The Abstinence Teacher (24 page)

She could see that his first impulse was to refuse, but for some reason he checked it.

“Coffee’s okay, if it’s no trouble.”

“Decaf?”

“Regular, if you got it.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “If I drink coffee at night, I’m wide-awake at three in the morning, ready to start the day.”

He stared at her with such a pained expression that she had to stop and review the conversation to make sure she hadn’t said anything inadvertently offensive. But then it occurred to her that it didn’t really matter what she said. It was just being here, under these circumstances, that was making him look so miserable.

He hates me
, she thought, but instead of being offended, she just felt sorry for him, which was probably a bad idea, given the hard line she was determined to take on the prayer issue.

COACH TIM
followed her into the kitchen and took a seat at the table while Ruth attended to the coffee. Unfazed by the buzz saw shriek of the grinder, he picked up the Bible that Eliza had ostentatiously left propped against the wire basket full of apples, kiwis, and grapefruits—if he was surprised to see it there he didn’t let on—and began flipping through the pages.

“That’s my older daughter’s,” Ruth explained, banging the heel of her palm against the bottom of the grinder. “She’s very interested in Jesus these days.”

“Good for her.” He spoke distractedly, his eyes fixed on the book, expressing no more enthusiasm than if she’d told him Eliza was taking Spanish or had signed up for swimming lessons. After a moment, though, he looked up. “Wish I could say the same about my own kid.”

“She doesn’t go to church with you?”

“Abby lives with her mother,” he said. “My ex-wife. I don’t have a whole lot of say in how she’s brought up.”

“That must be hard,” Ruth said, glancing over her shoulder as she extracted a box of Lemon Zinger from the high shelf of the cabinet. “I’m divorced, too. You know Frank, right? Maggie’s father?”

“Oh, I know Frank,” Tim assured her. “I probably get ten e-mails a week from him. He’s very generous with the coaching advice. And the, uh, constructive criticism.”

Ruth felt strangely embarrassed, as if Frank were still her husband.

“Just ignore him,” she said. “He can’t help himself.”

“He’s not an easy guy to ignore.”

“Sometimes you have to insult him,” Ruth explained. “That was my preferred method.”

“I’ll have to give that a try.” Tim put down the Bible and turned his attention to the coffeemaker, which was hissing and groaning on the countertop as if it were about to explode, but not producing a whole lot of coffee. “Something wrong with that thing?”

“I don’t know. It used to work a lot faster.”

“You probably just need to clean it. You’re supposed to run vinegar through the machine a couple times a year.”

“I used to do that,” she said, though what she really meant was that Frank had. “I never really noticed a difference afterward, except the house smelled bad.”

“Minerals collect inside,” he said, making a fist to illustrate this process. She noticed again how big Tim’s hands were, at least compared to the rest of his body. “It gets all gunked up in there, like plaque on your arteries.”

The teakettle whistled meekly—there was something wrong with the hinged cap on the spout—as if reluctant to interrupt the conversation. Snatching it off the stove, Ruth set it down on a trivet bearing the inscription,
Come live with me, and be my love
. Both the kettle and the trivet had been wedding presents, and should have been replaced a long time ago.

“You gotta use the white vinegar,” he added. “My ex-wife used balsamic once, and it was a disaster.”

Ruth laughed as she poured boiling water into her mug.

“You’re pretty big on the household hints, aren’t you?”

He eyed her warily, uncertain if he were being mocked.

“What do you mean?”

“At the game on Saturday you were bragging about how you put lemon juice on apple slices.”

“I wouldn’t call it bragging,” he said, sounding slightly miffed. “It’s just, the kids won’t eat the apples if they’re brown.”

“Whatever. You seemed pretty proud of yourself.” Ruth jerked the tea bag up and down, not really sure if this sped the steeping process. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Coach Tim had a theory on this as well. “Maybe you should get yourself a newspaper column. Call it Tips from Tim. Like Hints from Heloise. Except you’re a guy, which might make it more interesting to your readers since it’s mostly women who care about that stuff.”

He looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t understand what she was up to, blathering away about whatever popped into her head, as if this were just a friendly social visit. Ruth couldn’t help wondering the same thing herself, and the only thought she could muster in her own defense was that it was hard to maintain an attitude of frosty politeness toward someone who was sitting in your kitchen, offering helpful advice about your appliances. Not to mention the subtle hangdog vibe Tim was giving off, which was making her feel weirdly self-conscious, like it was her responsibility to cheer him up.

She brought him his coffee and sat down at the other end of the table, letting a few seconds go by as a signal that it was time to get down to business. But instead of clearing her throat and telling him how concerned she was about what had happened after the game, she took a sip of tea, and said, “So, did you play soccer in high school?”

“Not seriously. Where I grew up, the soccer players were mainly these Italian guys fresh off the boat, Angelo and Mario and Guido, and the Schiavoni brothers. The American guys played football.”

“You don’t look like a football player.”

“I wasn’t. I devoted my teenage years to getting stoned and learning to play ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

“Hey,” she said. “I think we knew each other.”

“Then I apologize,” he replied. “Because I probably wasn’t very nice to you.”

Ruth laughed, but she found herself mildly annoyed by the condescension implicit in the joke, the assumption that he’d been a little too cool for the kind of girl she’d been back in the day. Of course, what really bothered her was the knowledge that he was probably right.

“What, were you some kind of big ladies’ man in high school?”

He bobbed his head noncommitally, as if to say that this was a complicated question deserving of a thoughtful answer.

“Not at first. I was a skinny kid with a bad complexion. But I joined a band my junior year. We called ourselves Circuit Breaker for a while. Then we changed it to Balin Son of Dwalin.”

“That’s a terrible name.”

“We liked it,” he said. “It was some kind of Tolkien thing.”

“Balin Son of Dwalin? Why not Big Buncha Dorks?”

“Go ahead and mock,” he said. “But we were pretty popular. Lots of female fans.”

“Groupies?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“In high school?”

“You must be about my age,” he said.

“I’m forty-one.”

She expected him to be startled by this revelation, but he just nodded, as if he’d figured as much.

“I’m a year older,” he said. “So you remember what it was like. Sometimes I think about what kids were doing back then, and I can’t believe it really happened. I mean, I’d hate to think of my daughter growing up the way I did.”

“It’s a different world,” Ruth agreed. “But we didn’t turn out so bad.”

Chuckling, Tim reached for a kiwi.

“I don’t know about that,” he said, pondering the hairy fruit with skeptical concentration, as if he’d never encountered one before. “Some of us got pretty screwed up.”

Ruth wasn’t sure if he was taking a swipe at her or just making a general statement about their generation.

“You think it’s better now?”

“I do,” he said, returning the kiwi to the basket. “At least for me it is.”

“So what happened to the band? Did Balin Son of Dwalin survive high school?”

“Not really.” He shook his head, as if he hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time. “The singer and the lead guitarist had a fight over a girl. It was like a bad divorce. The guitar player got custody of the drummer, and the singer got me. Jerry and I stayed together for eight years, played in five different bands. We even put out a couple of records in our early twenties.”

“Anything I might have heard?”

“I doubt it. We called ourselves The Freebies. There were a couple college stations that played our stuff.”

“You must’ve been pretty serious.”

“Jerry more than me,” he said. “He really wanted it, and he had the
talent. He kept changing and trying new things, and I kinda went along for the ride.”

“So what happened to him? Did he make it big?”

Tim looked at the table.

“He died when we were twenty-five. Choked on his own vomit. Just like Jimi Hendrix, that’s what we used to tell ourselves. As if that made it okay.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Coulda been me,” he said. “I was just as messed up as he was.”

Tim fell into a momentary funk, rubbing his index finger in a circle on the tabletop, as if trying to erase a stain, and Ruth couldn’t help feeling like she was getting a glimpse of the beaten-down guy Matt Friedman had described, the recovering addict who couldn’t even be trusted to drive his daughter home from school.

“But you changed,” she reminded him. “You turned your life around.”

He looked up in surprise.

“It took a long time. I wish I could have those years back.”

A funny thought occurred to Ruth.

“You know who you’re like?” she said. “Yusuf Islam.”

His response was a blank stare.

“You know, Cat Stevens. He became a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam.”

“I’m not a Muslim.”

“I don’t mean that. I just mean you’re a musician who rejected the rock ‘n’ roll life and found happiness in religion.”

He made a face. “I wouldn’t exactly call Cat Stevens rock ‘n’ roll.”

“You know what I mean. Besides, ‘Peace Train’ was kinda a rock song, right?”

“I guess, but—”

Before he could finish the thought, Tim’s face broke into a peculiar grin, so radiant and unexpected that Ruth felt momentarily cheated
when she realized it hadn’t been meant for her, but for Maggie, who had materialized behind her in the doorway, dressed in pajama bottoms and her soccer jersey.

“Hi, Monkey,” he told her.

“Hello, Turnip.”

“Honey,” Ruth said wearily. She’d specifically asked her daughters to stay upstairs while she and Coach Tim had their conference.

Maggie shrugged. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Well, you said it.”

Maggie bowed to her mother, hands pressed to her forehead in prayer position.

“Yes, master.” She straightened up and flashed a conspiratorial grin at the coach. “Practice on Thursday?”

“You bet.”

“Regular time?”

“Yup.” Tim waved good-bye. “Now get outta here. Your mom and I need to talk.”

THE ATMOSPHERE
seemed to thicken around them after Maggie’s departure. Ruth sighed, and Tim nodded, acknowledging the suddenly obvious fact that the time for small talk had expired.

“So,” he said. “I guess we have a problem.”

Ruth had spent the last three days preparing for this exact moment—nursing her grievance against Coach Tim, sharing it with other parents, setting it down on paper—but now that she had a chance to say it to his face, she didn’t quite know where or how to begin. It seemed beside the point somehow, as if the man in her kitchen bore only a tangential relationship to the man she’d been complaining about.

“I’m a little curious,” she said. “Why do you call her ‘Monkey’?”

“It’s just a nickname. She likes to climb trees, and Monkey sounds a little like Maggie. I do it for all the kids. Nadima’s Nomad, and Candace is Caddyshack.”

“And you’re Turnip?”

“I prefer ‘Coach Turnip,’ but yeah. And I got off easy. They call John Roper ‘Mullet.’”

“Ouch.”

The coach grinned. “Candace showed some of the girls his high-school yearbook. Class of ’85. Apparently he had an unfortunate haircut.”

“Girls that age can be a little mean.”

“Nah, it’s just fooling around. They’re good kids. Maggie especially. You’re lucky to have a daughter like that. You’ve done a great job raising her.”

Ruth felt a surge of gratitude that took her by surprise. She tried hard to be a good parent, but she didn’t often get credit for it. It was hard enough just being divorced; to be a divorced Sex Education teacher who’d been publicly accused of immorality made you a bad mother by definition, or at least it had begun to seem that way.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“Look,” he said. “I know you’re upset about Saturday, and I don’t really blame you.”

“You don’t?”

“Believe me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone, or make you feel uncomfortable. I have no interest in shoving my faith down anyone’s throat.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“I got carried away,” he explained. “Abby got hurt, and the game was so amazing, I just kind of lost track of where I was. You have to understand, for me praying is like breathing. It’s just something I do.”

He sounded sincere, but Ruth didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily.

“That’s fine, as long as you realize that not everybody believes the same thing as you. You’ve got Jewish girls on that team, a Muslim—”

“I’m well aware of that. A couple of the other parents have already
spoken to me about it.” He paused unhappily. “They said you were maybe planning to write to the Soccer Association?”

“I was thinking about it,” Ruth admitted.

“I hope you won’t,” he said. “I made a mistake, and I apologize. I promise it’s not gonna happen again.”

“You mean that?”

His eyes made a silent plea for mercy.

“I love coaching this team,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if they took it away from me.”

ALL IN
all, Ruth thought as she slipped her nightgown over her head, the meeting had gone surprisingly well. Coach Tim had turned out to be so much more reasonable than she’d expected, a lot less rigid and confrontational than the other Tabernacle people she’d tangled with in the past.