Chapter 5
The car at the top of Quarry Road belonged to Kevin Barnes, and he was asleep in it.
Laura stood in her own driveway with her heart going before she got close enough to see the shape of him through the glass — six foot four of retired quarterback folded into a truck cab with his cap over his eyes and his mouth open.
She knocked on the window with two knuckles.
He came up out of it like a man who had slept in a lot of vehicles.
"Hey. Hey. Sorry." He got the door open and unfolded himself into the road, and he was going gray at the temples now, and soft through the middle in a way that suited him.
"I've been out here an hour and a half. I didn't want to just sit in your driveway like a — you know.
Like a person sitting in your driveway."
"So you sat at the top of the road."
"Which is worse," Kevin said. "I've had time to think about it. It's worse."
She laughed. It surprised her, coming out.
"There's a truck bed full of stuff," he said.
There was. He had backed up to the gate and there were four boxes and something long under a tarp, and when she pulled the corner back it was a treatment table. A good one. Better than either of the two she had.
"Kevin."
"Before you start." He put both hands up. "It's not from him. He doesn't know I'm here, and if you want, I'll tell him I was here, and if you want I won't. I'm not carrying messages. That's not what this is."
"Then what is it?"
"It's a table." He scratched the back of his neck.
"Camp folded in Murfreesboro. Guy owed me.
I've got a barn full of stuff I'm never going to use and you've got a room on Depot with two tables in it, and I figured out somewhere back down the road that if I stood here and said all that out loud it was going to sound like exactly what I promised myself it wasn't."
Laura looked at the table under the tarp. Then at him.
"How do you know I've got two tables?"
"Tammy Fowler," Kevin said, "talks."
They got it in the shed because it was too dark to take it downtown. It took both of them and a certain amount of language, and afterward they stood in her mother's kitchen and she made coffee at eight at night because there was nothing else in the house.
He filled the room the way big men do. He looked at the wall of school photographs going up the stairs and did not say anything cute about them.
"How is he," Laura said, and hated herself immediately.
Kevin took a while with it.
"I'm not going to do that with you," he said finally.
"Not because I'm protecting him. Because if I answer that, then that's what I am to you.
I'll be the guy you get the report from.
" He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table.
"And then you'll be waiting on me to come out here and give it to you, and you'll be different when I do, and I've seen how that goes. "
"That's a very long way of saying no."
"I'm a slow talker."
"You're really not," she said.
He grinned at that. Then the grin faded off and he said, "I'll tell you one thing and then I'm done.
I've known him since he was twenty-three years old.
I have never once seen him look the way he looks right now.
That's all. That's the whole report, and you can do whatever you want with it, including nothing. "
Laura looked into her cup.
"Nothing," she said.
"Okay."
And he let it go, completely, the way almost nobody could — no second try, no gentle circling back to it later.
He asked about the clinic instead. Then he listened to the answer.
That was the strange part. She talked for a solid stretch about tibial rotation and a sixteen-year-old's quad and a secondhand ultrasound she suspected of being a paperweight, and Kevin Barnes sat at her mother's kitchen table with his coffee going cold and asked her three questions, and every one of them was about the work.
At the door he said, "There's a game Friday. District semifinal, Sawyer's Bend and Monterey, over at the gym."
"I know when the games are. I grew up here."
"I'm saying I'd like to come to it."
She stood with her hand on the doorframe.
"Kevin."
"Yeah."
"I'm still married."
"I know exactly what you are," he said. "I've known you eleven years.
" He put his cap back on. "It's a high school gym in a town of three thousand people.
I want to watch a boy you fixed move around on his own legs.
If that's a problem I won't come, and I won't ask again, and I'll still bring you the other table. "
The porch light was on behind him. Down at the bottom of the hill the road was empty; the last press car had given up back in November and gone on to something else.
"Come to the game," Laura said.
She thought about it that night, lying in her mother's bed with the ceiling doing nothing above her.
Not about him — not really, not the way the internet would have said it. About the fact that a man had sat at a table and asked her three questions about her work and then waited for the answers.
When was the last time.
She went looking for it honestly, the way she went at everything, and what she came up with was a dinner in Chicago years ago where a woman she'd just met had asked what she did and Laura had said, "I was a PT," and the was had come out on its own, and then the whole table had gone on to something else.
She was thirty-four years old. She had a green folder in a drawer and a rock against the door and a man in Nashville she was legally required to talk to through a lawyer.
And somebody had asked her about her work, and she had talked and talked, and it had felt like being handed back a coat she'd left somewhere years ago.
The town took her back that month, in pieces, the way a town does — not with any announcement, just by including her in things until she was included.
Sunday supper at Tammy's sister's, where too many people ate in a kitchen built for four.
A woman named Michelle she had not spoken to since graduation, who now ran the school cafeteria and wanted to know, seriously, whether Laura could look at her wrist. The Presbyterian church's Wednesday potluck, which she went to twice, and where nobody once said the word pictures in her hearing, which she understood had been decided in advance and by somebody.
On a Saturday she started on her mother's closet, because it had been three years and it was time.
That took the whole day and most of a bottle of wine.
She found her own baby teeth in an envelope in a shoebox.
She found her mother's nursing pin. She found, folded in tissue at the back, the dress her mother had worn to Laura's wedding — the good one, from the store in Cookeville, the one she had made such a production of not letting Jake pay for.
Laura sat on the floor of the closet with it in her lap for a while.
Her mother had liked him. That was the thing. Her mother, who had been suspicious of every boy Laura ever brought up that road, had taken one look at a twenty-six-year-old man with a shoulder in a sling and decided he was fine, mostly because he ate three helpings and washed his own plate.
She would have been so angry now. Not at the affair — at the rest of it.
At the four years. At the license. Her mother had put herself through school at night with a child in the house, and if she had lived to see her daughter give away a license she would have said something short and unforgettable about it, once, and then never mentioned it again.
Laura put the dress back in the tissue and put it on the shelf, and did not throw it out.
Friday came in warm, which happens in February in that part of the state — sixty-one degrees and everybody in shirtsleeves and pretending it means something. Half the county came out, because a district semifinal in a town like that is not a basketball game, it is the only thing happening.
Laura had not been inside the Sawyer's Bend gym since she was twenty-two.
She came in under the bleachers with Tammy and it hit her all at once, out of nowhere, from the smell: popcorn, floor wax, the hot-metal smell of the old scoreboard, the particular roar a packed gym makes that no other room on earth makes. She had to stop for a second with her hand on the rail.
"You okay?"
"Yeah," Laura said. "I'm good."
They sat six rows up at center court. Peggy Nolan was three rows below with a blanket over her knees and a thermos, and turned around and said, "Laura Bennett," and patted the bench next to her, and Laura went down and sat with an eighty-year-old woman for a quarter and let her talk about her hip.
Brady Combs did not play. He was four months out and Laura would have killed him herself if he had.
But he was down there at the end of the bench in his warmups, and when a ball got away down the far sideline in the first quarter she watched him go after it the length of the floor, and he ran it evenly — no hitch, no hike, the hip staying where a hip belongs — and Laura stood up in the middle of the bleachers without meaning to.
Tammy grabbed her sleeve. "What. What."
"Nothing." Laura sat back down. Her eyes were stinging. "He's running."
"He's getting a ball."
"He's running, Tammy."
Kevin came up the bleachers at the half with three hot dogs, which was not enough hands for three hot dogs, and gave one to Tammy and one to Laura and kept one, and sat down on the end of the row without asking whether he could.
Tammy looked at him. Then at Laura. Then back at him.
"Kevin Barnes," she said, in a voice that could have stripped paint.
"Ms. Fowler."
"Mm," said Tammy.
That was the whole of it, and it lasted no time at all, and Laura sat between them eating a hot dog and feeling — she checked, twice, because she did not trust it — happy.