Laura looked at the wall that separated her from her daughter’s room — the same wall Emily had painted a year ago, the wall Emily had cried against in March when she came home from school and didn’t want to say why — and she said the thing out loud for the first time in a decade.
“I got hurt my junior year,” she said. “Senior year I came back and lost the final at weight. Then the funding for the program got cut, and the assistant coach left, and there was no team for me to go back to by the time I was twenty-two. So I stopped. That’s the whole thing, Denise. Nothing dramatic. The money ran out first. Then the team did. Then my knees did. Then my name did.”
The line was quiet for a few seconds.
“You could have come back,” Denise said. “You could have coached.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Clearly.”
“I didn’t,” Laura said, more sharply than she meant. “I trained in a room where people cried. I trained in a room where someone’s mother would drive four hours to watch her daughter lose a consolation match on a mat in a rented gym in Ohio and then say, ‘It’s okay, you’re still in the will.’ I gave everything I had to that room for eight years. When it was done, I didn’t want to see another one.”
“You didn’t have to be away. You didn’t have to be gone.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Laura was quiet.
Then: “Because the woman who won states didn’t want to meet the woman who works the returns desk at the Dayton Public Library. And then I met Michael, and then Emily came, and I realized I liked being the second woman better. And that felt like it was the end of the story. And I just — didn’t want to have to keep explaining why the ending didn’t bother me.”
Denise let out a long breath.
“That’s the most Laura Bennett thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“Okay. It’s eleven past midnight and I’m two drinks into a bottle of pinot and I want you to hear something.” Denise’s voice got very careful. “I don’t care whether you ever step on a mat again. That’s yours. But there are twelve-year-old girls in my class right now who will spend their whole lives thinking they’re not the kind of people who do things, and if one of them ever got to see what you look like at the front of a room, it would matter in ways I can’t even describe to you.”
Laura closed her eyes.
“I’m not a coach.”
“Nobody’s asking you to be a coach.”
“Denise—”
“Nobody is asking you to be a coach, Laura.”
The line was quiet.
“Good night,” Laura said.
“Good night.”
She hung up and sat in the dark for a while, and at some point she realized Emily’s light had gone off, and somewhere after that she fell asleep with the TV on mute and her shoes still by the front door.
Tuesday morning was cold and gray and ordinary.
Laura opened the library at nine sharp, had a nine-fifteen with the branch manager about the summer reading display, worked the returns desk until noon, and ate half a sandwich in the staff room while the assistant director explained, for the third time that year, the difference between the new catalog system and the old catalog system.
None of it felt different.
That was the strange part. She’d braced for it to feel different.
At noon, a colleague — Ruth, sixty-one, wore a giant eyeglass chain, read three books a week, didn’t own a phone with a camera she knew how to use — leaned over the counter and said, “There’s a woman out front who says she’s here to see you.”
Laura looked up.
There was Denise, sitting on the concrete bench under the library’s flagpole, phone in hand, holding a coffee cup and looking extremely pleased with herself.
Laura walked outside.
“Denise.”
“I brought you a latte.”
“I don’t drink lattes.”
“Right.” Denise handed it over anyway. “It’s for me. I just wanted you to feel included.”
Laura sat down on the other end of the bench.
“How’d you find my schedule?”
“I called the reference desk on Monday and said I was your cousin.”
“Linda doesn’t buy that.”
“No, Linda does not,” Denise said. “Linda is the one who called you at nine-fifteen.”
Laura almost smiled. “What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Denise.”
“Nothing.” Denise sipped her coffee. “I’m old enough now that I can do things without a reason and just enjoy them. I spent eleven years building that gym‘s program and I’m allowed to sit on a bench in Dayton for one afternoon and look at a library.”
Laura looked at her.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I am immensely enjoying this.”
A jogger went by. The flag on the pole snapped in the wind. Two kids from the local high school walked past the bench arguing about a test.
Neither woman talked for a full minute, which for them was not nothing.
Then Denise said, without looking at her, “I’m not going to call you again. That’s not a threat. I just mean it. I’m not going to be the woman who calls.”
Laura gripped the warm cup.
“Okay.”
“But if you ever want to come back, you have a standing invitation, and it doesn’t have to be for anything. It doesn’t have to be to coach. It doesn’t have to be to compete. It can just be to sit in the back row.” Denise stood up. “The door’s open.”
She walked to her car and didn’t turn around.
Laura sat on the bench for another ten minutes with a latte she didn’t drink, watching the flag, and then she went back inside and clocked back in from lunch.
