The Sweetheart Deal Read Free Page B

think.”
    “I know Matt well,” said Richard. “I’ll call him.”
    They were like an envelope around us, Richard, Nick, Jeff, and the other Mount Hood Meadows staff that joined them as we moved from the lodge— don’t fall down, don’t fall down —to the private room in the medical center where they had Leo, to the car that took us home. I don’t know if their job was to keep us away from other people—how our news would have ruined their time at the mountain—or to keep other people away from us. I suppose people around us wondered why we moved as a pack—my family surrounded by officials wearing matching jackets—intuiting it surely couldn’t be good. I clung to the boys on the ride home, which was no longer the home any of us knew, shushing and comforting with words I mustered without thinking. On a very dark stretch of road on Highway 26, I hoped and waited for an instant head-on fatal collision. Bury the five of us together .
    When we got to the house, the boys were asleep, and Erin and Mark came out to the car to meet us. Mark half woke the boys and got them all inside. Since we had taken my Subaru wagon to the mountain like we always did, Leo’s Land Cruiser—his impenetrable four-door, more than twenty years old—loomed alone in front of the car that had driven us home. Its appearance looked exactly the way it had when we left that morning, suggesting that Leo was home and waiting inside for us, and I fell against Erin, unleashing the agony I’d harnessed for hours for the boys’ sake—to not come undone in front of them—in waves of wild sounds I’d never heard before. We stood in the driveway, behind Leo’s car, and I leaned on her and wailed until she shepherded me into the house and upstairs. Mark had put the boys in my bed, and they were all asleep again, and Erin helped me change, and tucked me in next to my sons. I lay there whimpering in the dark, with her sitting on the floor next to me, stroking my hair until I fell asleep.

Garrett
    L eo and I had both grown up in Radnor, Pennsylvania, but we didn’t become friends until 1983, when we were fourteen, during our freshman year at the Shipley School. Leo had gone to school there since kindergarten, and my parents, content enough with the public education I’d gotten through eighth grade, had decided Shipley, for countless compelling reasons, was where I would attend high school.
    Neither of us was big, but because we were both fast and accurate, we played varsity basketball as sophomores. That first year, when I was new to Shipley, Leo and I found each other through basketball, and because of him, within weeks I had shaken the stink of being the new kid. Once we were friends, it was like we always had been.
    Leo, and three of his friends who’d all been at Shipley since kindergarten and who played ball too—though not nearly as well as the two of us—took me in. We made five with Eric McGinnis, Ryan Wheeler, and Keith Donahue. We each had our own quirks, but for the rest of high school we were a unit. Eric refused to ever chip in for gas when Ryan, the first one of us to get his license, starting driving us all around, but as soon as Eric started driving, he started asking for gas money and Ryan shut him down right away, reminding Eric he was a cheap bastard and had been for months. Keith was the one we had to watch out for if we liked a girl. Once he got wind of it, she’d be the one he’d go for, with rare success, but he was on thin ice a lot of the time with us because he couldn’t help himself. We put up with him anyway, and never let him forget when he’d gone for someone one of us liked and failed bitterly.
    As tight as we were in general, in spite of our squabbles, when Lisa Ponti died right after our junior year ended, it changed us and cemented us together in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Lisa was in our class, one of the four Ponti girls, and was a superb golfer, a prodigy. All her sisters were too,