Turn Signal (19 page)

“Hey,” he said, putting his arm around him as they walked off the court, “no offense. I just wanted to get the bug out of Coach's ass.”

With everything that happened after that, Jack has only now recovered this scrap of his past. It almost overwhelms him, thinking about how good they all had it, up to that point.

He wants to take Shannon home and spend the rest of the night telling her how easy it is to screw your life up.

Shannon is a natural. He can see that. She has her mother's dark good looks, but she has some of him, too. She wants the ball, the way he wanted it in football if not basketball. She plays hard, unconcerned with anything outside the court. She already has that rarest of athletic gifts: the ability to perform better when the heat's on.

Some of the girls really aren't that good, and Jack thinks his daughter would probably shine brighter with some better shooters and passers around her. She wants to go to a basketball camp in Charlottesville this summer, and Jack thinks she should.

Shannon scores six of her team's 10 first-quarter points, and the lead is 15-8 midway through the second period when Gina finally slips in beside Jack.

“Sorry,” she says. “It seems like everybody in town picked today to have so-called medical emergencies, none of which seemed like emergencies to me, by the way. But what do I know?”

Jack fills her in on what's happened so far. He's pleased to see that Shannon doesn't look at them, doesn't even know when her mother came in. She wants them to be there, he's sure, but that's secondary.

He and Gina talk more when they're watching Shannon play basketball than they do in their own bed. Maybe it's because they're distracted by their common focus. She doesn't emit the irritation and panic he sometimes feels when they're home alone.

The bedroom is the worst. If she's looked at the manuscript, he can't tell it.

It's better, usually, for them both to just turn their opposite ways and go to sleep. He wants Gina, but he wants her to want him. Just one more reason, he thinks, to get everything straight about
Lovelady
. He's thought about how it'll be then, when it's all in the bag, and he knows he'll be capable of forgiveness.

“How could you have been so sure?” she'll ask him with wonder in her voice, and he'll tell her what he's been telling her all along: He just was.

The game is really over by halftime, with Shannon's team leading 22-10, and late in the third quarter, with the hosts up by 20, she's replaced by one of the girls who usually only gets two minutes of garbage time at the end of the game. Shannon, who has more than half the team's points, gets a big hand from the crowd, and especially Jack and Gina, whom she finally acknowledges with a smile. She high-fives the other girls on the bench and sits in the space that has been cleared for her, beside the coach, a young woman in her first year of teaching.

“She's really something,” Gina says.

“She reminds me of you,” Jack tells her.

“Uh-uh. I couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Not that there were the opportunities she has now. No, she got that from you.”

“Call it a tie, then.”

Gina looks at him and smiles, the first time she's smiled at him in days, he realizes. But then she looks away, as if she's remembering everything their daughter's game made her forget.

They suffer through the sloppy last quarter and then wait for Shannon to change.

On the way home, Jack and Gina both tell her how well she played, which only embarrasses her.

“I just got lucky,” she says.

“No,” Jack tells her, “that was skill. We're the ones who got lucky. We got you.”

Shannon groans but reaches forward from the back seat and squeezes his shoulder.

Back home, the three of them go their separate ways. Jack stays up long enough to see the highlights of every NHL, NBA and college basketball game worth seeing, plus all the Super Bowl hype.

When he finally comes to bed, Gina is asleep, turned on her side away from him. In the moonlight, he sees the still-sharp angles of her face, listens to the slight whistle of her breathing, and he wishes it were all settled.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He still enjoys watching the sport at which he once excelled. He even goes to a Redskins game every year or so.

He sees Super Bowl Sunday, though, the same way a serious drinker sees New Year's Eve. Amateur night. They'll take up several rooms at Judge Edmonds' house, with the talk and smoke so intense that you can hardly hear or see the big-screen televisions posted throughout. Every so often, someone will ask which ones the Ravens are, or inquire as to why the Colts aren't in Baltimore any more, or remark with wonder on the girth of some player who's been seen on ESPN every 10 minutes for the past two weeks.

Still, there are obligations. Susan has given the party on and off over the years, according to her marital status at the time, and old friends are expected to attend. He tells Gina that he has been to some 20 of Susan's Super Bowl parties in five different houses, and he doesn't believe he's actually seen an entire game in all those years combined. Sometimes, when it's a match-up he particularly wants to see, he'll tape it and watch it later.

Football is merely the excuse for Susan's parties. More attention is paid to the commercials than the game, and Jack has to admit that the former often are more entertaining.

He and Gina arrive after 5, still more than an hour before the start of the game itself. They have to park two blocks away. Susan Edmonds has a lot of friends.

They go inside the front door, half-open and festooned with purple and blue colors approximating those of the competing teams. The house is so packed that they don't even make contact with the judge or Susan for the first 10 minutes. Soon, they are separated, and Jack is on his own. The judge's place is smaller than he remembers from their long-ago make-out parties, when they would wander through a seemingly endless succession of rooms filled with the antiques and bric-a-brac of six generations of Edmondses. Still, it is a substantial house.

Old friends and acquaintances appear out of every doorway.

A woman Jack dated his junior year in high school is sitting in a wing chair in the judge's study. She seems to be drunk already; she is trying to thump cocktail peanuts through a goalpost some man Jack's never met is making with his index fingers and thumbs.

He sees Milo Wainwright across the livingroom, talking to a man who he recognizes, finally, as Carly Hamner's father. Jack didn't know his former father-in-law was still alive, thought he still lived in Fredericksburg and wonders how he might avoid speaking with him.

Out of nowhere, around a blind corner, comes Ricky Coles, arm-in-arm with the judge who once tried to use his power to keep Speakeasy's schools segregated. Jack hasn't talked to his old high school classmate and teammate in at least two years. Ricky Coles has long graduated from having to help his own crews pick up garbage, although Jack knows half the town will always think of him that way, no matter how rich he gets. He and Judge Edmonds seem to have just shared an extremely funny joke.

“Well, Jack. There you are,” the judge says, his words slurred already. Jack remembers one such party when the judge threw up on a Persian rug early in the third quarter. “We'll have the whole damn blackfield, I mean, backfield, here soon.”

Jack supposes that Ricky Coles has had to deal with worse. Other than Cully Dane, Ricky probably is the wealthiest member of the class of '70, which Jack hopes makes the day-to-day indignities go down a little more smoothly. He lives in a one-street development just north of town where every affluent African-American in greater Speakeasy has built.

“So,” Jack says after the judge totters away, “where have you been? I mean, I don't see you much around here anymore. Missed you at the reunion.”

“Oh, I'm here,” Ricky Coles says. His smile reveals a couple of gold teeth. “But we spend a lot of time at our place down at the beach. We bought a cottage at Sandbridge abut five years ago, although I'm probably going to lose the damn thing.”

Ricky is getting divorced. He says it with a shrug, like it happens to everyone, which is just about the truth among their old classmates.

“It's funny,” he says. “Loretta and me, we made it through 18-hour workdays, raising four kids and hauling garbage. Hell, she used to drive the truck for me. We just couldn't handle prosperity.”

Just then, Susan Edmonds comes up behind Jack and grabs him on the butt. “Well, here you are,” she says when he jumps. “Two of my favorite men.”

And, the way she moves alongside Ricky and massages his shoulder with her right hand, he knows that Ricky is the special guest she mentioned when they talked on the phone the week before. He wonders about the judge, a man who may or may not have belonged to the Klan 40 years earlier. By now, though, Jack doesn't see very much that surprises him. The human race—or at least the part of it with which he is experienced—seems more adaptable to change than he might once have thought.

Jack wanders off again as Susan pulls Ricky into the half-bath. He watches the first quarter and half of the second while sitting on a beanbag chair that coexists uneasily with heirlooms in the upstairs parlor. He only sees approximately every third play, though, because the two younger women next to him—both married to siblings of people with whom he went to school—keep asking him questions. Over a half-hour period, he explains first downs, two-point conversions and illegal procedure. When a commercial featuring a car stuck in a tree distracts them, he pulls himself out of the chair and wanders off.

He encounters Mack McLamb and Cully Dane in the Florida room, which is serviced by one black-and-white 13-inch TV set but offers a respite from what Mack calls the annuals, who won't watch another football game until next January.

Mack and Cully aren't really watching much football either, Jack realizes. They're discussing the thing that seems to consume most of their competitive and creative juices—money.

They are talking low and conspiratorially when Jack comes in. They are friendly enough and appear happy to see him, but they seem reluctant to really draw him into the specifics of their conversation. Jack senses that his failure to rise above the level to which they all were born, or even to aspire to do so, makes his old friends uneasy sometimes, as if downward mobility might be catching. Mack might be in more desperate straits than Jack now, but he's already scrambling to stay in whatever game they're supposed to be playing. He's getting his real-estate license, Jack has heard, and might be going to work for Cully.

Jack is a different matter. He has lost most of what Mack calls his “net worth” through his friend's investments. He seems to be on the verge of losing the house Cully built and sold him due to an unwillingness to earn enough to make the monthly payments. Money sits in the little room with them like an invisible but embarrassing guest.

Jack doesn't speak about
Lovelady
these days unless spoken to. He senses that his oldest buddies also are a little disoriented by what Cully calls “this book business.” His besuited friends were more comfortable with him when he was a truck driver, he believes. He was something exotic to them, a maverick, a cowboy, in some ways the truest to their high school instincts and desires. He'd tried to do what seemed right, and when he screwed up, he took it like a man.

Now, though, with foreclosure closing in, conversations seem to have odd pauses they didn't used to have. No one talks about the Code now unless he's drunk, but Jack wonders if he hasn't somehow broken it, at least in the eyes of his old friends.

The three of them talk in general terms about the market and new homes, or at least Cully and Mack do. Jack mostly listens. They turn to the small TV whenever the noise level in the next room rises. They are able to see all they need to see by watching the replays.

Milo stumbles in at halftime, looking for a fresh beer. He seems surprised to see them all there, and it seems to Jack that he would just as soon have been in some other room, some other house.

Milo being Milo, though, he recovers quickly enough and has everyone howling over a joke involving killer bees and the Crucifixion. He has always served this purpose. He was always in charge of keeping everyone loose, sometimes paying the price for his shenanigans. They all understood that any pies in the face Milo incurred for being Milo were his dues to whatever club they all belonged to.

“So,” he says to Mack, grinning, “you think I can get in the wayback machine and dial up last September so I can sell my dot-com stocks?”

There is a short, uneasy silence. Even Milo can go too far sometimes. But then Mack shakes his head and laughs, and everyone else joins in.

“If you can, I'd like you to squeeze me in there, too, so I can keep making payments on that damn Lexus Sarah talked me into getting,” he says. “And if people don't stop dumping Cisco, you might see me on one of those little scooters like I bought my kid for Christmas.”

Milo puts his arm around Mack.

“You know what I've always told you: I don't care if I'm eating cat food, as long as everybody else in the world is eating cat food, too. It ain't all that bad, you know? Cats seem to like it.”

“Well,” Mack says, “you've probably got enough stock left to buy about a year's supply.”

“Meow.”

Cully turns to Jack, his tongue loosened now that the subject of money is more or less on the table.

“Well,” he says, “I guess we're all going to be in the market for some Kibbles N' Bits pretty soon. I hear you and the mortgage company have been going round and round.”

Jack shrugs.

“It's going to get better soon,” he says. He stares straight ahead, not wanting to say more.

“Yeah, Gina said the insurance money was coming any day now, for your momma's house,” Milo says. “That ought to buy you some time.”