Hannah Gersen - Home Field

“What happened?” She was looking down from her perch atop Juniper’s saddle, and they were looking up at her with naked pain. Stephanie felt time slow down the way it had the day before, when Juniper tried to throw her.

“I need you to go to your brothers,” her father said. “They’re up at the house. The police are coming and I have to go with them to the hospital.”

“What happened? Please, you have to tell me what happened.”

“Your mother. .” His face contorted. “She hanged herself with the rope swing. Robbie found her.”

Her grandfather just kept staring at her.

Stephanie pressed her face into Juniper’s mane, which smelled like the muddy creek and the warm sun and the rich animal murk of farm life — a beautiful, decaying perfume.

The boy cried helplessly in Dean’s office. He wiped his face with his scrimmage jersey, but it was too sweaty to be of any use to him. Even without his pads, the boy’s shoulders were unusually square and broad. He looked like a grown man, with dark stubble already arriving in the late afternoon. Dean remembered scouting him from eighth-grade Field Day. He was big even then, uncoordinated but strong, his thick black hair growing as wildly as his body and long enough for a ponytail. He threw the shot put like it was nothing much, something slightly heavier than a softball. His name was Laird Kemp. Dean stood on the sidelines and watched him, writing a summer conditioning regimen on the blue index cards he always carried in the side pocket of his windbreaker. He gave it to the boy and told him to try out for junior varsity football in the fall. Four years later, Laird was their middle linebacker, the linchpin of their defensive unit. And he was telling Dean that he was sorry, but his family was moving in two weeks. His dad’s company — Mac Truck — had transferred him to another one of their corporate offices.

“I’m sorry, Coach. I know I should have told you sooner. I don’t know why my dad has to take this job.”

“I’m sure he has good reasons.” Dean knew Laird’s parents fairly well. Like Dean, they weren’t originally from Willowboro, which was a significant line of demarcation. They were also better off than most and lived in one of the nicer suburbs outside of town. They liked football as much as anyone and gave generously to the Boosters, but it wasn’t their priority. They probably wanted Laird to spend his senior year preparing for college.

“I don’t want to go to a new school,” Laird said. He took a deep breath to steady himself. “I’m happy here. Things are good for me.”

“Things will be good for you in your new school,” Dean said. “I’ll give a call to that coach over there. I’ll tell him how lucky he is to have you joining his team.”

Garrett Schwartz, the assistant coach, appeared in Dean’s doorway. “You’re leaving? You can’t leave! We need you!”

Typical Garrett: awkward, blunt, and easily excited. He was the athletic director in addition to his role as assistant coach. His slightly built figure was a familiar sight at the beginning of every game as, clipboard in hand, he checked to make sure the facility was clean, the scoreboard turned on, the bleachers pulled down, and the soda and snack machines stocked and lit. He checked in with the cheerleaders, the Boosters, the refs, the coaches, and anyone else he recognized. He always had a whistle and a stopwatch around his neck, the stopwatch strung on a gimp lanyard that the cheerleaders had made one year for Spirit Week. Dean had given his lanyard to Stephanie.

“Don’t worry about us,” Dean said to Laird. “Go and shower. We’ll tell the team tomorrow.”

“I can come to practice tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

Garrett began to brainstorm ideas for a replacement as soon as the kid was out of earshot. No one was as built as Laird — or as aggressive. That was the thing about Laird; even though his temperament was mellow, almost timid, he was ruthless on the field. Dean had a theory: Because Laird had always been big for his age, he’d had to learn how to be gentle, or risk hurting littler boys. When he played football, he could show his true strength.

“What about Jimmy Smoot?” Garrett asked. “He bulked up over the summer.”

“He’s fast,” Dean said. “He’s got a sprinter’s build. You don’t let that kind of speed go.”

“I’ll put him down as a question mark,” Garrett said. “All the Smoots are linebacker material. It’s in their genes. I went to high school with Jimmy’s cousin. His nickname was Bear.”

Garrett knew everyone in Willowboro. He had lived in the area all his life. Dean had arrived when he was twenty-six. Even after fifteen years of coaching and a half-dozen championship teams, he still felt he was regarded as an outsider.

“Okay, here’s an idea,” Garrett said. “I’ve actually been thinking of it for a while, but I sat on it because I know you don’t like to poach from other teams.”

“That’s a firm policy of mine,” Dean said.

“I know, but there’s this pitcher on the baseball team, a junior, and he’s a big guy, okay? Kind of a gut, maybe, but we can work with that. He’s got a really fast pitch. He’s already being scouted. His name’s Devlin, Mark Devlin.”

“I know Devlin. He takes gym every year,” Dean said. “I don’t want him getting injured.”

“But he wouldn’t necessarily,” Garrett said. “And I think if we leaned on him, he would play.”

“You asked him already?”

“I ran the idea by him in the spring. I was at a game. He said he didn’t see himself as a football player, but you should see him pitch, he’s an animal. He’ll hit the batters if he has to.”

“If he doesn’t come here voluntarily, I don’t want him,” Dean said. “Remember Tyler Shelton? He ruined his knee playing football. Lost a basketball scholarship because of my dumb sales pitch. Trust me, you don’t want that kind of guilt.”

The phone rang and Dean picked up right away. It was Stephanie, reminding him in a sour voice to be home by four.

“I have a dinner shift, okay?” she said. “So please don’t be late again.”

“You know I can’t get home early on double days.”

“You’re going to have to figure something out, because I’m only here one more week. Or did you forget that, too?”

The line went dead, but Dean said good-bye before hanging up. Garrett made a show of flipping through the papers on his clipboard.

“Everything okay?” He glanced at Dean quickly.

“I have to get home,” Dean said, ignoring Garrett’s half-assed attempt at meaningful conversation. Garrett didn’t really want to know. No one did. “Would you mind taking a look at the playbook? Find all the ones that we wrote for Laird. We’re going to have to change things up.”

“I’ll mark it and make a copy for you.”

“You don’t have to do that. We can compare notes tomorrow.”

Dean left, grabbing his cap on the way out. He’d worn his oldest one today, with the retired logo: a sunrise between two mountains with a small bird gliding in the corner. Now the bird — an eagle — was front and center, the mountains in the background. The sun had been removed.

Outside there were piles of grass clippings everywhere, but no mower in sight. The groundsman liked to start and finish his days early and was probably already at home on his deck, enjoying a cold one. When Dean first started coaching at Willowboro, it had been up to him to maintain the football and practice fields, a side duty he had thoroughly enjoyed, riding atop the whirring mower in the early evenings, feeling at once productive and leisurely as the sky above turned orange and then pink and then violet. He’d lime the sidelines in the dusky light and they would seem to glow. The next morning it would all be waiting for him in bright primary colors.