Fortunate Lives by Robb Forman Dew Read Free Book Online Page A

over West Bradford and in the atmosphere of all those other places where Toby
     had been known: his aunts’ and uncle’s, his grandmothers’ and grandfather’s, and within his own house where it suffused all
     the rooms.
    Several weeks after Toby’s death, Martin had put Duchess on her lead, intending to follow this very same route up Bell’s Hill.
     He had started out in a mild October drizzle, but as the rain increased he had changed his course and made his way along the
     village streets, tramping stolidly through the puddles.
    He rounded the baseball field of the high school as the rain grew stronger, the drops full and hard and gusting over him in
     sheets when the wind picked up. He crossed the sidewalk to the gym and pushed open the wide door that led into the rear of
     the building. As soon as she realized that she was out of the rain, Duchess shook herself vigorously, spattering him with
     water, and he looped her leash around the metal stanchion supporting the bleachers.
    Martin would have liked to join the small group of parents in the center of the bleachers who had arrived early to watch the
     basketball practice before driving their children home in the heavy rain. They had discarded their dripping jackets in a pile
     and were talking among themselves in a comradely murmur. With Duchess in tow, however, he had no choice but to sit unobtrusively
     at the foot of the far end of the bleachers near two women who had climbed higher up in the stands and were chattingsoftly while glancing at the cheerleaders practicing farther down on the sidelines.
    The basketball team was almost languorous in their warm-up drills, waiting for the coaches to organize them. A dark-haired
     boy passed the ball off to his teammate and moved over to the bleachers where the cheerleaders sat. He approached a small
     girl, sitting about four seats up, who wouldn’t glance his way. Finally he fell forward slightly from the hip, resting his
     forearms widely on either side of her, and she made a great point of straightening up to peer over his shoulder, refusing
     to look at him.
    The boy bent farther over the girl, and she finally looked right back at him and smiled, raising her hand to brush his hair
     back from where it had fallen over his forehead. The two of them said something to each other before the boy stood back and
     moved away. Watching them, Martin was suddenly surprised by a memory of uncomplicated adolescent lust, and his attention was
     caught with an odd alertness, as though he remembered this very building, the high struts of the roof, the echoing thunk of
     the ball, the diminished, hollow murmuring of a few people in an empty gym.
    Most of the girls sat scattered over a small section of the far bleachers while two of them demonstrated a series of leaps
     and turns again and again. Now and then one of the seated girls would rise and step down the bleachers to join them until
     she, too, mastered the sequence. They were not shouting their cheers; they were concentrating on the choreography and only
     talking quietly among themselves.
    When Owen Croft came out of the dressing room behind the two coaches, the atmosphere became subdued. Martin had not realized
     until that moment that he had been expecting to see Owen, but now he watched him carefully. Owen didn’t see him at all. In
     fact, Owen kept his head down, his eyes averted, and he didn’t turn totalk to anyone; he simply moved into a loosely organized rotation beneath the basket, turned, put the ball up, and moved off.
    Both the women sitting above Martin, and the larger group of people farther down the stands, were quiet while Owen pivoted,
     ran, shot, moved. A kind of sympathetic solemnity was heavy in the atmosphere as Owen continued to radiate his own isolation
     within that group of lanky boys. And Martin felt it, too—an aching suspense, a communal need for resolution, absolution.
    There was a dramatic hesitancy in the movements of the cheerleaders