RUTH HAD EXPECTED TO SIT DOWN AND BANG OUT HER FORMAL letter of complaint in a matter of minutes. It seemed like a simple, straightforward proposition: Coach Mason violated Article X, Section Y of the Soccer Association Guidelines—i.e., “Coaches are not permitted to inflict their religious beliefs on their players”—and should therefore be punished for this infraction.
There was only one problem: no such rule existed. She scoured the Stonewood Heights Youth Soccer Association Handbook—it was available as a .pdf download at SHYSA.org—and couldn’t find a single reference to religion in the entire twenty-two-page document. Even the surprisingly detailed Coach’s Code of Conduct was mute on the subject. There were paragraphs devoted to the coach’s responsibility for civil behavior on the sidelines (“SHYSA has zero tolerance for verbal abuse or second-guessing of referees”), for ensuring that each player got a roughly equal amount of time on the field, for taking care that players weren’t exposed to severe or dangerous weather conditions, and for providing a smoke-free youth soccer experience for the children of Stonewood Heights. A whole page was devoted to the issue of sexual abuse—Ruth was pleased to learn that coaches had to submit to a background check, and impressed by the Association’s stern and highly specific set of prohibitions, issued under the bold heading, YOU MUST NOT:
Allow or engage in inappropriate or intrusive touching of any kind (Examples: Don’t “help” a child change clothes, or even tuck in a child’s jersey. Refrain from delivering “congratulatory” pats on a child’s buttocks)
Make sexually suggestive remarks to a child, even in jest
Take children, other than your own offspring, alone on car journeys, no matter how short
Engage in roughhousing or sexually provocative play with a child
As thoughtful and thorough as the drafters of the Handbook had been in most matters, it had obviously not occurred to them that a coach might take it upon himself to lead his team in organized prayer. The closest Ruth could come to the kind of rule she was looking for was an ambiguously worded catchall provision: “The coach must confine him/herself to the technical realm and only provide athletic instruction.”
Though this guideline could reasonably be construed as barring coaches from discussing subjects other than soccer with their players, Ruth found it way too vague for her purposes, and completely unrealistic. Was the coach not supposed to comment on the weather, or tell the kids a silly joke, or ask how someone had enjoyed their trip to Disney World? Strictly speaking, all these things were as far outside the boundaries of soccer instruction as The Lord’s Prayer. If Tim Mason was guilty of breaking this rule, so was every other coach in the league. Besides, it seemed like a depressing anticlimax, writing a letter full of moral indignation, only to accuse someone of “not confining himself to the technical realm.”
As a result of this confusion, Ruth made several false starts on the letter on Monday night. Some of the early drafts were too emotional, verging on melodramatic (“I was flabbergasted. This was not the Stonewood Heights I knew, or the America I loved.”); others got bogged down in unnecessary detail (“I believe that Assistant Coach Roper was sitting on Coach Mason’s right, though it’s possible that I’ve gotten the mental image reversed, and that he, Mr. Roper, was actually on the left.”); still others strayed into such deep legal water that Ruth quickly found she was in over her head (“I am, of course, not an attorney, but it seems like simple common sense to assume that if it’s unconstitutional for public-school teachers to lead their students in prayer, then surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is equally violated when a youth soccer coach, who can be viewed, in a certain sense, as a sort of volunteer teacher, engages in a similarly religious exercise in a public forum, in this case a county park.”).
It wasn’t until she hit upon the tactic of putting Maggie front and center that things began to fall into place:
… My daughter loves playing for the Stonewood Stars, and has enjoyed participating in youth soccer since the age of five. She participates because she loves the game and wants to compete at a high level while honing her athletic skills, improving her fitness, and enjoying the camaraderie of belonging to a team. She does not, however, play soccer for the purpose of receiving religious instruction. That is what churches and synagogues and mosques are for. I don’t know what the Association’s policy on coach-sponsored prayer is (there doesn’t seem to be any spelled out in your Handbook), but it seems clear to me that organized prayer at a soccer game falls far outside the purview of the SHYSA mission statement, which, as you know, proclaims the admirable goal of “teaching the game of soccer to the youth of Stonewood Heights in a way that encourages healthy competition, good sportsmanship, physical fitness, and above all, fun.”
I don’t, for the life of me, see how Christian prayer fits into this. If I’m wrong, please let me know. If, however, you agree with my opinion that Coach Mason has egregiously overstepped the bounds of appropriate conduct, then I would like to know, as soon as possible, what disciplinary action SHYSA plans to take against him before I consider any and all steps (including seeking advice from legal counsel) I might take to ensure that my daughter and her teammates are not exposed to this sort of behavior again.
Once she found her footing, the writing flowed quickly. She began what turned out to be the final version of the letter right after dinner on Tuesday evening and finished it shortly before her unofficial deadline of eight o’clock, the time when Tim Mason said he would be stopping by to discuss the matter with her in person.
HE’D CALLED on Monday afternoon, around the time Ruth was meeting with Dr. Kamal, but she hadn’t gotten the message until several hours later, when she was tucking Maggie into bed.
“Sweetie,” she said, laying her hand softly on her daughter’s shoulder. “Sleep well, okay?”
Maggie’s only reply was a halfhearted, mildly hostile shrug. Ruth couldn’t help but be impressed—Maggie had managed to last two full days without uttering an unnecessary word in her presence. She’d answer a direct question if she had to, using monosyllables or grunts if possible, but other than that she was implementing the silent treatment with monklike discipline.
“I love you,” Ruth told her. “I know it may not seem that way sometimes.”
Maggie didn’t exactly flinch when her mother’s lips brushed against her forehead, but she did tense up ever so slightly, as if she were receiving an injection and trying to be stoic about it. Then she pulled her stuffed owl, Morton, tightly to her chest and rolled onto her side to face the wall.
“I once went a whole week without talking to Grandma,” Ruth said, her eyes straying to the poster on Maggie’s closet door, Mia Hamm looking cute and boyishly fierce in her white uniform, two fists clenched above her head, the crowd a pixilated blur behind her. “My senior year of high school. I can’t even remember what we were fighting about. It seems so silly now.”
Ruth pulled the chain on the bedside lamp and stretched herself out on the narrow twin bed. It was an old habit, only recently broken—for the first nine years of her life, Maggie hadn’t been able to fall asleep without one of her parents lying beside her. On a lot of those nights, Ruth had dozed off herself, lulled by the sound of her daughter’s breathing, only to wake at one or two in the morning, cold and disoriented, still in her clothes. More often than she would have liked to admit, the journey across the hall to her own room seemed too arduous, so she just wriggled under the covers, snuggling up against Maggie’s warm little body.
“I used to get so furious with your grandmother,” she continued. “I thought she was too nice. She always smiled and pretended everything was fine, even when it wasn’t. It was like she lived in a world where it was illegal to complain. Sometimes I would get frustrated and say really terrible things to her. And you know what she used to tell me?”
Maggie didn’t reply, but Ruth responded as if she had.
“She told me I’d miss her when she was gone.”
Ruth stopped the story there, leaving out the part that suddenly seemed most important, and sad beyond words, which was that she used to swear to herself, No, I won’t. I won’t miss you a bit. At least she’d never said it out loud, not that she could remember, anyway. But she wished she could apologize to her mother for even thinking it.
“Mom?” Maggie said, after a minute. She sounded wide-awake.
“Yes, honey?”
“Coach Tim called after school. He said he needs to talk to you.”
“After school?” Ruth was puzzled. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I don’t know.” Maggie let a couple of seconds go by. “I just didn’t want you to be mean to him.”
AFTER SEALING the letter in a stamped envelope, Ruth still had fifteen minutes to spare before Coach Tim was scheduled to arrive, most of which she spent trying to resist a powerful urge to change her clothes and put on some makeup. She’d gone for a run that afternoon—three laps around Stonewood Lake, four and a half miles total—and was wearing her usual postshower ensemble of Adidas warm-up pants and a hooded cotton sweatshirt, not dowdy, exactly, but hardly flattering.
It would have been easy enough to run upstairs and throw on a pair of jeans and a casual shirt—the fitted maroon top with the scoop neck always looked good—maybe a bit of lipstick and a quick touch-up around the eyes, but she was disgusted with herself for even considering it. This wasn’t a date, it was a negotiation—possibly even a confrontation—with a man who had abused his authority and driven a wedge between herself and her daughters, a man about whom she had just composed an impassioned letter of grievance. What did she care if a man like that thought she was pretty, or at least reasonably attractive for her age?
And yet, she couldn’t help being aware of a strange undercurrent of schoolgirlish anticipation about his visit, the sense of being on the verge of something unusual and exciting. After all, when was the last time a good-looking man—at least a good-looking man who wasn’t gay or to whom she hadn’t once been unhappily married—had shown up on her doorstep, even on an errand as unpromising as this one? What harm would it do to brush her hair and hide the shadows under her eyes?
My God, she thought. I’m pathetic. I’d probably put on a skirt and heels for Dick Cheney.
If there was one thing that rankled about being a woman, it was this conviction, drummed into your head before you had a chance to defend yourself, that it was your job—your obligation—to always look your best, even in situations when you had no logical reason to care. The truly courageous feminists, Ruth had long believed, weren’t the sexy ones like Gloria Steinem, but those combative women like Andrea Dworkin who made a point of embracing a kind of defiant frumpiness—ugliness, even—as an announcement to the world that they were through living as ornaments, subordinating their own comfort and selfhood to the remorseless demands of the male gaze.
Jesus, she thought. It’s just a pair of jeans.
Finally, with only a couple of minutes to spare, Ruth gave in and hurried upstairs, as she’d known she would all along. She compromised to the extent that she rejected the maroon top—it really was the kind of thing you’d wear on a date—in favor of a stretchy gray T-shirt beneath a cropped black cardigan. She dabbed on a tiny bit of eye makeup, but skipped the lipstick.
It’s not for him, she reminded herself. It’s for me. So I won’t be at a disadvantage.
LATER, AFTER Tim left, she realized—though maybe it was less a matter of realizing than of being able to admit it to herself—that she’d secretly been hoping to find herself enmeshed in one of those corny “opposites attract” narratives that were so appealing to writers of sitcoms and romantic comedies. The formula was simple: you brought together a man and a woman who held wildly divergent worldviews—an idealistic doctor, say, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer—and waited for them to realize that their witty intellectual combat was nothing but a smoke screen, kicked up to conceal the inconvenient and increasingly obvious fact that they were desperate to hop into bed with each other.
Luckily for Ruth, this ridiculous fantasy crumbled immediately upon contact with reality. The visibly uncomfortable man who stepped into her house a few minutes after eight was barely recognizable to her as the scruffy hipster coach she’d been so taken with on Saturday morning, and completely unsuitable for even the most outlandish romantic scenario. In his Dockers and button-down Oxford shirt, his long dark hair strangled into an ill-considered ponytail with the aid of some kind of gel or pomade, this cleaned-up version of Tim Mason looked shifty and a little too slick for his own good, like a small-time criminal whose lawyer had instructed him to wear something nice for the judge.
“Mrs. Ramsey,” he said, without looking her in the eye or offering his hand. “I won’t take up a lot of your time.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she told him, withholding the ritual invitation to call her by her first name. “I really think we need to talk. Can I get you some coffee or tea or something?”
She could see that his first impulse was to refuse, but for some reason he checked it.
“Coffee’s okay, if it’s no trouble.”
“Decaf?”
“Regular, if you got it.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “If I drink coffee at night, I’m wide-awake at three in the morning, ready to start the day.”
He stared at her with such a pained expression that she had to stop and review the conversation to make sure she hadn’t said anything inadvertently offensive. But then it occurred to her that it didn’t really matter what she said. It was just being here, under these circumstances, that was making him look so miserable.
He hates me, she thought, but instead of being offended, she just felt sorry for him, which was probably a bad idea, given the hard line she was determined to take on the prayer issue.
COACH TIM followed her into the kitchen and took a seat at the table while Ruth attended to the coffee. Unfazed by the buzz saw shriek of the grinder, he picked up the Bible that Eliza had ostentatiously left propped against the wire basket full of apples, kiwis, and grapefruits—if he was surprised to see it there he didn’t let on—and began flipping through the pages.
“That’s my older daughter’s,” Ruth explained, banging the heel of her palm against the bottom of the grinder. “She’s very interested in Jesus these days.”
“Good for her.” He spoke distractedly, his eyes fixed on the book, expressing no more enthusiasm than if she’d told him Eliza was taking Spanish or had signed up for swimming lessons. After a moment, though, he looked up. “Wish I could say the same about my own kid.”
“She doesn’t go to church with you?”
“Abby lives with her mother,” he said. “My ex-wife. I don’t have a whole lot of say in how she’s brought up.”
“That must be hard,” Ruth said, glancing over her shoulder as she extracted a box of Lemon Zinger from the high shelf of the cabinet. “I’m divorced, too. You know Frank, right? Maggie’s father?”
“Oh, I know Frank,” Tim assured her. “I probably get ten e-mails a week from him. He’s very generous with the coaching advice. And the, uh, constructive criticism.”
Ruth felt strangely embarrassed, as if Frank were still her husband.
“Just ignore him,” she said. “He can’t help himself.”
“He’s not an easy guy to ignore.”
“Sometimes you have to insult him,” Ruth explained. “That was my preferred method.”
“I’ll have to give that a try.” Tim put down the Bible and turned his attention to the coffeemaker, which was hissing and groaning on the countertop as if it were about to explode, but not producing a whole lot of coffee. “Something wrong with that thing?”
“I don’t know. It used to work a lot faster.”
“You probably just need to clean it. You’re supposed to run vinegar through the machine a couple times a year.”
“I used to do that,” she said, though what she really meant was that Frank had. “I never really noticed a difference afterward, except the house smelled bad.”
“Minerals collect inside,” he said, making a fist to illustrate this process. She noticed again how big Tim’s hands were, at least compared to the rest of his body. “It gets all gunked up in there, like plaque on your arteries.”
The teakettle whistled meekly—there was something wrong with the hinged cap on the spout—as if reluctant to interrupt the conversation. Snatching it off the stove, Ruth set it down on a trivet bearing the inscription, Come live with me, and be my love. Both the kettle and the trivet had been wedding presents, and should have been replaced a long time ago.
“You gotta use the white vinegar,” he added. “My ex-wife used balsamic once, and it was a disaster.”
Ruth laughed as she poured boiling water into her mug.
“You’re pretty big on the household hints, aren’t you?”
He eyed her warily, uncertain if he were being mocked.
“What do you mean?”
“At the game on Saturday you were bragging about how you put lemon juice on apple slices.”
“I wouldn’t call it bragging,” he said, sounding slightly miffed. “It’s just, the kids won’t eat the apples if they’re brown.”
“Whatever. You seemed pretty proud of yourself.” Ruth jerked the tea bag up and down, not really sure if this sped the steeping process. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Coach Tim had a theory on this as well. “Maybe you should get yourself a newspaper column. Call it Tips from Tim. Like Hints from Heloise. Except you’re a guy, which might make it more interesting to your readers since it’s mostly women who care about that stuff.”
He looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand what she was up to, blathering away about whatever popped into her head, as if this were just a friendly social visit. Ruth couldn’t help wondering the same thing herself, and the only thought she could muster in her own defense was that it was hard to maintain an attitude of frosty politeness toward someone who was sitting in your kitchen, offering helpful advice about your appliances. Not to mention the subtle hangdog vibe Tim was giving off, which was making her feel weirdly self-conscious, like it was her responsibility to cheer him up.
She brought him his coffee and sat down at the other end of the table, letting a few seconds go by as a signal that it was time to get down to business. But instead of clearing her throat and telling him how concerned she was about what had happened after the game, she took a sip of tea, and said, “So, did you play soccer in high school?”
“Not seriously. Where I grew up, the soccer players were mainly these Italian guys fresh off the boat, Angelo and Mario and Guido, and the Schiavoni brothers. The American guys played football.”
“You don’t look like a football player.”
“I wasn’t. I devoted my teenage years to getting stoned and learning to play ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”
“Hey,” she said. “I think we knew each other.”
“Then I apologize,” he replied. “Because I probably wasn’t very nice to you.”
Ruth laughed, but she found herself mildly annoyed by the condescension implicit in the joke, the assumption that he’d been a little too cool for the kind of girl she’d been back in the day. Of course, what really bothered her was the knowledge that he was probably right.
“What, were you some kind of big ladies’ man in high school?”
He bobbed his head noncommitally, as if to say that this was a complicated question deserving of a thoughtful answer.
“Not at first. I was a skinny kid with a bad complexion. But I joined a band my junior year. We called ourselves Circuit Breaker for a while. Then we changed it to Balin Son of Dwalin.”
“That’s a terrible name.”
“We liked it,” he said. “It was some kind of Tolkien thing.”
“Balin Son of Dwalin? Why not Big Buncha Dorks?”
“Go ahead and mock,” he said. “But we were pretty popular. Lots of female fans.”
“Groupies?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“In high school?”
“You must be about my age,” he said.
“I’m forty-one.”
She expected him to be startled by this revelation, but he just nodded, as if he’d figured as much.
“I’m a year older,” he said. “So you remember what it was like. Sometimes I think about what kids were doing back then, and I can’t believe it really happened. I mean, I’d hate to think of my daughter growing up the way I did.”
“It’s a different world,” Ruth agreed. “But we didn’t turn out so bad.”
Chuckling, Tim reached for a kiwi.
“I don’t know about that,” he said, pondering the hairy fruit with skeptical concentration, as if he’d never encountered one before. “Some of us got pretty screwed up.”
Ruth wasn’t sure if he was taking a swipe at her or just making a general statement about their generation.
“You think it’s better now?”
“I do,” he said, returning the kiwi to the basket. “At least for me it is.”
“So what happened to the band? Did Balin Son of Dwalin survive high school?”
“Not really.” He shook his head, as if he hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time. “The singer and the lead guitarist had a fight over a girl. It was like a bad divorce. The guitar player got custody of the drummer, and the singer got me. Jerry and I stayed together for eight years, played in five different bands. We even put out a couple of records in our early twenties.”
“Anything I might have heard?”
“I doubt it. We called ourselves The Freebies. There were a couple college stations that played our stuff.”
“You must’ve been pretty serious.”
“Jerry more than me,” he said. “He really wanted it, and he had the talent. He kept changing and trying new things, and I kinda went along for the ride.”
“So what happened to him? Did he make it big?”
Tim looked at the table.
“He died when we were twenty-five. Choked on his own vomit. Just like Jimi Hendrix, that’s what we used to tell ourselves. As if that made it okay.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Coulda been me,” he said. “I was just as messed up as he was.”
Tim fell into a momentary funk, rubbing his index finger in a circle on the tabletop, as if trying to erase a stain, and Ruth couldn’t help feeling like she was getting a glimpse of the beaten-down guy Matt Friedman had described, the recovering addict who couldn’t even be trusted to drive his daughter home from school.
“But you changed,” she reminded him. “You turned your life around.”
He looked up in surprise.
“It took a long time. I wish I could have those years back.”
A funny thought occurred to Ruth.
“You know who you’re like?” she said. “Yusuf Islam.”
His response was a blank stare.
“You know, Cat Stevens. He became a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.”
“I’m not a Muslim.”
“I don’t mean that. I just mean you’re a musician who rejected the rock ‘n’ roll life and found happiness in religion.”
He made a face. “I wouldn’t exactly call Cat Stevens rock ‘n’ roll.”
“You know what I mean. Besides, ‘Peace Train’ was kinda a rock song, right?”
“I guess, but—”
Before he could finish the thought, Tim’s face broke into a peculiar grin, so radiant and unexpected that Ruth felt momentarily cheated when she realized it hadn’t been meant for her, but for Maggie, who had materialized behind her in the doorway, dressed in pajama bottoms and her soccer jersey.
“Hi, Monkey,” he told her.
“Hello, Turnip.”
“Honey,” Ruth said wearily. She’d specifically asked her daughters to stay upstairs while she and Coach Tim had their conference.
Maggie shrugged. “I just wanted to say hi.”
“Well, you said it.”
Maggie bowed to her mother, hands pressed to her forehead in prayer position.
“Yes, master.” She straightened up and flashed a conspiratorial grin at the coach. “Practice on Thursday?”
“You bet.”
“Regular time?”
“Yup.” Tim waved good-bye. “Now get outta here. Your mom and I need to talk.”
THE ATMOSPHERE seemed to thicken around them after Maggie’s departure. Ruth sighed, and Tim nodded, acknowledging the suddenly obvious fact that the time for small talk had expired.
“So,” he said. “I guess we have a problem.”
Ruth had spent the last three days preparing for this exact moment—nursing her grievance against Coach Tim, sharing it with other parents, setting it down on paper—but now that she had a chance to say it to his face, she didn’t quite know where or how to begin. It seemed beside the point somehow, as if the man in her kitchen bore only a tangential relationship to the man she’d been complaining about.
“I’m a little curious,” she said. “Why do you call her ‘Monkey’?”
“It’s just a nickname. She likes to climb trees, and Monkey sounds a little like Maggie. I do it for all the kids. Nadima’s Nomad, and Candace is Caddyshack.”
“I prefer ‘Coach Turnip,’ but yeah. And I got off easy. They call John Roper ‘Mullet.’”
“Ouch.”
The coach grinned. “Candace showed some of the girls his high-school yearbook. Class of ’85. Apparently he had an unfortunate haircut.”
“Girls that age can be a little mean.”
“Nah, it’s just fooling around. They’re good kids. Maggie especially. You’re lucky to have a daughter like that. You’ve done a great job raising her.”
Ruth felt a surge of gratitude that took her by surprise. She tried hard to be a good parent, but she didn’t often get credit for it. It was hard enough just being divorced; to be a divorced Sex Education teacher who’d been publicly accused of immorality made you a bad mother by definition, or at least it had begun to seem that way.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“Look,” he said. “I know you’re upset about Saturday, and I don’t really blame you.”
“You don’t?”
“Believe me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone, or make you feel uncomfortable. I have no interest in shoving my faith down anyone’s throat.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
“I got carried away,” he explained. “Abby got hurt, and the game was so amazing, I just kind of lost track of where I was. You have to understand, for me praying is like breathing. It’s just something I do.”
He sounded sincere, but Ruth didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily.
“That’s fine, as long as you realize that not everybody believes the same thing as you. You’ve got Jewish girls on that team, a Muslim—”
“I’m well aware of that. A couple of the other parents have already spoken to me about it.” He paused unhappily. “They said you were maybe planning to write to the Soccer Association?”
“I was thinking about it,” Ruth admitted.
“I hope you won’t,” he said. “I made a mistake, and I apologize. I promise it’s not gonna happen again.”
“You mean that?”
His eyes made a silent plea for mercy.
“I love coaching this team,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if they took it away from me.”
ALL IN all, Ruth thought as she slipped her nightgown over her head, the meeting had gone surprisingly well. Coach Tim had turned out to be so much more reasonable than she’d expected, a lot less rigid and confrontational than the other Tabernacle people she’d tangled with in the past.
It must have been his background that set him apart, the hard living he’d done before he found Jesus. She had known a couple of other recovering addicts and AA types over the years, and to one degree or another, they’d all displayed the same vulnerability and melancholy self-awareness as he had, the same refusal to judge other people or condemn them for their shortcomings. It made perfect sense to her that people who’d hit bottom would be attracted to Christianity and find solace in its message of forgiveness, the idea that it didn’t matter how badly you’d screwed up your life, there was always another chance to start over and get things right. Where she always came up short was in figuring out how that part of the religion coexisted with the sanctimonious and intolerant part, the angry, Goody Two-Shoes Christianity that was always gleefully damning people to hell and turning its believers into hypocrites. All she could figure was that Coach Tim just ignored that stuff and took what he needed to keep himself going.
She fell into bed feeling happier than she’d been in a long time. It was just such a relief to know that she wasn’t going to have to gird herself for a bitter public fight, expose herself once again to the anger and ridicule of her neighbors, or get maneuvered into a corner where she had no choice except to betray her principles or break her daughter’s heart. She hadn’t fully understood how heavily the burden had been weighing on her until it had been removed.
On top of the relief, though, she felt a sense of giddy possibility that had nothing to do with Coach Tim or her kids or the normal parameters of her life, and everything to do with the strange thing that had happened just a few minutes after he’d left. She was in her study, ripping up the letter she’d written to the Soccer Association, when the phone rang. Her first thought was that it must be Tim, calling from his car with something he’d forgotten to tell her—the image was startlingly clear in her mind, for some reason—but the voice on the other end belonged to a different man.
“Ruth?” he said. “Is that Ruth?”
“This is Ruth,” she said. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t I sound familiar?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You do. Your voice is exactly the same.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” she said. “Because if it is, I really don’t have the time.”
“It’s Paul,” he said. “Paul Caruso. Your old next-door neighbor.”
“Paul? Oh my God.”
“So Ruth,” he said. “I heard you were looking for me.”
SHE WOKE the next morning with her high spirits intact, amazed by the sudden change in her fortunes. It was weird to remember how bad she’d felt just twelve hours ago—besieged and heavyhearted and alone—and how little it had taken to turn things around.
She and Paul hadn’t talked for long. He explained that an old buddy of his, Artie Lembach, a trombone player in the marching band, had seen Ruth’s posting on the Classmates.com bulletin board and passed along the information.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s gotta be what, twenty-something years?”
Embarrassed, Ruth started muttering untruthfully about how she’d decided to reconnect with lots of different people from her past, as if to suggest that he was no one special, just a small part of a much bigger group.
“I was so excited to get Artie’s e-mail,” he said, lowering his voice to an intimate register. “Because, Ruth, I think about you a lot.”
“Really?” She felt a warm surge of blood moving into her face and was glad he wasn’t there to see it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, sometimes you don’t realize it when things are happening, but then when you look back …”
He let the statement hang there, and she didn’t ask him to complete it. Instead she changed the subject to him, asking where he lived, and what he did for work, and whether he was married. He said he’d been in Connecticut for the past ten years, working in the hightech field. As for his marriage, it was a long, complicated story, one he’d be happy to tell her if she was free for dinner over the coming weekend.
“This weekend?” she said. “You mean three days from now?”
“I’m in the city on business,” he said. “I can easily make it out to where you live. How about Friday night?”
“Okay,” she said. “Sure. I don’t have any plans I can’t change.”
“Excellent,” he said. “It’ll be great to catch up with you.”
And just like that she had a date, her first in a long, long time. And not a blind date, either, but something better, a date with a man she already knew, a boy she’d grown up with, and, more to the point, her first lover. She’d read a couple of articles recently about couples reconnecting at high-school reunions, rekindling romances from their youth. The thing everybody mentioned was how strong those old bonds remained despite the passage of time, how meaningful a shared history could be. Over and over, people talked about picking up right where they’d left off, not missing a beat, as if the intervening decades had never happened.
Sensing that she was getting carried away, she did her best to put the brakes on. After all, she hadn’t seen Paul Caruso in a long time. For all she knew, he was bald and weighed 350 pounds. Plus, she realized, he had never really answered her simple question about whether he was married, which struck her as a bit worrisome. On the other hand, people who were happily married didn’t tell you it was “a long, complicated story,” so she felt fairly optimistic on that count.
Ruth, I think about you a lot.
The whole thing was just so sappy and romantic and out of the blue, she couldn’t wait to tell Randall all about it. She got to school a few minutes early, and was rushing down the hall with a latte in each hand, whistling the chorus of “Peace Train”—the song had been stuck in her head all morning—when Joe Venuti popped out of his office and planted himself directly in her path. He looked the way he always did in the morning, like he’d been up half the night sweating on the toilet.
“Excuse me,” she said, trying to veer past him on the right.
“Ruth,” he said, blocking her way with an outstretched arm, “I need to talk to you.”
“Can it wait?” she said, gesturing at him with the coffee cups. “My hands are full.”
“Not really,” he said.
On a normal day, Ruth would’ve told him that she was busy just then and would be happy to talk to him during one of her free periods, but she was feeling a little too cheerful to make a fuss, so she sighed and followed him into his office. If she’d been thinking a little more clearly, she wouldn’t have been so surprised to find JoAnn Marlow and Superintendent Farmer inside, scowling at her and shaking their heads, and she certainly wouldn’t have blurted out, “Hey, guys!” in such an excited, high-pitched tone of voice, as if she were thrilled to death to have been invited to this particular party.