Broken Field by Jeff Hull

Author:Jeff Hull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

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Caroline Jensen was not accustomed to her son showering on Saturday afternoons. It was piker’s work to get him interested in showering most mornings before school. So many things were happening with this boy, new and unusual behaviors that only served to clog up her sense of how their little family operated in the open, and that made her inexplicably sad. He should be growing into new social situations, and, as his mother, she should love that, feel excited for him, thrill in his expansion of the boundaries of himself. But she didn’t. Because now she was pretty sure she knew who the girl was.

Because she was not Mikie’s girl and would not be. Caroline knew how these things worked. Josie Frehse was a darling, a flower of the community. She belonged to Dumont, not to the characters on its fringes, not to half-breed boys that nobody knew. She was athletic and smart, not just polite but genuinely sweet. She would, in all likelihood, not stay here, because the pressure of belonging to the town would grow overbearing, and the bigger world was meant to draw girls like Josie from them, take her to huge anonymous cities, where excitement and opportunities were stacked and waiting for girls with a pretty smile and sharp mind and men who knew how to get what they wanted out of that.

If she did stay, Josie’s life was so bound and wound in the lives of Brunners and Martins—and Danreuthers and Woleslagels and Alderdices and Aarstads—that she could not, Caroline knew, break from the perfectly normal expectations created by the lives of those families to form an existence with someone like Mikie. Even if she wanted to, even if she was aware enough of the way life worked, the way love lurked and lurched and the way everybody’s high school romance eventually became dinner in front of the TV, even if Josie could step outside the inward-peering view of her teenaged world, and that of her friends, to lay eyes on an outsider like Mikie, Josie would never let them be happy, not in any enduring sense, not if they stayed here.

Caroline believed, too, that Mikie was in no way prepared to have a girl like Josie in his life. He fixated too sharply on things, extended too quickly and broadly his sense of ownership over those elements of his life over which he exerted some control. He would never be able to withstand the constant attention from outsiders that a girl like Josie generated wherever she went. He was, simply, too petty and jealous.

And lazy. Had she made him that way? She had to admit that sometimes when she thought about mopping the bathroom floor she thought, Why bother, I own socks. A defining characteristic of human behavior is imitating other humans. That’s how life got done. Her role modeling must have had something to do with it—another in the thousand cuts on her heart. Mikie would always feel that he didn’t measure up to a girl like Josie.

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