Home Field Read Free

to start and finish his days early and was probably already at home on his deck, enjoying a cold one. When Dean first started coaching at Willowboro, it had been up to him to maintain the football and practice fields, a side duty he had thoroughly enjoyed, riding atop the whirring mower in the early evenings, feeling at once productive and leisurely as the sky above turned orange and then pink and then violet. He’d lime the sidelines in the dusky light and they would seem to glow. The next morning it would all be waiting for him in bright primary colors.
    Dean always felt as if he needed August, as if these long days of practice, unfettered by academic or familial demands, were an interlude that restored him in some way, a time of simple feeling and nostalgia that connected the man he had become to the boy he had once been. It was the time of year when he felt that he knew who he was.
    But this year that clarity was gone.
    Don’t try to get to the end of your grief. That’s what his mother-in-law had told him. She had moved in with them for a few weeks over the summer, and Dean still missed their late-night conversations.
    Two teachers waved to Dean from the other end of the lot. Dean waved back vaguely. He didn’t know the other faculty that well. He was sequestered in the east annex, where his office, the weight rooms, and the locker rooms bordered twogyms, one large and one small. The teachers’ lounge was at the other end of the school. That was fine with him. Although he taught PE, Dean didn’t think coaching had much to do with teaching. He was more like a mechanic, or a horse trainer, like his father. The point was, he didn’t consider his work to be intellectual. He’d never thought this was unusual, but Nicole had seized on it on one of their first dates.
    â€œBut the kids learn so much from you,” she’d said. “Of course you’re a teacher.”
    â€œAll I care about is winning games. If they happen to learn something in the process, that’s just a by-product.”
    She’d laughed, but he wasn’t going to be one of those men who claimed that football was “character building.” It wasn’t a civilized sport. The training could be brutal. The players were often crude. He could think of few lessons that would serve anyone for a lifetime. It was a moment-by-moment kind of game. That was why he needed it now. All summer long he had been living “one day at a time,” as everyone advised. It was an act of will not to look ahead, not to think about all the ways his future had been destroyed. He tried not to look back, either, but that was harder. Everyone said he couldn’t blame himself, but Dean knew they were all thinking the same thing, that it would never happen to them, that they would never let it happen. And at the same time everyone told him how shocked they were, how they had no idea, how they never would have guessed that someone like her, a woman so, so, so . . . they always struggled to say what had fooled them. So normal, perhaps. Or maybe: so undefined. So easy to project happiness onto.
    Maybe they all just had crushes on her. Dean got notes ofcondolence from her country club clients, most of them male, all of them recalling Nicole’s sunny nature. She always had a smile for me, one wrote. As if that meant anything, Dean thought bitterly. He hated how grief made him cynical. The world, for him, was now full of shortsighted, awkward idiots.
    Dean drove down Main Street, which was actually Route 40, an old road you could take west all the way to Utah. Or east to Baltimore. Dean could still remember learning the roads in the area, before everything became rote, before he met Nicole. There had been a time when he wasn’t even sure he’d stay very long in this particular corner of western Maryland, this tiny town tucked into the skinny arm of the state. Even though it was several hours from his father’s, it