9. The Five K
The Five K
"You have a rowing machine in a garage," I said.
"That's cardiovascular."
"It's furniture."
"Ray signed me up." He was reading the email on his phone with an expression of pure betrayal. "Ray signed me up and copied Kessler's replacement and now there's a *federal* entry, Lila, it says 'Team FBI' and there's two of us and the other one is a twenty-six-year-old from Ventura who did track."
"Take Bear."
"Bear does not run either. Bear is the only being in this county with less interest in running than me."
He ran it. He trained for eleven weeks with genuine seriousness because he is incapable of doing anything otherwise, at six in the morning, up the Mesa and down, and Floss went with him twice a week and came home wrecked and delighted, and Bear watched them leave from the doorway with the expression of a man whose family has joined a cult.
The jackets came in May.
They came in a box to the resident agency, sponsor merchandise, one for every entrant: navy, lightweight, with a PAL logo on the front and, across the back, the sponsor's chosen slogan for that year in big pale gray letters.
PEOPLE PROTECT POSSIBILITIES.
Nate held it up in my kitchen with both hands and looked at it for a long moment.
"What does that mean?" he said.
"It doesn't mean anything."
"No, but what does it *mean*."
"Nate, it's a charity slogan. A marketing person in a room came up with four words that start with P." I took it off him and turned it around. Underneath the slogan, small, was the sponsor's name in the same gray. "It's fine. It's for kids' sports."
"It's got FBI on the sleeve," he said, with real pain. "I have to run three miles in public with the Bureau's name on my arm and the words PEOPLE PROTECT POSSIBILITIES across my back. Do you understand that a lawyer is going to see this? Do you understand that Diane Kessler is going to see this?"
"She'll love it."
"She will never mention it once," said Nate, "for the rest of my life, and that will be worse."
He wore it. There is a photograph of him in it, from the back, taken by a friend on the sand at East Beach on a Sunday in June with two dogs sitting on either side of him, and it is the single best photograph anybody has ever taken of my husband, and the words across his shoulders are ridiculous, and I would not change one thing about it.
I read the small gray lettering under the slogan that night in my kitchen and did not think about it for five weeks.
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