Hannah Gersen - Home Field

“I’m pretty sure my dad’s dating someone. I even think they may have been dating before my mother died.”

“Oh my God, that’s awful. Is that why you’re so mad at him?”

“Sort of. It’s hard to explain.” The easy thing to say was that she blamed her father for her mother’s death — except that wasn’t an easy thing to say. And she didn’t blame him. But she wanted to. She wanted to blame someone and she couldn’t. But what would it mean to blame someone? Would it be a way to absolve herself? And why couldn’t she just blame her mother? Was it that she didn’t really believe it was her mother’s fault? Or was it that it would hurt too much, there would be too much blame, it would be all-encompassing? Her mother’s life choices had determined Stephanie’s life; her mother’s choices were her father and her brothers and the landscape she’d grown up in. She didn’t want to take any of that back.

“The weirdest thing,” Stephanie said, “is I want to talk to my mother about it.”

Theresa nodded. “I can see that.”

“What did your mom say about Jason breaking up with you?”

Theresa shrugged. “She wasn’t very sympathetic. She doesn’t want me having boyfriends right now. She says I need to concentrate on school. She says ‘wait until graduate school’ because that’s when she met my dad. But that’s not good advice. I mean, why would I meet my husband in graduate school just because she did?”

“Do you think you want to get married?”

“Yeah, eventually. Do you?”

“I think so,” Stephanie said, although she remembered telling her mother she didn’t, just to be contrary. She had always felt pressure from her mother to have a boyfriend; it had started in middle school when her mother would arrive early to pick her up from school dances to see if she was dancing with anyone. And Stephanie would feel as if there was something wrong with her because she felt nothing in particular when she slow-danced with boys from her school, and she found it hard to believe that other girls did, because the boys in middle school were just slightly taller versions of the noisy and hyperactive boys she’d known in elementary school. These other girls were pretending, they were acting out a love they’d seen on television and in the movies. But when Stephanie had shared this theory with her mother, her mother looked at her with such sadness that Stephanie felt guilty. And then her mother told her she was wrong, that it was possible to fall in love at age twelve or thirteen and that it was a very special kind of love, an easy kind of love, and that the only reason she pushed Stephanie to attend dances was that she wished for Stephanie to have it, because she’d had it, and it had meant the world to her. And Stephanie had felt guilty, because she knew then that her mother was speaking about her father, her real father, a man she had supposedly met but did not remember or miss.

Sometimes Stephanie was even secretly grateful that he had died, because she couldn’t imagine a father better than the one she’d grown up with.

She couldn’t believe she’d told her father that he wasn’t real to her. It was so far from what she actually believed. In the moment it had seemed simpler to cut herself off from him, to say to herself that both her parents were dead.

Theresa wanted to discuss boys from school, a topic that naturally dissolved into a more general discussion of sex. They told each other about their first times, and Theresa was shocked that Stephanie’s was so recent and that she had told no one. Beneath her romantic attachment to Jason, Theresa had a kind of analytical attitude toward sex, and she gave Stephanie advice for the future, for how to make it feel better.

They started to get sleepy and eventually gave in and went to bed. Stephanie was given Andrew’s room, a boyish blue space that reminded Stephanie of her brothers’ room. As she drifted off, she wondered if Robbie had taken over her room yet, or if he was still too scared to sleep alone.

The days disappeared in a haze of flu, with Robbie catching it just as Bryan was recovering. Dean was making a batch of cherry Jell-O when he realized that he was coming down with it, too. He had a sore feeling at the back of his throat that wouldn’t go away. That night he woke up with aching limbs and a violent urge to use the bathroom. He took a shower in the middle of the night, as if he could wash off the illness, and shivered under the hot water. By then he’d already missed two days of work to take care of the boys. He ended up taking the rest of the week off. It was unsettling to be alone in the house during the day. He tried to distract himself with TV, but the commercials depressed him. They seemed pitched toward some unhappy population, a host of minor Jobs in need of credit consolidation, mortgage refinance, diets, vitamins, antidepressants, and kitchen knives. Dean had to stop watching. Instead he sat on his porch wrapped in blankets and listened to the portable radio. Karen dropped by one afternoon and found him dozing there. She brought sick-person food: soup, saltines, and ginger ale.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Dean asked her, his tongue loosened by fever.

“Because you’re nice to my kid,” Karen said. “The other coach, she was fine, but she didn’t care as much.”

“I’m missing a week of practice,” Dean said. “I’m hardly coach of the year.”

“Don’t worry, See is under the weather, too, and I heard that Aileen missed a few days of school.”

“I guess I don’t need to do a taper, after all.”

“What?”

“It’s when you ease up the mileage for a week or so. But we got the flu instead.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Karen said. “You’re turning sickness into strategy!”

“Thanks for the soup. When I feel better, I’ll take you for a three-course dinner at the Red Byrd.”

“Sounds classy,” she said, smiling. But then she paused, as if considering whether or not to say the next thing she was thinking. Dean liked her mix of openness and reserve, the mild unpredictability of it and the way it fell away completely when she was having sex.

“You know, you don’t have to ask me out,” she said. “I don’t like to jump into things. I don’t need the drama.”

“Who’s jumping into things?”

“You are,” she said. “I know where you’re at. I’ve been there. If we’re really going to date, I’d rather wait.”

“Fair enough,” Dean said. He quickly changed the subject. He didn’t like that his careening emotions were so transparent to women. After Karen left, he dozed off, thinking of Laura. He wondered if she knew he was sick.

With more than half the team downed by the flu, Dean decided to forfeit Saturday’s meet and spent the morning on the sofa with the boys, watching cartoons and eating toaster waffles. By then, he was starting to feel better. He could smell the sickness in his house: it was finally a thing apart from him. He did four loads of laundry, washing all the sheets and towels, and then he scrubbed down the bathrooms and kitchen. On Sunday he made a big spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and a salad, and served ice cream for dessert. He and the boys ate ravenously, thinned by their week of illness, and went to bed early. Monday morning, it was as if he were returning from a long, strange vacation.

Adding to the strangeness was the fact that it was Homecoming Week and the school had been transformed. Every hallway was garlanded with streamers and blue and white balloons, and the doors were adorned with posters announcing the week’s events: the rally, the game, and the dance. Photos of the homecoming queen nominees were hanging in the cafeteria, and all week long there was a special menu of “pep” foods — basically, all the junky items that were sold à la carte at football games, plus cupcakes with blue frosting. Dean viewed the hoopla from a distance. He recalled Stephanie’s complaints, her idea that the football team got too much attention and adulation, and that it was all out of proportion to the actual accomplishments of football players. Dean had always argued that the institution of cheerleading was to blame, but he could see now that the entire school was in cahoots with them. His girls seemed somewhat cowed when he met them for practice in the big gym, lined up beneath a football banner that read WINNING IS A HARD HABIT TO BREAK.