The Marriage Lie(34)

Coach Miller sits, digs his heels into the carpet and rolls himself up to the desk, his chair wheels squealing like nails over a chalkboard. He does a little double take when he catches my expression. “You okay?”

Somehow, my voice finds its way outside my head, and it sounds only slightly strangled. “I’m fine. Please, continue.”

“Okay,” he says, but in a way that tells me he’s not totally convinced. He takes off his cap, rubs a palm over his tight curls and sets it back. “Like I was saying, nobody at home was disciplining him, which means he pretty much did whatever he pleased and got away with it, both in school and out. He fought. He stole stuff. He dealt drugs in the hallways and on street corners. He skipped so many classes, I don’t know how he ever graduated. Because the teachers wanted him gone, probably.”

Coach Miller’s revelations are like a string of mini explosions in my head, one on top of the other, leaving me breathless and dizzy.

“Will told me his father died when he was a baby,” I say. “He said he had no memory of him.”

“Wishful thinking, probably. Mr. Griffith was a mean old drunk. But it was his mother who died, as I recall sometime during our junior year.”

I think back to the first time Will told me of her death, the only time I ever saw him cry. Malignant melanoma, he said, caught after it had already metastasized to her brain, liver and lungs. An awful, painful death. “Cancer?”

As soon as I say it, I wish I could go back and fix my tone, make it sound less gullible wife, more certain. Surely, Will couldn’t have faked a tale that emotional. No one is that good an actor.

But Coach Miller barks a laugh. “Hardly. She died in a fire.”

“Oh, my God,” Dave says. “That poor woman. Poor Will.”

Coach Miller leans back in his chair, his weight bouncing it around a few times before it finds stillness. “Poor Billy, huh? Let me tell you something. Every kid in our neighborhood was dealing with some kind of crap at home—addictions, arrests, deadbeat dads all over the place—but we were finding a way to deal with them. Billy didn’t even try. He just got angry and mean.”

Dave and I exchange a frown, and I can tell he’s thinking what I am. How does a drug-dealing street punk become a college-educated, loving husband?

I clear my throat against a sudden onslaught of emotions leapfrogging up my chest. Sadness for Will’s lonely childhood and his mother’s violent death. Resentment for parents who couldn’t stop slinging fists long enough to love on their son. Indignation at whatever higher power dealt Will such a crappy hand. Fury I’m only finding out about it now.

“What ever happened to his father?” I somehow manage.

“I heard rumors he’s sick, something needing full-time care, but...” Coach Miller lifts both hands, lets them fall with a thunk to the desk. “My mom used to keep me updated on neighborhood gossip, but she died a couple years ago.”

Dave and I fall silent. When we were young, Mom always told us there were three sides to every argument. Our side, the other side and, somewhere in the middle, the truth. Maybe this is what Dave meant when he asked if I was sure I wanted to know about Will. Without him here to defend himself from Coach Miller’s tale, I can’t gauge where the middle falls.

But that doesn’t mean I’m about to swallow this story whole. Coach Miller is clearly holding on to his grudge with both gigantic fists, and for events that went down almost two decades ago.

He takes in our doubtful expressions and grunts, shoving away from the desk. “Believe me. Don’t believe me. Doesn’t change the fact that Billy Griffith was a spiteful, sneaky thug who could come up behind you, stab you with a knife and leave before you even noticed the blood. Ask around. I’m sure you’ll have a hard time finding anybody to say otherwise. Now I gotta get to practice before those punks destroy my diamond.” He stands and stalks past us, forgetting all about the baskets of equipment in his hurry to get to the door. He stops himself halfway into the hall, his big hand gripping the doorjamb. “Do you believe in karma? Because that’s the first thing I thought when I heard what happened to Billy.”

*

Dave and I backtrack our way through the corridors of Hancock High, both of us trying to make sense of Coach Miller’s story. I wanted a toe-dip into my husband’s life. What I got was more like a full-body dunking into arctic waters, and it’s left me shell-shocked and numb.

“Did you believe him?” I say as we turn the corner onto a wall of dingy and dented lockers under a giant banner. Go, Wildcats! Stay Fierce!

Dave lifts a shoulder, and his mouth scrunches into a tight squiggle I know all too well. He doesn’t want to, but he believes at least part of what we heard. “We could check with the local police station. If Will really was dealing drugs, maybe he got into trouble. The police might have it on record.”

“I guess.” I sigh, my shoulders sagging toward the dingy floor. “And I get that Will wouldn’t want to talk about his mother’s death. I get it. But that story he fed me about her dying of cancer? I cried, Dave. Real tears. He had all the medical jargon down, too. Knew all the symptoms and details of how the cancer progressed. You can’t just make something like that up. He must have spent weeks researching melanoma on the web. I mean, you have to really commit to a lie like that one.”

At the stairwell, Dave shoves open the door, stepping aside to let me pass. “I’d imagine so.”