Page 101 of Puck the Coach's Son
So, I go anyway.
I shower and change into running gear. I come downstairs and Paul is still at the island with his iPad still dark. He doesn't look at me.
“I'm going for a run.”
“No, you're not.”
I grab my water bottle off the counter. Don't break his eye line.
“I am. Day off. I need to move.”
“Theo.”
“It's a run.”
He doesn't believe me. His face tells me he doesn't believe me. But also, I'm twenty years old and my father is not legally my warden, and he knows that and I know that, and the silence between us is both of us knowing that.
“If you get in a car with him,” Paul says, “you're done.”
“Done?”
“You don't play for me. You don't live here. You don't eat at my table. You don't get any more of what I have built for you.”
My hand is on the door.
“It's a run, Paul.”
I go out.
I walk down the drive. I walk past the mailbox. I walk around the corner. And then I run.
I run like I've been wanting to run since he said my name in the kitchen. I run past the row of identical houses with identical lawns and identical flags on their identical porches. I run past the bus stop where I've been waiting in the dark since we moved here. I run past the coffee shop Paul likes where he once told the barista that a medium should be a small. I run past all of it. My shoes hit the pavement. My breath is loud in my ears. My legs are still tired from last night and they don't care. They run.
Four miles out. Past the reservoir. Up onto the trail.
The trailhead is a parking lot with a single vehicle in it.
His truck.
He's leaning on the hood in joggers and a hoodie with the hood down, and his hair is a mess from sleep or from driving with the window down, and his breath is white in the cold. He sees me come up the road doesn't smile, doesn't wave, doesn't move.
He watches me come to him.
I slow down twenty feet out. I walk the last bit. My lungs are burning. My face is hot. I stop two feet from him, and I don't know what to do with my hands.
He opens his arms.
I walk into them.
He holds me against his chest in the parking lot in the cold with the pine trees leaning over us and the only sound the tick of his engine cooling and the wind. He puts his hand on the back of my head. He holds me like I’m important to him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
His hand flattens between my shoulder blades.
“Was he a bastard?”
