Shame by Greg Garrett

shrugged when I asked how he thought it was going.
    â€œOkay, I guess. You’re the coach.”
    While Michelle bustled around getting ready to leave, we talked about colleges, and he got a gleam in his eye when we talked about forestry. He had spent part of the last few summers after we’d finished harvest with other FFA kids at the Cimarron camp in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, and he hoped to work as a ranger this next summer, taking groups out into the wilderness for two-week backpacking trips. While it looked like he would probably go to Oklahoma State, which had a good reputation for forestry, he really had his heart set on the high-powered program at the University of Montana in Missoula, and he said so again this morning.
    â€œWell,” I said, “let’s hope you have another good season.” There had been some interest from college scouts the previous year. “Maybe you’ll get a basketball scholarship or get some help if you keep your grades up.”
    â€œMaybe.” He sighed, and I sensed a danger spot, an open pit looming ahead, and eased cautiously around the edges of it. Instead, I asked him about Jennifer, his current girl, and he smiled big before catching himself. “Oh, she’s good, she’s fine,” he said, filling his smile with a spoonful of cereal.
    â€œWhich one? They’re not interchangeable, are they?” asked Michelle, dashing back into the kitchen to scoop her keys off the counter with an exasperated I’m-running-late groan.
    â€œYup,” he said, and took another bite so he wouldn’t have to say anything else.
    â€œOkay,” Michelle said, “I’m off to save Western culture. Any encouragement?”
    â€œAll memorable events transpire in morning time,” I called after her, and was answered by a laugh and a slamming door. Henry David Thoreau said something of the sort, I believe, in Walden , and since Michelle annually taught him to her seniors and implored them to listen to his advice on life, I had sought out a few pungent quotations to employ on appropriate occasions—which is to say, when they worked to my benefit, which is the only reason anyone ever quotes anything.
    B. W. and I were the only members of the family who happily followed Thoreau’s admonitions to rise early and greet the dawn, unless you count Michael, who sometimes greeted it coming home, which I don’t think was exactly what the bard of Walden Pond had in mind.
    â€œGot to go, Dad,” B. W. said, rising from the table with his bowl and juice glass.
    â€œI’ll see you at practice,” I said, patting his shoulder as he went past.
    He grunted, put his dishes in the sink, and departed, leaving me to bask in the auroral glow of morning by myself. Actually, I’d already been outside and it was brisk out there, wind out of the north, mid-forties according to the thermometer outside the kitchen window, which was probably about right for a low temperature in October. I was content to remain inside for awhile, and was thinking about going into the den and pulling Henry David off the bookshelf instead of driving into town for coffee when the phone rang.
    I figured it was probably one of my coffee buddies wondering where I was, so I picked it off the cradle and said, “Yeah.”
    â€œSince when do the only two men in my life conspire behind my back?” Samantha Mathis Cobb purred in my ear. I knew that voice in the same way I knew the contours of the face I shaved every morning, but knowing that voice and being prepared to hear it were entirely separate matters. My breath left me like a covey of quail exploding out of a stand of tall grass, and my insides, whether straining to follow or exposed to the partial vacuum thereby created, knotted.
    â€œS-Sam?” I stammered.
    â€œThe very same,” she said. “Surprised?”
    â€œUhmn,” I said, not yet trusting words. At least