Chapter 8: The Wrestling Room

Dale's POV

"You walked into that room alone," I said, in the church parking lot, and I heard how it sounded.

Jo folded her arms around the clipboard.

"I walked into a basement full of people who like me," she said. "That's not alone."

"It's alone if I'm not in it," I said.

"Dale," she said.

"I stood at that table last time and said one sentence," I said. "It cost me my job and changed nothing."

"I'd like to stand in front of something once."

She looked at me for a while, and the light was going gold on the lot behind her.

"You will," she said. "On the twelfth. Sit in the second row, and wear a clean shirt."

Then she got in her car.

I stood in the parking lot of a Lutheran church with a beagle at my knee and nothing to do with my hands.

Two weeks later, I stood at the edge of the wrestling mat in the Findlay High gym.

It was six in the evening, and I was trying to get twenty-two boys to stop wrestling each other's shoelaces.

Summer camp ran three nights a week.

It smelled of sweat and mat cleaner, and it was the only place in the world where I knew exactly who I was.

Biscuit slept in the corner on a folded towel.

My nephew was in the center of the mat, working a single-leg takedown against a sophomore who outweighed him by fifteen pounds.

He had my father's shoulders and my brother's temper, and he was fifteen.

He finished the drill, and I blew the whistle.

"Water," I said. "Two minutes."

Boys scattered.

He came toward me with a towel over his neck, and his face was shut tight.

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