A cup of melting ice chips in her hand, Katie asked her how practice had gone.
“He’s so red,” she said. “Look at him.”
He was, a little flame curling from beneath the covers.
“He’s not contagious anymore.”
And Devon, backing away, nearly covering her face with her hand, hiding it. “Everyone’s counting on me.”
Chapter Ten
Their tracksuits were shining in the night as they marched up the driveway.
“Didn’t you tell them about the strep?” Katie asked, peeking through the curtain.
Eric nodded wearily. “They promised they wouldn’t come inside.”
It was after ten, and the boosters had arrived.
Maybe it was all those arched backs, those manicured nails gripping water bottles, their glossy manes, the high, whinnying sounds they made, their beady eyes. It reminded her of the hyenas in Drew’s favorite animal book. They have excellent nighttime vision and hearing. True. They have powerful jaws and sharp teeth that they use to break open bones so they can feed. Also possibly true.
“It’s time to take matters into our own hands,” Gwen was saying. “Every day they don’t practice, our girls descend into mediocrity. Our responsibility is to our kids and their performance at qualifiers. Not this tabloid drama.”
Katie watched them from the upstairs window. Drew long asleep, Devon was holed up in her bedroom, studying for an exam. Katie hoped she couldn’t hear them.
They were all arrayed on the patio. Gwen, Kirsten, Molly, with husband, Jim, in tow, gnawing on an energy bar as if he were straight off a run. The former college track star. And in the center now, Eric. Always.
She’d never really gotten used to it. To sharing him with all those antic mothers, their clicking heels and clucking heads and private confidences about their own homemade sorrows: absent husband, nefarious sisters-in-law. Molly’s breathless hugs, breasts seeming to draw circles on Eric’s chest. Kirsten’s late-night calls whenever she opened the Drambuie in the minibar on one of her business trips and wanted to settle in for a “chat about the gym’s future and Jordan’s place in it.” Becca Plonski’s birthday gifts, which last year included a pair of boxer shorts that read Boost This! And Gwen, always Gwen, who sometimes unclamped her talons at the booster parties, donning her skyscraping snakeskin heels and singing “Delta Dawn” on karaoke after tequila shooters with Eric and Jim Chu. (What Katie remembered: how she said, that night, pounding on a tabletop, Mark my goddamn words, Eric Knox, we will ride your daughter all the way to Olympic bronze, silver, and gold!)
“Can I get anyone anything?” Katie asked, finally stepping outside. “Coffee? Vitamin C?”
All their heads lifted, their bodies straining from their perches on the rusty lawn chairs, the same squeaky ones she’d meant to replace last summer. Gwen’s had a center of fraying slats, tendrils ready to snap. Behind her sat her eleven-year-old daughter, Lacey, hoodie-hunched in a ball, her short, sinewy legs thick as banister knobs, and that face. The face of a cartoon dog, soulful eyes and slight jowls and the general aura of sorrow.
But no one was listening to Katie, all eyes returning to Gwen’s laptop, laid forth on the patio table like a holy book. A competition video played, the floor-music score chirping, katydidding in the night air.
“Lacey,” Katie said, touching the girl’s shoulder, sharp as an arrowhead, “would you like some juice?”
“Orange juice has twenty-four grams of sugar,” Lacey replied, looking up. As if it had been a test, and she was passing it.
“John’s done terrific work with those girls,” Gwen interrupted, “but, entre nous, he is not happy. He’s talked about opening a new gym right over in Indian Springs.”
“Who’s John?” Katie asked, feeling Eric’s eyes on her.
“John Ehlers,” Molly said. “At EmPower.”
EmPower. An Olympic training gym two hours away in Hartswood, a woody, lush community near the water. The kind of place Katie and Eric had always dreamed of vacationing—canoes, paddleboats, cracked crab on the water—before the second mortgage and the most recent round of competition fees. And it was the place that, in the past five years, had propelled a half dozen girls to the national level, girls who, rumor had it, still had their baby teeth at twelve.
“Why are you talking about EmPower?” Katie asked, moving closer. “That’s where they do daily weigh-ins. Girls work out with broken toes. At regionals, we saw an EmPower girl compete with a leg brace.”