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  Maybe they all just had crushes on her. Dean got notes of condolence from her country club clients, most of them male, all of them recalling Nicole’s sunny nature. She always had a smile for me, one wrote. As if that meant anything, Dean thought bitterly. He hated how grief made him cynical. The world, for him, was now full of shortsighted, awkward idiots.

  Dean drove down Main Street, which was actually Route 40, an old road you could take west all the way to Utah. Or east to Baltimore. Dean could still remember learning the roads in the area, before everything became rote, before he met Nicole. There had been a time when he wasn’t even sure he’d stay very long in this particular corner of western Maryland, this tiny town tucked into the skinny arm of the state. Even though it was several hours from his father’s, it had seemed too close to where he’d grown up. Or maybe it had just seemed too small.

  Willowboro had never been prosperous or historically significant. Unlike other nearby towns, which had hosted Civil War battles and bunkered generals, Willowboro’s wartime role was to receive the bodies of the dead after the Battle of Antietam. This ghoulish task had taken place in the town’s livery stables, now the site of Weddle’s Nursing Home. The place gave Dean the creeps, but he had to visit it every October with his players. They would sing fight songs, and then Dean would give an overview of the season, with slides. It was called “A Night with the Coach,” and it was open to the whole town. The point was to get people to visit their infirm relatives, and it worked. Only Christmastime was busier.

  Dean turned right at the stoplight, driving past the four businesses that were the cornerstones of Willowboro’s social life: Asaro’s Pizza, Mike’s Video Time, Jenny’s Luncheonette, and the post office. Willow Park was tucked behind them, a small but quaint landscape with arched stone bridges, wooden pavilions, playgrounds, and, of course, willow trees—the grandchildren of the original trees, planted at the turn of the century. Before it was called Willowboro, the town was called Weddle, for its founding brothers. Dean thought that the dopey, sleepy-sounding “Weddle” was more fitting.

  Willowboro was bounded by two stoplights, and the town quickly thinned out on either side of them, the sidewalks petering out to accommodate the shoulders of wider roads. The Legion Hall, with its beige siding and sloping black roof, marked the edge of town. The football banquet, homecoming dance, and prom were held there every year. A half mile past the Legion Hall was Shank’s Produce, which was owned by Dean’s sort-of in-laws, Vivian and Walter Shank. The Shanks were the parents of Nicole’s first husband, Sam. Sam was buried ten miles from here, and after the Shanks moved away, they talked about getting him exhumed to a cemetery closer to them. Nicole thought they said things like this to get under her skin, but Dean thought they were just odd people. Stephanie liked them, though. And they were a good influence. He doubted she’d be going to a college like Swarthmore if they hadn’t pushed her to apply.

  The new Sheetz loomed ahead, bright red and yellow and simple in design, like something a kid would make with Legos. Dean stopped to fill up and then decided to go ahead and get some subs for dinner. It was the third time this week they’d had them, but it was the only thing the boys ate with any kind of appetite.

  He ran into Jimmy Smoot in the parking lot. He was with a girl Dean didn’t recognize and drinking a mouthwash-blue Freeze. His Adam’s apple bulged in his skinny, razor-burned neck and Dean thought that Garrett was wrong; this kid was not going to bulk up, not ever.

  “Hey, Coach,” Smoot said. “You tried these? It’s team colors.”

  “You should drink chocolate milk after practice. You need protein with your carbohydrates.”

  The girl crossed her arms. “Plus milk doesn’t give you Smurf lips.”

  “This is my sister, Missy,” Smoot said. “She’s going to be a freshman this year.”

  “Melissa,” the girl corrected. She was tall, like her brother, and had his rangy, broad-shouldered frame, which she accentuated by wearing oversized clothing: baggy jean shorts and a black T-shirt with the word HOLE on it. Layered over the T-shirt was a short-sleeved button-down, also oversized. The ensemble was intensely unflattering, but Dean recognized it as “alt style.” Stephanie had explained this term to him when she began to dress in the same way.

  “Are you an athlete, like your brother?” Dean asked her.

  “Missy’s going out for cheer squad,” Smoot said. “She can’t help herself, she just has to cheer me on—oh, shoot! Brain freeze!” He pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut, as if it was the worst pain he’d been in all day.

  “You drink those things way too fast.” Melissa turned to Dean. “I don’t play sports. I’m not coordinated.”

  “Maybe you just haven’t found the right sport.”

  “Maybe.” She nudged her brother. “Come on, you said you’d drop me off.”

  “Yeah, okay. See you Monday, Coach.”

  They waved guilelessly, completely absorbed by the logistics of their evening and the politics of siblinghood. They couldn’t see Nicole’s ghost, and for that, Dean was grateful. Both the best and worst thing about working with kids was that they had almost no ability to imagine life beyond the age of thirty.

  Dean turned on the radio for the ride home, searching for WINQ, the oldies station he and Stephanie used to sing along to together. Once, they had been buddies, best friends. She had tagged along to every game, and sometimes even to practices, doing homework in the stands. She’d been three years old when he met Nicole, the young widow no one wanted to date—or maybe, the young widow everyone wanted to date but was too cautious to approach. Dean had no idea of her previous marriage. And neither did Stephanie. As far as she was concerned, Dean was her new father. He’d never pictured himself marrying a woman who already had a child, but after their first week together, he was already sitting next to her in a church pew, unwilling to be apart from her for any part of the weekend. He’d never fallen for someone so quickly, and it was exhilarating. When he and Nicole broke the happy news to Stephanie, she seemed confused. It took them a while to realize that she thought they were already married. They let her pick the wedding cake, and she chose to have it decorated with pink and purple flowers. She wore a ruffled pink-and-purple dress to match.

  Now Stephanie was a different kind of girl altogether. She didn’t fantasize about wedding cakes and she never wore pink. She had gone to her junior prom wearing a torn slip and a man’s blazer, her date a boy who was not the least bit interested in girls—a fact that unsettled Dean, though he was careful not to say so. Nicole was even more disappointed than he was. Stephanie had started high school on her mother’s path: a cheerleader, a churchgoer, a smiling girl with smiling friends. But she started to change at the end of ninth grade. Nicole noticed before Dean did; it began with her clothes. Stephanie stopped shopping with Nicole at the mall and instead went to thrift stores to find items that no one else had. New clothes led to new friends; that was how it worked with girls, apparently. The new friends weren’t bad—they were smart and polite—but they mystified Dean with their dark clothes, their dark looks, and their dark under-the-breath jokes. What did they have to be depressed about? There had been a war going on when he was in high school. He blamed the culture, the muddy-sounding music. He would watch MTV with Stephanie to try to figure it out. One of the singers mumbled so badly that his lyrics were put up on the screen, like subtitles. This guy wore a dress onstage. When he killed himself, Stephanie wanted to take a day off from school. An absurd request, Dean thought, not even worth acknowledging, but somehow it turned into one of her and Nicole’s bigger fights. Sometimes it seemed as if the two of them could not even breathe the same air. Dean’s policy was impartiality. Nicole thought he was taking Stephanie’s side.

  Dean turned onto Iron Bridge Road, a lane divided into two sections: one old, narrow, and badly paved, and the other new, wide, and smooth as a highway. Dean lived in the old section, where the road’s namesake, a wrought-iron bridge, h
ad once stood. It was demolished in the late seventies and replaced by a plain cement structure with thick safety rails made of corrugated metal. Dean might have seen the original if he’d arrived in Willowboro just a couple of years earlier. He was genuinely sorry to have missed it. He’d had a fondness for Iron Bridge Road even before he lived on it. When he first moved to the area, he would take long bike rides in the country, lacking anything better to do. He remembered discovering the old part of Iron Bridge Road and thinking it would be a good place to build a house. He had been surprised, later, when Nicole agreed. Her family all lived close to one another on a farm on the outskirts of town. He assumed she would want to stay near them. But she had wanted a change.

  They ended up buying an old house and constructing an addition, instead of building something new. It was a simple two-story stone house, similar to others in the area, made from gray limestone and white mortar, with small square windows, evenly spaced and white-silled. The house’s selling point was a double-decker side porch, a real Maryland porch. In the summer, the boys liked to spend the night there, dragging their sleeping bags right up against the window. Mornings they’d come downstairs with imprints of the screen on their cheeks. Their real bedroom was downstairs, in the addition. Robbie had been planning to move into Stephanie’s upstairs bedroom after she left for college, but he hadn’t mentioned it recently. The boys had once complained about having to room together; now they seemed pleased to have a shared retreat, a reason never to be alone.

  Dean didn’t see Stephanie’s car in the driveway as he approached his house. He pulled in and saw that it wasn’t parked in the shady side yard, either.

  He cursed aloud. He had wanted to say good-bye before she left. He was becoming superstitious.

  There was no note in the kitchen and the boys weren’t in their usual spot, playing Nintendo in the living room. He checked their bedroom, but it was empty.

  He went to the back porch and called for them in the yard. “Robbie! Bry!” Then he went upstairs to check from his bedroom window, where he could see into the backyard and surrounding fields. His door was closed, which was odd, since he usually left it open. Nicole was the one who would close it—a signal to him to leave her alone. Had he left her alone too often? Not enough? It was impossible to know in retrospect.

  With Nicole so strongly in his mind, Dean wasn’t surprised, at first, to see her clothes strewn across the bed. It was a sight that had greeted him many mornings when he emerged from the shower. “What’s the weather like?” she would ask, as if their bathroom was a portal to the outdoors. He always said, “Partly cloudy.” One day he added, “with a chance of hail,” and that stuck for years, becoming funny for no good reason. At some point she stopped asking.

  He gazed at the clothes, the layers of patterns clashing with the bedspread. Florals, bright colors, lots of blue—to bring out her eyes. Stephanie must have been going through them to see if there was anything she wanted to bring with her to college. He’d told her to take a look in the closet before he gave them away, but he didn’t think she actually would. He began to pile the clothes into the hamper. They rustled and he thought he heard whispering. “Nic?” he said aloud, involuntarily. The room was silent. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t even try to talk to Nic in prayer. Still, he felt that someone was in the room with him.

  “Boys?” he called.

  He heard the whisper again. It was coming from underneath the bed.

  “Boys?” Dean knelt to lift the duster. There they were, squeezed together, their eyes bright like little animals’. “What are you doing?”

  “Playing hide-and-seek,” Robbie said.

  “Who are you hiding from?”

  “Steffy.”

  “She said to tell you she went to work,” Bry added.

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “She did so—ow!”

  Dean stood up. “Look, I don’t care, just get out from under there.”

  “Can you go down to the kitchen and we’ll meet you there?” Robbie asked.

  “No,” Dean said, sharply—too sharply, he knew, but he was losing patience. They were hiding something, obviously, something that was probably nothing, but in their kid brains it was worth lying about.

  “Please,” Robbie said.

  “Hurry up,” Dean said. “I’m waiting.”

  There was no movement, and Dean thought he was going to have to lift the box spring off the frame, but then Bry began to wriggle out on his stomach. At first, Dean noticed nothing unusual about his eight-year-old son’s appearance. His dark-blond hair was its usual cowlicked mess, his cheeks flushed, his fingernails dirty. It wasn’t until Bry’s torso was completely exposed that Dean realized his son was wearing a woman’s white blouse. Nicole’s blouse. He was wearing a skirt, too. It was green with tiny yellow polka dots. The skirt, which had been knee-length on Nicole, hit Bryan midcalf. Dust bunnies clung to the hem.

  “Daddy—” Bry began.

  Dean held up his hand. “Robbie! Did you put your brother up to this?”

  “Why do you always blame me?”

  “Get out from under there right now.”

  Robbie rolled out at the foot of the bed. He was wearing one of Nicole’s dresses, a pale blue one with buttons down the front. On his feet he wore a pair of her heels, with bows. Everything feminine about his older son—his shaggy overgrown hair, his long-lashed and expressive eyes, his slender neck and arms—was brought into relief.

  “Steffy was trying things on—” Bry said.

  “Never mind! I don’t want to hear it. Just get back in your regular clothes.”

  Bry began to cry. He was always the first to do so; sometimes he seemed to be the family’s designated mourner, tearing up whenever his mother’s name was mentioned by some sympathy-wishing stranger. “I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his nose with Nicole’s ruffled cuff.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Dean said. “I’m sorry I had to see this.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.” Robbie tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes. Dean had to look away, but when he averted his gaze, he caught his sons’ bizarre image in Nicole’s vanity mirror.

  “Just change back into your clothes, all right?” Dean said.

  “Steffy said you told her to try things on. So can’t we?”

  “Don’t be smart with me. You know the answer to that question.”

  “Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” Robbie said. “Stephanie already has a ton of dead-lady clothes from Goodwill.”

  “Don’t talk about your mother that way.”

  “What, that she’s dead?”

  “We’re not a family that just dumps things at Goodwill.”

  “What kind of family are we?”

  “I don’t know, Robbie! Will you get out of those clothes?”

  Bryan was still crying. “I’m sorry, Daddy! I didn’t know you would be so mad.”

  “It’s okay,” Dean said. He glared at Robbie over Bryan’s head. “I’m going downstairs. I want you down there in five minutes, in your normal clothes. Got it?”

  Bryan immediately began to unbutton Nicole’s ruffled blouse. Dean hurried out, not wanting to see his scrawny chest beneath. In the kitchen, he got a beer and downed it quickly, and then opened a second can and poured it into a glass, like he was a civilized person having a drink at the end of the day. Everyone had told him this would happen, that his boys would “act out,” but Dean had steeled himself for something quite different. He thought they would pick fights, punch walls, break things. Instead they had become quiet. They never talked about their mother, except when Dean brought her up, and even then, they said very little. He never had any idea what they were thinking. And now this. He couldn’t even tell anyone about it. There was a sexual element that disturbed him.

  “Boys!” he called.

  They came downstairs together. It was such a relief to see them in their T-shirts and shorts that Dean immediately apologized.

  “Let’s go out
to dinner, okay?” he said. “We can go to the Red Byrd and surprise your sister.”

  “But you got subs,” Robbie said, pointing.

  “We can have them tomorrow,” Dean said. “Come on, don’t you want to get out of the house? You’ve been stuck here all afternoon.”

  Only Bryan nodded, but that was enough for Dean.

  The radio came on loud when Dean started the car, startling the boys, but somehow it cleared the air.

  “Steffy’s leaving next week,” Dean said. “We have to figure out something for you to do when I’m at practice.”

  “I don’t want to go to Aunt Joelle’s,” Robbie said.

  “You don’t like playing with your cousins?” He wasn’t eager to leave them with Joelle, but there was no reason for them to know that.

  “She has Bible verses taped up everywhere,” Bryan said. “And she makes you say one before she gives you a snack.”

  “It’s good exercise for your brain to memorize things,” Dean said, trying to find the secular virtue. Joelle’s fundamentalism was getting harder to ignore. It had started before Nicole’s death, but then he’d had Nicole as a buffer. Or maybe it was that Joelle had spent her energies trying to convert Nicole instead of him. She thought love of Jesus could cure Nicole, that modern psychology was a crock. Dean was no big fan of psychology, either, with all its doped-up promises, but he thought Joelle’s minister told bigger lies, with his shiny face and his PowerPoint “teachings.” Nic had gone to Joelle’s church one Sunday and returned confused. “They actually think they’re talking to God,” she said. “Can you understand that?” Dean’s answer had been no, he couldn’t. He assumed that God had more important people to talk with.