirt. “Did anyone on the underground railroad happen to give you any clothes?”

“You don’t like the suit? I was trying to dress up.”

“That is dressed up? Dressed up is you in all those pictures with movie stars.”

“Yeah, that. Stylists. I haven’t actually dressed myself for years. Anyone who has achieved Public Face status has to pass inspection before they leave Hub HQ. They gave me the clothes. I put them on. Someone did my hair. All that shit.”

“So you don’t have any normal clothes?”

“I could wash the shirt.”

“You know, I think I might possibly have some of your old things stuffed away somewhere.”

Yeah, like under my bed in a flat, plastic bin, wrapped up so that the tiniest hint of the smell of the man you were sixteen years ago still lingers.

“I think, maybe, I might have saved an old pair of jeans to mow the lawn in. Or something. I’ll go check.”

Though I stomp on the Levi’s and white shirt that I pull out from under my bed, they still look clean and crisp on Martin when he emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered, water dripping from the tips of his wet-darkened, curling hair. The way he used to look when we went out.

“I’ll drive,” I say, wincing as soon as the words are out. Of course I’ll drive. Why wouldn’t I drive? Once again, I’m trying too hard to appear unkindled.

I head to Coach Tighty Whitie Hines’s house. When we pull up in front of a massive construction of red brick with columns lining the front porch, Martin asks, “A high school football coach lives here?” A lamppost out front with an ever-flickering electric lantern twitches away. “Looks like a nineteenth-century English orphanage. How can a high school football coach afford this?”

“With the bonuses he gets from the booster club, he makes more than the superintendent of schools.” As we walk to the front door, I ask, “You ready for this?”

“Cam, I was on the team that got Next tax exemption from the IRS. Then all those years managing some of the most complicated egos on the planet? Yeah, I think I am ready for a high school coach.”

The instant we ring the bell, dogs start barking. Coach Hines commands, “Baron! Big Shot! Silencio!” and the dogs bark even louder. Coach Hines opens the door. Shoving a pair of slavering rottweilers behind him with his leg, he edges out onto the porch and slams the door shut.

Coach Tighty Whitie’s casual weekend wear is a crisp pair of khakis, a pressed madras plaid shirt, and shined lace-up shoes. As usual, he makes me feel slovenly.

Martin has his hand extended and is invading the coach’s personal space before Hines has the door fully closed behind him. “Coach Hines, I’m Aubrey Lightsey’s dad.”

The same sour look crinkles Hines’s freshly shaved face when Aubrey’s name is mentioned as it did when I first visited. The expression might be pain, though, since Martin is pulverizing the coach’s meat paw of a hand in a grip of crushing manliness.

As soon as his hand is released, Coach folds his arms over his chest. “I told her”—he nods at me; I am “her”—“I have severed all contact with Tyler Moldenhauer.”

Martin squints almost imperceptibly at the mispronunciation of “severed.” Anyone else would think that Martin was just an unusually “interested” sort. I know that he is assessing Hines with his Next-trained androidlike scrutiny.

“Tyler Moldenhauer hasn’t lived in our home since school ended. I have no legal responsibility for Tyler Moldenhauer and/or his actions.”

I vaguely recall some rumors about how none of Hines’s three children have any contact with him. I can understand why. His flintiness doesn’t offer much that could sustain life.

“Coach,” Martin jumps in, “we understand that completely. She”—head nod my way, exasperated tone—“told me that already.”

Coach tips the tiniest of go-on nods in response to Martin’s jab at meddling, overprotective mothers.

“Anyway, I know you as a man of honor, a man dedicating his life to modeling young men.…” Before Coach has a chance to work up a wrinkle of skepticism at such blatant ass kissing, Martin asks out of nowhere, “Say, what did you play? Middle linebacker?”

From the way that Hines draws his shoulders back, stands up a bit straighter, I have to conclude that Martin’s assumption is a compliment of some sort. A conclusion that is confirmed when Hines drops his gaze and answers modestly, “Well, I started out there but ended up defensive end. Played a few seasons at Beckwith A and I before—”

“What?” Martin interrupts eagerly. “ACL tear?”

I’m impressed. Hines does favor his right leg, a stance that could, indeed, hint at a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

The coach nods modestly like a former astronaut admitting how he had to miss the moon landing because he had a cold.

“They still honor your scholarship?”

“Pretty much. Had to start going to class, though.”

The two men laugh. If I didn’t know that he wasn’t, I’d have taken Martin for exactly what Hines does, a former jock who considered the concept of going to classes laughable. Hines not only drops his arms, he asks, “What can I help you with?”

“We’d really like to track down this Moldenhauer character.”

“This” Moldenhauer character. With one demonstrative adjective Martin has put himself squarely in Hines’s camp. Masterful.

Hines asks, “Did he steal from you?”

Steal?

Martin locks Coach’s gaze in his with the creepy Next laser stare that, in this context, seems like plain old alpha-dog male intimidation and says in a confiding tone, “I think you know what we’re talking about here.”

Tighty Whitie acts as if Martin has read his heart. “You do not have to tell me about Tyler Moldenhauer. God, that boy was promising. Most promising player I have ever worked with. I put my heart and soul into that boy and … You know how many schools were out here recruiting him? Southeastern was going to let him start. A freshman! Mitch Winslow, one of our biggest supporters, called the athletic director there and vouched for him personally. They guaranteed him a spot. Guaranteed! You know how many kids get that? This many …” The meat paw forms a goose egg.

In normal circumstances, I would be extremely annoyed to listen to Martin being treated like the go-to parent. The circumstances aren’t normal. I’m thrilled that Martin is opening Hines up like a tube of Ben-Gay.

“He turns his back on that? Walks away? After I put myself on the line getting his reels to those colleges, getting the recruiters to come down here, spending God knows how many weekends of my free time?”

Martin amens each of his grievances with knowing head nods of boundless sympathy. “I hear you, Coach. You give time, you give help—most of all … most of all you give trust.”

“I opened my home to that boy. I took him in and treated him like family.”

“You open your home up,” Martin echoes. “You treat him like family.”

“Then he just leaves. Walks out without so much as a bye or a leave to Mrs. Hines either. I guess that’s what hurts the most. The way he was to Mrs. Hines, who was nothing but good and gracious to him. He got special treatment. We went out of our way to help him, and this is the thanks we get?”

“This is the thanks.” Martin shakes his head in mournful sympathy. “I hear you, Coach. Boy, do I hear you.”

“That truck? Bought it with money he made working construction at Mitch Winslow’s company.”

“Where’s the gratitude?”

Coach shakes his head with sad resignation. “Raising always shows, doesn’t it?”

Raising?

“It does, Coach. That it does.” After many tsks of solemn commiseration, Martin concludes, “Well, then, I think we understand each other.”

“I think we do.”

I try to reconstruct when this understanding emerged.

“I’ve been holding some mail that came to the house after he left. Couple of pieces of correspondence in there might interest you.”

“Mind if we have a look? We will be sure he gets it.”

“Oh, I know you will.” Hines’s confiding tone makes me realize that, most likely, he has assumed that Martin is the enraged father of a pregnant daughter.

“Wait right here.” Hines leaves us on the porch and fights his way past the barking, scrabbling dogs.

I start to say something to Martin, but, without changing his aggrieved expression, he bobs his head the tiniest bit toward the camera mounted above the porch. I wonder again at all the things Martin has learned over the past sixteen years.

Hines returns. The instant that Tyler’s mail is in Martin’s hands, I ask the coach, “Why did you ask if he’d stolen from us? Did he steal from you?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the ins and outs of this whole deal, but let me just put it this way: Tyler Moldenhauer is not who everyone thinks he is.”