Page 154 of Final Drive

“It’s tomorrow now.”

“Then you got two.”

I put my head on his arm, and I’m asleep before I can answer.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Reese

The first practice of the fall starts at ten past five, and the lake is steaming.

It does that in September, when the water is still holding on to summer and the air has already decided it’s fall. The dock lights disappear into the fog about twenty feet out, and every sound carries farther than it should. Oarlocks. Shoes on the aluminum ramp. Somebody swearing quietly because they forgot socks.

I’ve been here since twenty to five with a clipboard I don’t need, because some habits are apparently going to survive personal growth.

I’m not going to be in a boat this year. I got that in writing in June, two sentences from compliance confirming the competition bar and the dates it begins and ends. I read it once, put it in a folder, and haven’t looked at it since. I know exactly which folder.

There’s another letter in there from my father.

He came up for graduation in May and made it through the entire weekend without asking me for anything. That shouldn’t have been remarkable, but it was. Gray crossed the stage first because Lockwood is annoyingly early in the alphabet, and I stood up and screamed loud enough that the woman in front of me flinched. Jackson crossed with his hands at his sides and never looked at the crowd until he reached the far stairs. Then he turned, found me, and held my eyes for about a second and a half before somebody behind him nearly walked into him.

Tyler shook four hands and thanked every person by name. Eli pumped his fist during the name after his and got two hundred strangers to applaud some poor economics major from Greensboro. Quinton Whitmore graduated about forty minutes later. He has a court date in July for the assault, and Kowalski’s video is the state’s evidence. I heard his name, but I didn’t look.

Afterward, my father found me outside the stadium and handed me eleven pages of annotated bylaw with a cover memo that began This is my reading and it isn’t advice.

It was the most him thing he’d ever done.

His conclusion was that my competition bar couldn’t extend to a non-competitive development camp, the conference had never argued otherwise in eleven years of published findings, and if they tried it now, they would lose. Webb had already told me the same thing and I’d already accepted the invitation, but I let my father tell me anyway.

We spent almost an hour sitting at a table in the hotel lobby going through his notes. He didn’t tell me what I should do, and I didn’t spend the whole conversation trying to figure out what answer he wanted from me. When we were done, he put the pages back into the folder and asked whether I wanted coffee.

It was the first hour we’d ever spent together where neither of us was managing the other.

My mother filed for divorce on June ninth. I found out from an email his paralegal sent me with the subject line Courtesy notice, which told me more about my family than the actual filing did. I called my mother, then I called my father. Neither conversation was particularly good, but both of them were real, and apparently that’s where we are now.

At five past five, Wilder comes down the ramp carrying a travel mug and a laminated card in her jacket pocket that she thinks nobody has noticed.

I noticed it four minutes ago.

She was named interim head coach in May. Bennett told me himself at the reception after graduation, standing under a white tent with a lemonade in his hand that I never saw him drink.

“She’s decent,” he said. “She’s been my assistant six years. Never run a program on her own, though, and she’s going to need somebody who knows where everything is.”

“Is that a job offer or a warning?”

“Both. That’s how most of them come. I’ve told her you’ll be on the launch with her in the fall, and if she argues about it, she can call me.”

He’d already announced his retirement by then. Two donors and a member of the athletic board had made their position clear about a roster certification he signed knowing exactly what it would cost him, and Bennett had made his position clear right back. The eight of them took it harder than he did.

“You’re not going to be around?” I asked.

“I’m retiring, Callahan. I’m not dying. I’ve bought a boat.”

I pictured something with an outboard.

I was wrong.

There are nine novices on the dock this morning, and two of them are women. One is maybe five-one and standing with her arms folded so tightly across her chest she looks like she’s braced for impact.