Sometimes Mine by Martha Moody

Author:Martha Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

ON DECEMBER 12 , a Tuesday, Mick’s forward Tom Kennilworth was arrested for aggravated menacing at a party. He had been brandishing a gun, telling another attendee to stay away from the infamous English tutor/girlfriend. Kennilworth’s lawyer was angling for a deal with the prosecutors, but in the meantime Kennilworth was off the team. Mick and I had been over and over it on the phone. Privately, the Turkman State president had said the possibility and the timing of Kennilworth’s reinstatement would be up to Mick, but Mick should remember that the faculty was still upset about the English chair’s resignation (he had indeed moved to Iowa). It might be better, under the circumstances, to err on the severe side and keep Kennilworth off the team unless the charge was dropped to a misdemeanor. The president hinted at Kennilworth’s convenient whiteness. The Students of Color League, he said, would not be making a statement.

Mick was bursting with advice he had given his players.

“Whatever happened to a good old fistfight?”

“I tell them all the time, nothing good ever happens after ten P.M.!”

“No one cares if it’s not loaded.”

I could imagine Mick’s players rolling their eyes at these statements. Each one made Mick sound old.

When I got to our room Thursday Mick was by the window, slumped in a chair as if it had been pulled out from beneath him. He was wearing his nubbly brown sweater. His eyes rolled toward mine as he spoke. “I’m beat,” he said.

Immediately, I thought about the trouble with Kennilworth. The Warriors were 6 and 1. The partisan TV commentators were sounding almost giddy. “What are you talking about?” I said. “You can’t be your players’ babysitter. You can’t be their conscience, sit on their shoulders like Tinker Bell all night long.”

He didn’t smile. He looked to his right, away from me, and worried his upper lip with his lower teeth. “I don’t feel like much of a coach.”

“You’ve got Eluard.”

“Eluard’s a kid.”

Kid. The word itself seemed to burst with the plosive truth of it. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I have Frederick, sure,” Mick said, “but Frederick can’t do everything.”

I traced the stitching in the bedspread with my finger. “And Chiswick,” I said, “and Morgan, and your freshmen.”

Mick said, “I don’t know if I have the energy for this.”

I looked at him, thinking of Mick’s life that was secret from his team, the cancer and the antitestosterone shots and the expectation of surgery. I wished that I’d had cancer myself, because I couldn’t really know what Mick was experiencing. Sometimes I thought the same thing with my patients. What did chest pain really feel like? What sensation let people know that they were about to die? You could see, sometimes, the understanding fill their faces, but its source was as mysterious as starlight. It was possible Mick couldn’t be the coach he was the year before. “Are you tired?” I asked, and it hit me that “tired” was a word as rough and rudimentary as a caveman’s hammer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.