Shame (14 page)

Michelle arrived then, having parked her car down the highway in front of the Dodge dealership and walked over. “What a madhouse,” she said, and smiled admiringly.

“We're staying,” Lauren said.

Michelle looked across at me and saw my grimace, then checked her watch. “Okay. We'll be back for you at eleven thirty. And woe be unto you if we have to go looking for you.” Then she hooked her arm through mine and led me out into the chilly air of the parking lot.

I looked across at her. “‘Woe be unto you?'”

“That's right, cowboy.” She gave my arm a tug. “Buy me a cup of coffee?”

I grunted assent. “How about McBee's?”

“I guess so. Who's driving?”

I shrugged, and she looked up at me and blinked. “Bad night? Did the kids act up?”

“Not now,” I said. “When we're in the car.”

We walked in silence, our footsteps crunching on gravel as we approached the car. I didn't open her door for her. The stars were dancing wildly in the cold night air, and I stood for a moment at the passenger door looking up and out into the inky darkness splashed with light. How peaceful it all looked up there.

“You're angry,” she said after I got in and she started the car and I still didn't speak.

I held myself still and let my voice stay calm. “Why didn't you tell me about Bill and Sam?”

“Ah,” she said. “That.” She pulled onto the two-lane highway headed back into town. “Well,” she said as she stopped at the four-way stop, “it's like this.” Then she eased straight ahead instead of making the right turn toward McBee's. “Let's say that there's a convicted killer who escapes from prison, and you know he's coming back to get you. No. Hang on. That's not a good analogy. Strike that.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove. She turned right, then right again, through the middle of town. When the silence seemed like it would never be broken, she tried again. “Okay. Let's say that your husband is an alcoholic, and you know a liquor store the size of a Super Wal-Mart is about to open up the next town over.” She grimaced, wrinkling her nose, chanced a look at me. “No, that makes you sound like—well—not good. I don't mean that.”

She took a deep breath, took another look across at me, and said quietly, “Okay. Let's suppose that you're a wife whose husband still misses the woman he lost when they were kids, a woman who has just split up with her husband and is headed back to town. She's rich and beautiful and smart and funny, and why wouldn't he still love her?” She took a deep breath. “But why should the wife have to be the one to break the news to him? Why should she be the one to watch his reaction?”

She turned right again, drove for a bit, stopped at the four-way stop again, this time headed west out of town. Finally she asked, “How did you react?”

“I was—surprised.”

“I'll bet,” she said. “I just didn't want to see that. Can you understand?”

“Better,” I said. “Although you should know by now that you've got nothing to worry about. You could have told me.”

“I don't know that,” she said, and her voice was no longer calm and pleasant. “I don't know that at all.” Her head jerked, and the car eased over slowly to the side of the road, stopping on the shoulder. She covered her eyes with her hands.

I leaned across toward her and tried to take her in my arms, but she pushed me away. “J. J., if you're going to leave me,” she sobbed, “I don't want you to be nice about it. Don't lie to me and disappear. Just tell me. We'll get along fine. I won't make things hard for you. Just tell me, that's all.”

“I'm not going to leave you, Shell,” I said, and at that moment, I certainly didn't want to. “Get that out of your head.” This time when I tried to gather her up she consented. I held her while she sobbed, her frame shuddering as she tried to hold it back, all the time telling her, “It's okay. It's okay. I'm not going to leave you.”

And as I said it I was praying,
Please, please, let that be true.

After awhile, my arm went numb, and I looked over her shoulder at the steamed-up windows, wondering if she believed me, wondering if I believed myself, wondering why I was wondering.

And at last, I realized that I was wondering because we had been sitting there for a very long time. I didn't want to say anything—there wasn't anything I could say to make things better—but I cleared my throat and asked, “Shell, what time is it?”

And since Michelle was a parent as well as a frightened human being, she instantly caught my meaning and checked her watch. “Well, that's not good,” she said. “It's eleven thirty.” She fumbled for the ignition, started the car, and pulled a highly illegal U-turn.

“Set the car clock back ten minutes,” she said. “As long as we're still the parents in this family, time is what we say it is.”

Lauren and Martin stood shivering outside the Pizza Hut when we pulled up. Michelle had blown her nose just before we turned into the parking lot, and I had brushed some wisps of hair off her flushed face and back behind her ears. When we pulled up, I opened my door while Michelle sat, motor running, and got out.

“You're late,” Lauren said. “We've been standing out here for hours.”

“She says we're late,” I said.

“Not by my watch,” Michelle said. “You hurry home.”

“We will,” I said. I smiled at her, but all I got in return before I shut the door was a pursing of the lips.

I gave Michelle a complete postdate debriefing in our truth-telling period as I got ready for bed: how Lauren had not held Martin's hand in the truck, how Lauren had not walked Martin up to the front porch, how their good-byes had been truck-borne and brief—“See ya.”

By common consent we did not speak of our earlier conversation in the car, although naturally it filled the bedroom like air, invisible yet tangible whenever one of us moved.

I noticed that I was the only one making preparations for bed. “Are you staying up?” I asked around a mouthful of toothbrush.

“Of course I'm standing up,” she said, so I spit and asked again.

“Oh,” she said. “For awhile.” She poked her head into the bathroom. “I'm not mad. Okay? I'm not mad.”

“I'm not mad either,” I said. I shivered as I slid between the cold sheets. “Don't stay up too late.”

When she did come in, it was after two, and it was to whisper in my ear: “J. J., do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” I must have muttered, and rolled over, but she had more to say.

“You know, J. J.,” she whispered, “it hurt me the first time you went back to her, and I didn't really have a claim on you. And I was younger and more resilient then.”

I grunted, because there was little I could say that I hadn't already said, and because I was really tired.

She nestled in next to me like a bird nudging a nest toward comfort. At last, she settled down, and as I dropped off, I heard her murmur, “Don't leave me, J. J.”

“I won't leave you,” I tried to say, but my eyes were heavy, my lips didn't seem to move, and the next thing I knew, it was morning.

I got up in the dim light, spent several hours taking care of my calves, filling troughs with feed for the older ones and moving unweaned babies onto the waiting udders of the milk cows standing around for that very purpose.

When I came in, the house was warm and smelled of sourdough biscuits, and I smiled, took off my boots and coveralls, and went into the kitchen. Lauren and Michelle were sitting cross-legged and facing each other in adjacent chairs at the table, and they were giggling like schoolgirls sharing secrets.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'll just back out of here before I hear something I shouldn't. You never saw me.”

“Oh, get in here,” Lauren said. “I made biscuits.”

I sat, split open several steaming biscuits, spread them with butter and blackberry jam, and ate slowly, savoring the mingling of hot and creamy and sour and chewy in each bite.

Meanwhile, decorum had returned to the table, and the girls sat primly, straight-faced, although their eyes occasionally darted to meet the other's. “I'm being left out of something,” I said between biscuits, and Lauren simply said, “Yup,” and they both donned identical wry grins. That was all I got.

Our senior citizen practice the next day began on a similarly lighthearted note, although for very different reasons. It is true that Bobby Ray was, for Bobby Ray, positively kind to Phillip, which was a good development, and since I'd invited a bunch of the varsity up to shoot while the gym was open I was able to orchestrate a scrimmage between old and young teams, a predress rehearsal of sorts. And Jimmy Bad Heart Bull was there in tennis shoes instead of the football cleats he'd occupied all fall, which was pleasant. I was starting to think that I'd only imagined him. I invited him to play with us old folks, since the first team I'd been running in practice all fall was present and had gotten used to playing with one another. B. W. led their offense and I led ours, such as it was—my team was so bad that really all you could do was laugh about it.

We hadn't been up and down the court a half-dozen times before Bobby Ray and Phillip were gasping, and when B. W. took an outlet pass from Micheal Wilkes at half-court and dashed past Jimmy, I knew we were in trouble. They had scored four times in a row—five, after B. W.'s layup—and we hadn't done anything. We were staring embarrassment in the face.

I tried to be patient, to find one of my guys when he was open, but my guys—except for Oz—stood around waiting for
me
to do something. Oz spent most of his time setting picks for me, which meant my chances of hitting him for an open shot were almost nil unless he rolled off and got open after setting his pick, which he had apparently forgotten how to do. No, when he set a pick he became a semipermanent organic wall; he was standing around like everyone else but was at least preserving the illusion that he was doing something useful.

Several times I passed to Bobby Ray, who had taken up occupancy to the right of the basket outside the three-point line, and every time he put up a shot. One was blocked spectacularly by Martel Sparks into the fourth row of the bleachers; one caromed back off the rim for a long rebound and another easy layup for B. W.; another missed the rim and the backboard, and I was a little surprised that it managed to hit the floor.

On defense we weren't much better. I had put us in a zone defense because I didn't think we could keep up with them man-to-man—a pretty easy prediction to make, since Phillip and I were our most fleet footed, and that wasn't saying much—but my kids were moving, cutting along the baseline, setting screens for each other like I'd taught them, and even in a zone we old men looked like stumblebums.

So we must have been down about 12-0 when I finally decided that, even though my role since childhood had always been assist man and not scorer, maybe I should take things in hand and see if I could fare any better than my cohorts, which is to say, not well at all.

At the time, it seemed to happen in a flash of motion and momentum, but when I related it to folks later I realized I could slow it down and run it back to see what I did wrong, what I might have done differently. I have had other such moments in life: on a sweltering summer day when I was fifteen, turning a tractor over on a steep side hill and jumping for my life into the hot sandy soil; on a Friday night, with the tangible scent of sweat seeping in from outside of the coach's office and of ersatz orange on our breaths from drinking Gatorade and Everclear, kissing Michelle Hooks just before we made Michael; on a muddy Sunday morning, stepping into the house with my boots thick with manure while down the hall I knew my sons were trying to hurt each other.

On this occasion, what happened was this: I thought I saw a passageway between B. W., who wasn't guarding me that closely, and Martel Sparks, who was hovering close to Bobby Ray. I was dribbling slowly with my left hand, my head up, seemingly scanning the floor for a pass, and not watching the opening I thought I could drive through.

I gave a slight head and shoulder fake left, shifted my dribble to the other hand, and tried to dart to the right around B. W. and up the center of the three-second lane. My strategy was textbook; since we weren't doing anything from the perimeter, we needed to penetrate, and I could either dish off when the defense collapsed or take the easy layup if it presented itself. My execution was not, however, textbook.

You see, I didn't exactly dart around B. W. He was too quick for me, had sidestepped to cut off the path to the basket, and I saw this almost as soon as I pushed off. So I went up for what I hoped would be a floating jump shot from inside the foul line. It was, and I had the pleasure of seeing the ball bank off the backboard and into the bucket before the not-so-pleasurable realization that B. W.'s new position was directly in my flight path.

I twisted my body to try to keep from running into him, bringing my left shoulder down and in. I was not so conscious of anything else after my left foot came down on the side of B. W.'s shoe and my ankle bent sideways at an angle it is not meant to assume, and I collapsed to the floor with a nest full of hornets buzzing about my foot and up my shin.

I gasped, felt my face contort.

“Are you okay, Dad?” B. W. asked, on one knee next to me. “Can you get up?”

I flexed my foot once experimentally, and let out another gasp of pain. “Help me up,” I said.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I think that was a blocking foul.” He held out a strong arm, and I pulled myself up, hopping on my right foot.

“I think it would have been a charge,” I said, and I gingerly put my left foot lightly to the ground. Hornets. I hopped over to the sideline, letting my left foot touch ground as briefly as possible. I figured I had better not let it stiffen up on me, so I told everyone to take a short break, and I walked slowly up and down the sideline until the pain subsided to a throbbing.