Chapter 17 #3
His hair was wrecked and he was thirty-eight years old and there was gray all the way through the sides now, and he had a coach's stipend and a leaking sunroom he had sold in March and a whiteboard in a spare room, and Laura Bennett Hayes lay underneath him in a rented cabin and thought: there is nothing I would trade for this. Not one thing.
"Okay," she said. "Go."
Afterward they lay across the bed the wrong way with their feet hanging off, and he had one hand behind his head and the other one on her hip, and the rain was doing what it does.
"Say the thing," Laura said.
"I'm here."
"Mm."
"I'm here," Jake said. "I'm going to be here on Thursday, and in June, and when we're sixty, and when I'm annoying you about the gutter."
"You're already annoying me about the gutter."
"That gutter is pitched wrong, Laura."
She started laughing, and he pulled her over on top of him, and they lay there in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon like two people with absolutely nowhere else to be.
On the fourth day the rain stopped and they walked down to the falls with a bag of terrible gas station sandwiches, and sat on a rock, and Jake said, "Can I tell you something dumb."
"Always."
"I don't miss it." He was looking at the water. "Any of it. Not the show, not the money, not the — " He turned his hand over. "I keep waiting to. Everybody told me I would. Barnes told me I'd wake up one morning at forty and want it back so bad I'd taste it."
"And?"
"And I got up at six on Tuesday and drove to a field and taught a kid named Dequan how to come out of a break without dropping his shoulder," Jake said, "and he got it, after about a dozen tries, and he looked at me like I'd handed him a car."
Laura put her head on his shoulder.
"You know what I did last Tuesday?" she said.
"Tell me."
"I got a woman out of a chair." She watched the water.
"Sixty-one. She'd been in that chair for most of two years, and everybody had told her it was her age.
And on Tuesday she got up out of it on her own and walked to the window, and then she got mad — really mad, Jake, furious — because two years. "
"Good."
"That's what I said." Laura laughed. "I said, be as mad as you want, and then come back Thursday."
They sat on the rock.
"We're a couple of physical therapists," Jake said.
"You are not a physical therapist."
"I'm adjacent."
"You are a man with a laminated card he doesn't read."
"I read it," he said. "Sometimes I read it."
She was still laughing when he kissed her.
But here is where it ends.
The last Friday of that October, a year and change from the night four photographs of a wet sidewalk landed on a laptop in a house in Belle Meade, Laura stood on the sideline of a high school football field in a windbreaker with her clinic's name on it.
Her practice had forty-one patients and a waiting list and her name on the glass.
Her friend was in the bleachers behind her, ordained and shouting.
Her mother-in-law was next to Tammy with a blanket over her knees.
There was a deed in a drawer with two names on it, and a boy at wide receiver who ran like nothing had ever happened to him.
Nobody in that stadium had said the hometown wife in over a year. She had tried once, in the summer, to work out when it had stopped, and could not, and had liked that better than knowing.
And the phrase had gone strange on her anyway, somewhere in the spring, the way a word does when you hold it too long.
They had meant it as a size. Standing on the sideline of the field she had graduated off, in a jacket with her own name on the back of it, married to a man who coached the receivers for nothing on Tuesdays, she found she would have signed her name to it.
She was the hometown wife. It had taken her a year to work out that the insult was in the hometown, and that whoever wrote it had never been to one.
She thought about the woman who had stood at a marble island in Belle Meade with a folder full of dates and a rehearsed sentence, waiting for a husband who did not come home.
She thought about her with a great deal of tenderness and absolutely no pity, because that woman had been carrying the whole thing alone and had put it down on the table and made a chart of it and got herself out.
Everything here was built by her. Not given. Not bought back. Built, on Depot Street, with her own hands and her own six hundred dollars a month, out of a dead storefront in a town that had already decided about her.
And she had chosen, from the middle of it, with somewhere else to go, to let this man come and stand in it with her.
And down at the twenty, her husband was crouched in the grass with his arm around a fifteen-year-old, explaining something with his hands.
He looked up and found her on the fence, the way he did all game long.
He did not wave. He did not do anything at all for the crowd.
He put his hand flat on his chest, once, where she had put hers a year ago in a rented front room off Charlotte Pike — I'm here — and Laura, standing in the cold under the lights in front of the whole county, put her hand up and did it back.
Then she went and got the water bottles, because the boys were coming off, and there was a whole life to be getting on with.