Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
CLAY
M y last two English classes of the day flew by, fueled by the seven bites of mac and cheese I’d chomped through at my desk while grading a pop quiz from earlier in the day.
By the time the seniors filed out of my Shakespeare elective, I felt the familiar twinge of anticipation. I wanted to get outside. I needed to breathe real air.
I had one of the best jobs on the planet, but the one downside to teaching English was the practical need to do it indoors. Students learned best in an orderly, structured environment. I knew this. I just always felt myself agitating to do things differently.
On days with nice weather, I often took my students outside and created a sort of outdoor classroom. The fresh air helped them think. But if nothing else, my students got ample opportunities to write descriptively about nature. Even if it wasn’t strictly part of the Green Valley High curriculum, I thought it should be.
Shedding the restrictive blazer, I stretched my arms behind me before putting the jacket on a hanger in my truck. I wasn’t so much fastidious about my clothes as I was lazy—I didn’t want to have to iron the jacket the next time I wanted to wear it, so I shouldn’t toss it in a heap.
I threw my gym bag over my shoulder and slammed the door to Blue Eye, as my pickup truck was casually named. No one questioned it when I explained it was an homage to Toni Morrison. An English teacher quirk, people figured.
In reality, my truck could have no other possible name once I saw the paint color. There’d only been one person with eyes paler than the summer sky, and it made me happy to name my truck in honor of Ally Dalbotten. Even if I was the only one who knew it.
Especially then.
Especially when Ally was the sister of my good friend Jefferson, and a guy doesn’t go around naming his truck after his friend’s sister. Or her eyes.
I needed to get over her. I knew this, and I’d tried. I’d gone on plenty of dates, but I wasn’t interested in any of them.
Just her.
Even if I knew Ally and I were impossible.
It helped to get outside in the fresh air on a run or a hike, so I changed into my shorts and running shoes in the bathroom and headed out to the track that encircled the football field. Running helped my state of mind and elevated my mood, always had. If I was lucky, I could get a mile in before the track team came out for practice. Maybe two.
The students seemed to have the same reaction as I did to being inside all day, but it generally took them twice as long to socialize, change into their gear, and make their way outside.
Usually, it took a good twenty minutes for high schoolers to get their shpilkes out after class, shpilkes being a Yiddish term that means full of energy, impatience, and general restlessness. I found the term satisfying.
I taught my students that they should search for the most appropriate words when they wrote, even if the words came from a different culture or language. It also gave them awareness and respect when borrowing words from other cultures. Today, I was the one with shpilkes .
Inhaling the warm afternoon air, I felt my lungs relax, grateful for the fresh air and whatever amount of time I had to myself on the track. I started at a jog, taking one of the outside lanes out of habit.
I’d made it two laps around the track before I heard the steady crunch of shoes hitting the track behind me. There had been talk for years of replacing the classic track with modern tartan composite in the school’s colors, blue and gold, but the district hadn’t approved the budget. So we ran on dirt.
“Clay, hey.” Jefferson’s footsteps drew up behind me, plodding heavily like they always did.
“You sound like a hippopotamus.”
“Only to you, twinkle toes.”
At least twice a week, Jefferson took an afternoon break from running his construction business to show up and run some laps on the track.
“What’s good, man?” I kept up my pace, knowing he’d catch up in seconds. His feet fell in step with mine and I readied myself for an update on his current construction project.
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but Shane’s kitchen is a train wreck.” Jefferson was a mild gossip, always blabbing and warning that the news didn’t come from him.
I laughed because Shane, my younger brother, had told me that the kitchen remodel was going swimmingly. “Of course, I didn’t hear it from you. You never spill tea.”
“Cabinets were supposed to go in next week,” Jefferson said, breathing heavier as our pace increased. “’Course we’re still waiting on a shipment of wood, and it’s stuck on a freighter in the Gulf, so it’s not happening next week.”
“I won’t tell him, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Shane, my only sibling, was a bread maker at Donner Bakery and had gotten engaged last year to his high school crush. They’d been remodeling her grandmother’s family home together. “I’m off on a school retreat the weekend after next, and he won’t be at the jam session this week.” Shane had professional French horn–playing chops, so he often skipped the local jam sessions when the Nashville Symphony needed him.
“It’s his fiancée who scares the dickens out of me. She wants us on more of a schedule. She can’t understand why construction goes in fits and starts and doesn’t happen when she’s ready.”
I laughed again, imagining Julia reading him the riot act when he veered off schedule—she liked schedules. Also a baker, she’d moved back to Green Valley after a decade of running a bread empire in California. With the slower pace around here, she’d taken her type A personality out on the construction workers at the house.
“Don’t let it get to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
We rounded the bend and passed by the hurdles. I felt a twitch, my body daring me to jump over one. Just one.
“Don’t do it,” Jefferson warned.
“Don’t do what?”
“Break your ass jumping over something that’s too high for an old man.” He pointed behind us at the hurdles, all raised to the men’s racing height, daring me to clear them with an easy stride.
“It’s not called jumping. It’s hurdling. And I could do it without breaking my ass, but I’m choosing not to.”
“Good thinking, grampa. You’re getting smart in your old age.”
“Younger than you.”
“By a month.”
Back in high school, I’d been the odd combination of long-distance runner during the fall cross-country season and short-distance hurdler during the spring track season. It didn’t make sense to my coaches. By all accounts, I should have run the mile or the two-mile races. But the hurdles called to me, and I learned how to get over them in quick, neat bursts of energy.
Even now, coming out to the track sent a ripple of adrenaline through my veins, as though someone was hiding with a starting gun and I just might have to sprint. At thirty-six, I didn’t want to believe that anything had changed. Didn’t want to admit that I might not be able to keep up with my old pace or, worse still, that I might not get over a hurdle without catching an edge and knocking it down. Better to stay in the outer lanes.
“Damn wind,” I grumbled at the gust that kicked up when we rounded the curve and started down the back straightaway. My runners would complain for the entirety of practice that the wind was responsible for their slower times. Any chance to beg for forgiveness. What they didn’t understand was that I knew the wind was a hindrance, but I liked giving them a little obstacle. It made for a better workout.
“A little headwind never hurt anyone.” Jefferson knew how I thought about these things. “Gives you something to work against.”
“Exactly. How long are you staying?” I could hear voices of students crossing the grass field, which meant I might not get a full two miles in. Depended on how long it took them to change clothes. I picked up my pace a tiny bit. Jefferson kept stride.
“I’ll probably run three. Can’t do more than a dozen or so laps without getting batty from running in circles.”
“It’s an ellipse, not a circle.”
“Great.”
I ran beside him in silence. We’d known each other for long enough that we didn’t always need to talk in order to communicate. I didn’t have many friendships like that. Actually, I only had one.
“So I heard a rumor.” His words came in ragged breaths as he ran, our pace faster now than either one of us would have liked.
“Explain,” I huffed. One-word answers were better.
“About your grandmother.”
“Yeah?” That was odd, given that she’d died seven years ago, but Jefferson was like a bloodhound when gossip was afoot.
We rounded the curve, and with the wind at our backs, started running even faster. We were still shy of an all-out sprint, but I was sucking wind. So was he. But being just as stubborn a son of a bitch as me, he wasn’t about to tell me to slow down.
“Could be nothing,” he panted.
“Yet you’re here.”
“To run.”
“So run.”
For a full lap, neither of us said anything, our mutual pulling in air and exhaling substituting for conversation.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I gave Jefferson a nudge. I’d regained control of my breath enough to talk. “Let’s hear it.”
He cocked his head, and I got only a bit more than a side-eye, but it was enough for me to see the discomfort. He wanted to tell me something, but he also didn’t want to tell me.
“Out with it,” I insisted. Not knowing was making it worse.
“Heard a new rumor about why Principal Pindich left that law firm in Knoxville.”
Rumors had been flying about the principal since he took over the job after Kip Sylvester. We’d all figured the new guy couldn’t possibly be worse than Kip, but those two were cut from the same cloth. Principal Pindich was just as vindictive as Kip, but he managed to come off like a smooth, polished gentleman whenever it mattered.
“Hart Law.” I knew the place. They’d handled my grandmother’s affairs before she died.
There were always rumors about Pindich, and he only fanned their flames, saying things like, “When I was at the law firm...” or “You know, I worked at a law firm...” But Pindich wasn’t licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee. Apparently, he’d finished law school and never taken the bar. Never worked in the field again after leaving Hart Law. Moved to Green Valley.
“Yeah.”
“Fired for being a douchebag, probably.”
“If only that were a reason to fire a guy.”
“So tell me...” I had to catch my breath before continuing. “What’s the rumor this time?”
“I just went on a date with a woman, Sadie, who worked at the firm when he did.”
“And?”
Jefferson didn’t answer, his huffing breath taking the place of words. “Her hot take was that Pindich tried to date a wealthy client. Someone geriatric.”
My ensuing bark of laugher made it hard to catch my breath, but the image of Pindich romancing the elderly was worth it.
“Thought maybe it was your grandmother,” Jefferson added, chuckling beside me.
My laughter abruptly halted. I wanted nothing to do with that image. “You just had to go there,” I muttered, picking up my pace until Jefferson was panting louder than me, trying to keep up.
“I mean, she did have a house on Bandit Lake, after all. Maybe he thought he could woo it out of her.” The guy didn’t know when to give up. My grandmother did have a house there. And she left it to me, not to Curt Pindich. End of discussion.
“Heard something else,” Jefferson panted.
“Wow, you read the National Enquirer while you were getting your hair done or something?” It cost me some oxygen to get the words out, but someone had to let Jefferson know he sounded like his own personal hen party.
He didn’t say anything, so I picked up my pace. If he was going to torture me, I’d torture him back. In seconds, I heard the pounding of his feet on the track as he gained on me.
“Blithe...Tanner.” His words came out like a curse as he chased after me. I did this kind of ridiculous running every day of the week and therefore had an unfair advantage. Plus, the hurdling, back in the day.
“Yeah?” I couldn’t slow down now. There was only fast or faster. I gave it a little more gas. We’d already done almost a mile, and I was determined to get to two in the next six minutes.
“Her friend...has a niece. Wants to...” His voice trailed off as he inhaled a mammoth breath. Then another. We were going too fast for a conversation, running around the track at top speed, each of us pouring on the gas for his own reasons.
He gasped and started to finish his explanation, but I waved a hand to cut him off. I already knew what he was going to say. If Blithe Tanner wanted to get me to date her friend’s niece, the conversation could wait until we’d finished running. This felt too good.
My lungs craved the air that I was delivering in large, satisfying breaths. I needed the endorphins, plain and simple, always had.
Running had started as a sport. I’d done decently well, and it allowed me to be a competitive athlete all through high school. I played soccer in the winter, but fall and spring were when I exceled at racing sports. In the summer, I entered local five- and ten-kilometer runs, and most of the time, I outran nearly everyone.
Part of it was good racing habits—like I tell my team, train the way you race, race the way you train—but most of it was that I could get lost in my head on a run, which meant I’d put in far more miles than were required to train for a 5K. That meant that race days were easy by comparison.
My body craved the endorphins, that runner’s high that left me feeling blissful and centered. So I kept doing it. I had no idea why my body needed those endorphins so badly. I didn’t know I was different from anyone else.
That came later—the bouts of depression, the clinical explanation for my moods. Back in my early twenties, I’d really struggled when it settled over me like a cloud I couldn’t shake.
Right when I should have been dealing with it, I’d pushed away the signs that my mental health was deteriorating because I’d finally met a woman I thought I could love. Okay, maybe it wasn’t love. But I’d convinced myself that being with her would make me happy enough that it would send my depressed feelings into hiding. Of course, mental health doesn’t work like that. And our breakup sent me over the edge and into an abyss.
I was so down, felt so worthless. On some days, I didn’t get out of bed, didn’t eat. I didn’t care about anything, felt like my family and friends would be better off without me dragging them down.
I couldn’t separate rational from irrational thoughts, and my parents couldn’t help me through it. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t just “man up and get over it.” Not that they were callous; they just couldn’t relate.
Back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t see myself with any sort of objectivity. I only felt what I felt, an unshakeable mood of despair. I withdrew from my group of friends, went to work like a robot, and didn’t expect to feel any differently. I didn’t think I deserved anything else because I thought somehow it was my fault that I felt the way I did—worthless.
Jefferson Dalbotten was the one person who’d leaned in, rather than getting scared off. He followed me down to the bottom of the mental pit and insisted I seek help. He resisted my excuses and found me a psychiatrist who came up with a treatment plan. The antidepressant I now took every morning kept me on more level ground. I still had highs and lows, but they existed on an elevated plane compared to where I’d been.
But even Jefferson didn’t know the reason I stayed away from relationships after that—out of fear of falling into the same abyss again. Safer to go out once or twice with the women who were pushed my way and call it a day. And never consider someone like Ally Dalbotten who’d make me want the kind of relationship that would put my heart in jeopardy.
After two more driving laps around the track, I slowed to a jog for the final four hundred meters that would get me to two miles. As our breathing came back toward conversational, I elbowed Jefferson in the ribs. “Jeff, did you come for the workout? Or are you here to meddle in my dating life?”
He threw up his arms in protest. “Not meddling at all. I’m not telling you to date Blithe’s friend’s niece. Just letting you know a missile is headed your way in case you want to duck. Or...maybe put on a baseball glove and catch the damn thing for once.”
I laughed at that. Ducking was more like it. That’s how dating felt these days. When I’d turned thirty-four, everyone and their sister had somehow emerged from the countryside, all convinced they needed to find me a wife.
But I didn’t want a wife. I wanted Ally.
For years, I’d told myself that it was better never to start anything with Ally because I couldn’t risk how I’d feel if a relationship with her ended. I couldn’t risk falling back into the abyss. Better to admire her from afar and never pause too long when she was nearby.
Grabbing on to a rail by the bleachers, I held my foot and stretched my quad. I hoped that signaling the end of my little run would cue the end of the conversation. But Jefferson never could take a hint.
“Maybe one of these days it’ll be the right one. Couldn’t hurt to keep an open mind.”
I wasn’t about to tell him the only person who fit that bill was his sister. And I didn’t want to go into why I’d never take a chance on letting something happen.
But I imagined that on some level he knew.
“You doing okay?” The hint of quiet gravity in his voice let me know he was asking about my mental health.
“I’m fine. Thanks. The meds are working. All good.”
“So why not consider the possibility this niece of Blithe’s friend could be smokin’ hot?”
“Just not interested.”
I jogged in place. I knew he was antsy to keep running, so I hoped he’d eventually give up on this discussion so we could get moving. “Asking one more time, are you okay?”
“Yup. It’s under control.”
“Okay, good. Just checking.”
Sometimes it annoyed me that he knew. It gave him license to ask about my feelings and that bugged the crap out of me.
“Yeah, I know. Thanks. It’s not about that.”
It was always about that. A little bit.
“Just go on the date,” Jefferson said, starting to jog away from me, facing backward so he could watch me grimace at the suggestion. “Do it for me. I want to hear stories. You always have the best stories,” he said, retreating and nearly tripping over his own feet. If he did, he’d deserve it.
“Look where you’re going!” I urged.
Turning himself around, he picked up the pace again and I looked down at my watch. Sure enough, we’d hit a mile in under six minutes. I hadn’t done that anytime recently, and judging by the rush of endorphins I felt, my body approved.
I contemplated whether I could take another few laps around the track before my students sorted themselves out and made it to practice.
Almost on cue, the first group of runners ducked under the bleachers and stepped out onto the track. Moving slowly, they were doing more talking than warming up, even though I’d tried to drill them with my ethos—the workout starts the minute your feet hit the track. It was a mental thing, a changeover from whatever was happening in life beforehand.
I waved the kids over. “This is track practice. How about a little running around the track?” Most of them ignored me and continued walking. Only one or two grudgingly picked up their pace to a jog and headed my way.
“Fine, fine. Walk. That’ll earn you an extra lap during cooldown.”
That did it. All the kids broke into a jog. The ones just entering the track did the same.
Good. I needed them to make their way over to me as quickly as possible so I could focus on them. And stop thinking about how to get out of a blind date with Blithe Tanner’s friend’s niece.