“Candace!” Frank had both hands above his head and was waving them like one of those guys with the sticks on the airport tarmac. “You’re sweeper! Get back!”
Candace Roper, a very pretty girl whom Maggie had known since preschool, had drifted up near midfield, apparently unaware that one of her opponents—they wore shiny yellow jerseys with the word
Comets
emblazoned on the front—had slipped behind her and would have a clear path to the goal if her teammates could get her the ball. Candace glanced over her shoulder, clapped one hand over her mouth in guilty surprise, then scampered back into position.
“Jesus,” he said. “We’re sleepwalking out here.”
“Where’s Eliza?”
Frank jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Ruth turned to see her older daughter sitting at a picnic table beneath a fiery red maple that had already lost half its leaves. She was engrossed in a magazine, most likely a back issue of
O
or
Martha Stewart Living
that Frank’s lady friend, Meredith, made a point of passing along, knowing how much she enjoyed them. Ruth waved and called out a greeting, but Eliza didn’t notice—probably too busy boning up on recipes for low-fat crème brulée or color schemes to beat those stubborn winter blahs. Ruth watched her for a moment, struggling against the combination of
exasperation and pity that Eliza so often provoked in her. She was fourteen going on forty, for God’s sake. Wasn’t it past time for a little adolescent rebellion?
“Come on, ref!” Frank slapped his thigh. “Open your eyes! She’s throwing elbows!”
“Easy,” Ruth warned him. Both her daughters had recently complained about their father’s obnoxious behavior at soccer games. “You’re not allowed to harass the referees.”
“Number fourteen’s going to hurt someone!” he continued, as if Ruth hadn’t said a word. “She’s playing like a thug!”
He yelled this loudly enough that the thug in question—a big, rosy-cheeked girl who wore her blond hair in Valkyrie-style braids—turned and gaped at him, her arms spread wide in a gesture of puzzled innocence.
“That’s right, honey!” Frank jabbed an accusatory finger. “I’m watching you!”
“Enough,” Ruth said. “She’s just a kid.”
She spoke more forcefully this time, and Frank actually listened. His expression turned sheepish, and he shook his head, as if trying to clear away the cobwebs.
“Sorry. Sometimes I get a little worked up.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s crazy. These Bridgeton girls are a bunch of bruisers. What’re they putting in the milk over there?”
It was true, Ruth realized. The Comets were unusually big for their age—aside from one nimble Asian girl, they looked like a tribe of Viking warrior maidens—and they played a tough physical game, lots of pushing and shoving and body-checking. But you had to give Maggie’s team credit; what they lacked in size they made up for in quickness and skill, frequently beating their opponents to the ball and moving upfield in a rat-a-tat-tat series of pinpoint passes. If not for
several spectacular but risky saves by the Comets’ goalie, who had no qualms about coming way out of the net to challenge the shooter, Stonewood Heights would have held a commanding lead.
Ruth was especially impressed by her daughter’s performance. Maggie had always been a natural athlete, but in the past she’d seemed oddly tentative in the field, too polite for her own good. If a girl on the other team wanted the ball badly enough, Maggie would just stand aside and let her have it. Today, though, she was playing with a competitive fire that took Ruth by surprise, a beady-eyed intensity uncannily similar to her father’s. She was all over the field, leading the breaks on offense, helping out on defense, fighting fiercely for control of the ball. She talked a lot during the game, barking incomprehensible instructions to her teammates—she wore a mouthpiece to protect her orthodontia—who seemed to understand exactly what she wanted from them.
“Wow,” said Ruth. “She’s come a long way.”
Frank nodded. “She’s been like this all season.”
UNTIL HER
divorce, Ruth had been a dutiful soccer mom, surrendering countless Saturday mornings to the dubious pleasures of watching little kids kick a ball up and down a grassy field, often in unpleasant weather. Now that Frank had the girls on Saturday, though, he’d become point man for weekend sporting events, a piece of parental turf Ruth had surrendered without complaint. God knew she spent enough time ferrying the girls back and forth to various lessons, practices, and friends’ houses during the rest of the week.
Besides, Frank enjoyed the games more than she did, especially once Maggie began qualifying for the stronger teams. In the past couple of years, he’d become her advisor, practice partner, and biggest fan; besides taking her to numerous high-school and college games, he supervised her development, enrolling her in instructional clinics and expensive summer programs (this past July, she’d spent two weeks at a
sleepaway camp run by former members of the USA Women’s National Team). Eliza—a lackluster athlete who’d quit sports as soon as she was given a choice—frequently complained about Frank’s favoritism toward her little sister, how all he could talk about was Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, soccer, soccer, soccer.
The irony of this was not lost on Ruth, who remembered quite vividly just how disappointed Frank had been to have a second daughter, rather than a son he could “play ball with.” He used this phrase all the time, as if male children existed for the sole purpose of playing ball with their fathers. He pressured Ruth to reconsider the two-child policy that had been in place since the beginning of their marriage, and changed his mind about going in for the vasectomy he’d agreed to get once they reached their quota.
In retrospect, Ruth could see that Maggie’s birth had marked the beginning of the end of their marriage. Slowly but inexorably, Frank began drifting away. Without consulting her, he signed up for graduate courses in Education, and threw himself into his studies with an energy that would have seemed admirable under other circumstances, earning his Master’s in Administration in only two years while holding down a full-time teaching job. Only his family life suffered, but Ruth understood that that was the whole point—he’d gone back to school precisely so he could get the hell out of that house full of females, away from the unendurable torment of not having a boy to play ball with.
But now he had a girl to play ball with, and everything was forgiven. Ruth didn’t begrudge him the pleasure, or his closeness to Maggie, not anymore. As far as she was concerned, he was welcome to stand out in the rain and scream at the refs to his heart’s content, as long as it allowed her to spend her Saturday mornings waking up slowly in a warm, quiet house. This privilege had seemed doubly luxurious during the dark days of last spring’s Sex Ed scandal, when running the gauntlet of concerned soccer parents ranked somewhere beneath oral surgery on Ruth’s list of Fun Things to Do.
Maggie had seemed perfectly fine with this parental division of labor until a couple of months ago, when she’d been chosen to play for the Stonewood Stars, the town’s elite traveling team for girls eleven and under. It was a high honor, and it had made her happier than Ruth had ever seen her. She slept in her team jersey—royal blue with a white star over the heart—and wore it every day in the yard, where she spent an hour dribbling between cones and kicking the ball against the side of the garage. And every Friday, just before Frank came to take her and Eliza for the weekend, Maggie would remind Ruth about the game on Saturday, and beg her to please come and watch her play, and this week Ruth had finally run out of excuses.
THE SCORE
was still tied at halftime, but the Stars seemed relaxed and silly on the sideline, as if they’d already won. Several players were fussing over a black Lab puppy with a purple bandana around its neck; three others were teaching a dance routine—it combined elements of the Macarena, the Swim, and the Bump—to their coaches, an incongruous pair who seemed genuinely interested in mastering the complicated sequence of moves. After a moment of uncertainty, Ruth recognized the bulkier of the two men as John Roper, Candace’s dad, though he’d lost most of his hair and put on about fifty pounds since she’d first seen him dropping off his daughter at Little Learners seven years ago. She didn’t know the other coach—he was younger, unexpectedly hippie-ish for Stonewood Heights, a small compact man whose dark hair could easily have been gathered into a respectable ponytail.
Oblivious to the festivities, Maggie sat on the grass nearby, caught up in conversation with her friend, Nadima, a Pakistani-American girl with huge brown eyes and disconcertingly skinny legs. Nadima was scowling thoughtfully, nodding the way you do when you want your friend to know that you understand what she’s saying and sympathize with her position, even if you don’t completely agree with her. Ruth approached cautiously, hoping she might be able to overhear a few
scraps of their conversation—they looked so endearingly serious, like grown women discussing a complicated relationship or a thorny problem at work—but her cover was blown by Hannah Friedman, who glanced up while scratching the puppy’s belly.
“Hi, Mrs. Maggie’s mother!” she called out, in a loud, stagey voice. Unlike most of the girls on the team—they were eleven and under, after all—Hannah had already begun to develop real breasts and an annoying adolescent personality to go along with them.
“Hi,” Ruth replied, uncomfortably aware of several faces turning in her direction at once. “You girls are doing great.”
With a startled cry of delight, Maggie scrambled to her feet and rushed over to her mother, greeting her with a hug several orders of magnitude stronger than usual. Ruth squeezed back, feeling the clamminess of her daughter’s skin through the mesh weave of her jersey.
“Mommy!” Maggie’s voice sounded as theatrical as Hannah’s, but her eyes were full of honest emotion. “Thanks for coming.”
“Happy to be here,” Ruth told her. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
Maggie stepped back from the embrace, tugging at her uniform to get everything back in order. Ruth was unexpectedly moved by the sight of her, as if she were being offered a glimpse of two Maggies at once: the little girl she still was—a dirty-kneed tomboy straight out of Norman Rockwell—and the happy, confident young woman she was already on her way to becoming.
“Did you see when I scored?” she asked, kicking an imaginary ball. “The goalie dove, but it went right through her hands.”
Ruth frowned an apology. “I’m sorry, honey, I got here a little late. But I can’t believe how well you’re playing. You’re like the Energizer Bunny out there. I’m so proud of you.”
“You should be,” said a man’s voice. “She’s our spark plug.”
Ruth turned and saw the long-haired coach approaching with a friendly expression and a slight bounce in his step, probably a byproduct of the dance lesson.
“Can I interest you in an apple slice?” he asked, extending a Tupperware container. “The girls barely made a dent.”
Maggie took one, but Ruth declined.
“You sure?” The coach looked a bit put out by her refusal. “They’re nice and fresh. I squeeze lemon juice on ’em so they don’t turn brown.”
“Good thinking,” said Ruth. “Can’t go wrong with lemon juice.”
Nodding as if she’d uttered a profound truth, the coach shifted the container to his left hand and extended his right.
“Tim Mason. I’m the fearless leader of this motley crew.”
They shook. His hand was unusually large and a lot warmer than hers.
“I’m Ruth. Maggie’s mother.”
Keeping a firm grip on Ruth’s hand, Tim Mason studied her face, as if she were a good friend he hadn’t seen in a long time. Up close, he looked older than she’d expected, at least forty. Some gray hair. Crow’s-feet. A certain wariness around the eyes.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.
Ruth chuckled nervously, glad she’d taken the time to shower and put on makeup before leaving the house.
“Good things, I hope.”
Tim Mason didn’t answer, nor did he loosen his grip. He just kept staring at Ruth, the moment stretching out, the air smelling like apples.
“It means a lot to her that you’re here,” he said. “I know how much she’s missed you.”
When he released her hand, Ruth felt relieved and vaguely let down at the same time.
“Well, thanks for coaching,” she said. “I know it’s a big time commitment.”
“I love it,” he said, turning to Maggie and ruffling her hair. “We got a great buncha kids.”
* * *
RUTH WASN’T
sure why the brief encounter with Tim Mason had left her so flustered. It was nothing, really, just some innocuous small talk and a handshake that lasted a little too long with a guy she wasn’t even sure she found all that attractive (he was handsome enough, but she always found something vaguely off-putting about long hair on a middle-aged man). And yet here she was, all hot and bothered at the beginning of the second half, staring right through the players on the field to the coach on the far sideline—he was holding a clipboard, banging it against his leg like a tambourine—unable to think of anything but the pressure of his palm against hers and the way time seemed to stop when he looked into her eyes.
It was embarrassing, she understood that, pining for your daughter’s married soccer coach—oh, she’d checked for the ring; she always checked for the ring—possibly a new low. Not that it was her fault. This was the kind of thing that happened when you went without sex for too long. After a while, any scrap of male attention—a wry smile, a kind word, the faintest whiff of flirtation—was enough to create a full-blown disturbance in your love-starved brain. A guy says, “Excuse me” in the supermarket, well, he must be the One, your Last Chance for Happiness. Or barring that—because happiness was a pretty tall order—your last chance for a normally unhappy life where somebody at least touches you every week or two.
What made it more ridiculous was that it wasn’t even midmorning yet, and Tim Mason was already her second Last Chance of the day. During the night, she’d gotten so worked up thinking about Paul Caruso and their long-lost interlude of secret passion—Hadn’t they shared something special? Wasn’t it a pity that they’d fallen out of touch?—that she’d done something she already regretted. Dragging herself out of bed at three-thirty in the morning, she’d logged on to Classmates.com and posted a query on the Oakhurst Regional High
message board: “Does anyone know how to get in touch with Paul Caruso, class of ’80? He was a trumpet player who lived on Peony Road.”