The Stranger

There were no metallic stands, but some parents brought folding chairs so as to have a place to sit. Corinne kept four mesh ones in her minivan, all with cup holders on both arms (did anyone really need two for one chair?) and a shade for above the head. Most of the time—like right now—she preferred to stand. Kristin Hoy was next to her, wearing a sleeveless top with shorts so tiny that they had Daddy issues.

Adam nodded to a few parents as he strolled toward his wife. Tripp Evans stood in the corner with several other fathers, all with arms crossed and sunglasses, looking more like the Secret Service than spectators. To the right, a smirking Gaston hung with his cousin Daz (yes, everyone called him that), who owned CBW Inc., a high-end corporate investigation firm that specialized in employee background checks. Cousin Daz also ran less extensive background checks on every coach in the league to make sure that none had a criminal record or anything like that. Gaston had insisted the lacrosse board hire the high-priced CBW Inc. for this seemingly simple task, one that could be done far more cheaply online, because, hey, what are families for?

Corinne spotted Adam approaching and moved a few feet away from Kristin. When Adam got close, she whispered in near panic, “Thomas isn’t starting.”

“The coach is always rotating the lines,” Adam said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

But she would and she was. “Pete Baime started over him.” Son of Gaston. That explained the smirk. “He’s not even cleared from his concussion yet. How can he be back already?”

“Do I look like his doctor, Corinne?”

“Come on, Tony!” a woman shouted. “Make the clear!”

Adam didn’t have to be told that the woman shouting was Tony’s mother. Had to be. When a parent calls out to her own child, you can always tell. There is that harsh ping of disappointment and exasperation in their voice. No parent believes they sound this way. Every parent does. We all hear it. We all think that only other parents do it but that magically we are immune.

An old Croatian proverb Adam had learned in college applied here: “The hunchback sees the hump of others—never his own.”

Three minutes passed. Thomas still hadn’t gotten in. Adam sneaked a glance at Corinne. Her jaw was set. She was staring at the far sideline, at the coach, as though willing him through the power of her glare to put Thomas into the game.

“It’ll be okay,” Adam said.

“He’s always in the game by now. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pete shouldn’t be playing.”

Adam didn’t bother responding. Pete caught the ball and threw it to a teammate in the most routine play imaginable. From across the field, Gaston shouted, “Wow, helluva play, Pete!” and high-fived cousin Daz.

“What kind of grown man calls himself Daz?” Adam muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Corinne gnawed on her lower lip. “We were a minute or two late, I guess. I mean, we were here fifty-five minutes before game time, but the coach said an hour.”

“I doubt it’s that.”

“I should have left the house sooner.”

Adam felt like saying that they had bigger problems, but maybe for now, this distraction would be helpful. The other team scored. The parents moaned and dissected what their defensemen had done wrong to cause the goal.

Thomas ran onto the field.

Adam could feel the relief coming off his wife in waves. Corinne’s face went smooth. She smiled at him and said, “How was work?”

“Now you want to know?”

“Sorry. You know how I get.”

“I do.”

“It’s kinda why you love me.”

“Kinda.”

“That,” she said, “and my ass.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“I still have a great ass, don’t I?”

“World class, prime Grade A, one hundred percent top sirloin with no fillers.”

“Well,” she said with that sly smile she broke out far too little. “Maybe one filler.”

God, he loved the too-rare moments when she let go and was even a little naughty. For a split second, he forgot about the stranger. A split second, no more. Why now? he wondered. She made remarks like that twice, thrice a year. Why now?

He glanced back toward her. Corinne wore the diamond studs he’d bought her at that place on Forty-Seventh Street. Adam had given them to her on their fifteenth anniversary at the Bamboo House Chinese restaurant. His original idea had been to stick them in a fortune cookie somehow—Corinne loved opening, though not eating, fortune cookies—but that idea never really panned out. In the end, the waiter simply delivered them to her on one of those plates with a steel covering. Corny, cliché, unoriginal, and Corinne loved it. She cried and threw her arms around him and squeezed him so hard that he wondered whether any man in the world had ever been hugged like that.

Now she only took them off at night and to swim because she worried the chlorine might eat away at the setting. Her other earrings sat untouched in that small jewelry box in her closet, as if wearing them in lieu of the diamond studs would be some kind of betrayal. They meant something to her. They meant commitment and love and honor and, really, was that the kind of woman who would fake a pregnancy?

Corinne had her eyes on the field. The ball was down at the offensive end, where Thomas played. He could feel her stiffen whenever the ball came anywhere near their son.

Then Thomas made a beautiful play, knocking the ball out of a defender’s stick, picking it up, and heading for the goal.

We pretend otherwise, but we watch only our own child. When Adam was a newer father, he found this parental focus somewhat poignant. You would go to a game or a concert or whatever and, sure, you’d look at everyone and everything, but you’d really only see your own child. Everyone and everything else would become background noise, scenery. You’d stare at your own child and it would be like there were a spotlight on your kid, only your kid, and the rest of the stage or field or court was darkening and you’d feel that warmth, the same one Adam had felt in his chest when his son smiled at him, and even in an environment loaded up with other parents and other kids, Adam would realize that every parent felt the exact same way, that every parent had their own spotlight directed at their own kid and that that was somehow comforting and how it should be.

Now the child-centricity didn’t feel quite as uplifting. Now it felt as though that concentrated focus wasn’t so much love as obsession, that the single-lens single-mindedness was unhealthy and unrealistic and even damaging.