She’d never seen Ryan drink. Once she saw him at a boosters’ barbecue with a nonalcoholic beer snug between two fingers. Sometimes, when glasses were passed around, it seemed like Teddy studied him closely, as if watching for something.
“It’s not really the safest place to walk,” Eric said. “There’s almost no shoulder.” A pause, the sound of a car horn, of Eric taking a breath. “At that age, you don’t think anything will ever happen to you.”
Nothing ever felt so true. But the way Eric said it, voice creaking slightly, made her wonder why it felt true for him.
“Eric,” she started.
But there was a siren coming from somewhere, and he had to go.
Hair wet from the pool, slicked back like a miniature financier, Drew stood in front of the Y, head bent over his phone.
“Business?” Katie asked, stepping out of the car. “Or personal?”
Just looking at him, Katie felt better about everything. Her sweet, serious boy.
“Look,” he said, pointing to a silverfish squashed on the sidewalk.
She smiled. “You’re going to be one of those photographers who takes pictures of taxidermy and headstones.”
“It’s a night insect,” he said. “It doesn’t have wings, but it runs really fast.”
He handed her his phone. There were dozens of snapshots, extreme close-ups of metallic scales glimmering, antennae like points on a star. And other photos, beetles and cicadas. An explosion of jewels, a glamorous bracelet fallen, sprawling its gems everywhere.
“You, kid, are something else,” she said. “Wanna go to the museum?”
“We can watch the rest of Devon,” he said, shrugging. “I have stuff I can do.”
He always made it all so easy, never seemed to mind any of it, or at least he never complained. His entire life had been sitting in bleachers. And ten o’clock dinners, weekend trips to far corners of the state, strapped in the backseat for most of his early years, all the hours high up in the stands, the noises of the gym, of all the squeaking girls and mat pounding. Katie tried to make it as fun as she could, bleacher picnics with a steaming thermos of hot chocolate, fat cream cheese sandwiches stained with grape jelly, greasy-papered blondies from Zerillo’s bakery. It was always the two of them, with a stack of coloring books and puzzles and crazy eights. It was the kind of mother-son time they’d never have had otherwise, up there in the echoey stands, their elbows and forearms striped from the aluminum ridges.
These days, he’d mostly read by himself, books about magic and electricity and volcanoes. Earbuds in, he never seemed to mind.
He’d never known any other way.
“It’s damn late, Katie-did. I’m sorry.”
It was nearly nine o’clock, and there was Coach T. at their screen door, a six-pack of beer sweating in his big red hands.
“Is Eric around?” he asked.
From the kitchen window, Katie watched them at the picnic table, crouched over cans of Schlitz. It was a beer Katie didn’t even know existed anymore but that reminded her of her granddad, of long, crowded Sundays with crunched beer cans and football and the front door always swinging open. Every other night of the week, she and her mother had their Lean Cuisines, hands burning on the puckering pouch, but Sundays were filled with leisure and the encroaching smell of pot roast, carrots broiled to tinder sticks. Her grandparents, both long dead, always had real Sundays like no one had anymore—comics in the paper and football on TV and God is great, God is good, we thank you for this food, amen.
BelStars, of course, didn’t leave room for Sundays like that.
Silver hair glinting under the moon, Teddy leaned over his knees, shaking the near-empty can, saying things softly to Eric, too softly for Katie to hear.
They’d been talking a long time, Eric nursing the same can and Teddy peeling off two more from the plastic curlicue.
Finally, as the neighborhood quieted, the dishwasher cycle shushed, and the beer gave ballast to Teddy’s voice, she could hear them.
“She’d had a few drinks at dinner, you know? So Ryan drove her back to her apartment in her car and left it there for her. She says she hates herself for letting him walk home at that hour. Just thinking of it makes her want to die. What do you say to that? To your little girl saying she wants to die?”
“She doesn’t mean it, Teddy.”
“I only had sons, all off to college and beyond. Not a flipper in the bunch. So Hailey’s special to me. She’s like my own.”
Teddy peered into the beer can as if looking for something.
Katie waited, hoping Eric would offer a soothing phrase. It took a long ten, twenty seconds. For a crazy moment, she was afraid he was going to ask Teddy when he was coming back to the gym.
“Hailey’s strong, Teddy,” Eric said, at last. “She’ll get through this.”
“Sure,” he said, with a hint of his usual buoyancy and vigor. “Sure she will.”
Eric glanced over at the house as if looking for her.
“It’s hard not to think of doing things different, though,” Teddy said, pulling on his ball cap. “I had my worries about him.”
“What do you mean?”