You Will Know Me(10)

But most important of all, he got Gwen.

Gwen Weaver, the owner of a fleet of parking lots and of Weaver’s Wagons, a mini-chain of family-style restaurants that would prove perfect for cost-free pizza parties, fund-raisers, booster meeting sites. The woman who had single-handedly funded a new junior-high gym floor when her daughter was still in elementary school. Her daughter, Lacey, happened to be an aspiring gymnast.

“She’s the one we want,” Eric had said, pointing Gwen out to Katie at a town meet.

The serious-looking woman with the ash-blond bob and the cat’s-eye sunglasses. When she removed them, scanning the gym, Katie was reminded of something Drew had told her: Never make eye contact with a wolf. The wolf will take it as a challenge.

“First we poach the daughter,” Teddy said, joining them, nearly rubbing his hands. “Then we make the mama treasurer. After that, nature takes its course.”

And so, a dinner was arranged.

Shaking her head in wonder, Katie watched as Eric put on his crispest white shirt, his sole tie (later, Gwen bought him a second, a woven silk one that came in a long green box, when he was honored with State Booster of the Year). He even polished his best shoes with his dad’s old shine box.

When he came home a few hours later, a little drunk, his face bright, nearly pumping his fist like he never did, even at big competitions, Katie had to laugh a little.

“She’s in,” he shouted, spinning Katie around the bedroom, her head knocking the lamp, the lamp rolling across the floor and sparking as if in joint celebration.

Her husband, like a military general, fortifying the flanks. Or, in this case, after a few more wine-soaked dinners with Gwen, maybe more like an ace salesman. A confidence man. A gigolo. Because the long meals always turned, at some point, to talk of the poor state of the tumbling mats, the spring floor, the vault table, and, most of all, of the need for a landing pit.

So Gwen emptied those deep, silk-lined pockets, and they got a new elite spring floor, new mats, new fiberglass bars to replace the wooden ones, new everything.

All that was left was the pit.

There was a dinner party at Gwen’s home, a cherry-walled wonder so grand that Katie felt as if the hushed click of her modest heels on the floor was in bad taste.

She hadn’t even wanted to go. She dreaded leaving Devon alone these days, her daughter emerging from her dark bedroom only to take showers, her shoulders hunched, hair covering her face, as if she were no longer a gymnast at all.

“Gwen,” Eric said, training those gray eyes on her, “look what BelStars has done for Devon. She’s on track to compete nationally. Your daughter can bloom here. We can do this, together. We can make BelStars a place all our girls feel challenged and supported, motivated and inspired. There’s only one thing stopping us. One investment we need to make, together.”

“And what is that, Eric?” Gwen said, eyes narrowing.

“What else?” he said, smiling lightly. “A pit. We need a pit.”

And, remarkably, Gwen nodded. “Of course we do.”

“Gwen likes the soft sell,” Coach T. whispered to Katie, shaking his head in wonder. “And no one sells softer than Eric.”

And that very night, all of them flush from old wine and something called drunken prawns, they walked into Gwen’s study and watched as she flipped open her massive white-leather checkbook binder and, fountain pen in hand, signed in her swirling script.

All for that inground landing pit, which, Katie calculated, cost more than a year of their mortgage payments.

“It’s a must for Elite training,” Gwen told Katie, as if Katie didn’t know. As if these very words hadn’t come directly from Eric himself. “We shouldn’t skimp on our children’s dreams.”

“No,” Katie said, “we shouldn’t.”

“It’s a disgrace,” she added, handing over the check, “that we’ve waited this long.”



All of this, Eric managed. As if he were born to it.

It was an Eric Katie hadn’t seen in years and years, maybe even since their first, frenzied dates, those seven-, eight-hour adventures of shots and pool and soul-sharing and Katie hanging over the edge of a mattress, breathless with wonder over him. Nineteen-year-old Eric, who wanted so many things he couldn’t begin to name them all. Or any of them.

More than a dozen years later, two kids, a creaking split-level with water stains but strong beams, loose shingles but copper pipes, both working in jobs they wouldn’t have chosen but wouldn’t have fled, and where had all that energy, that exuberance, that sense of limitless possibility gone?

For Eric, for both of them, it went to this.

After all, who wouldn’t do anything for one’s child?

Especially when that child worked harder and wanted something more than either of them ever had? Who wanted in ways they’d long forgotten how to want or had never known at all?

*



“This is just the beginning,” Eric said, unscrolling the design plan for Coach T.’s approval, Gwen flanking him, smelling strongly of perfume. Katie, behind everyone, unable to see.

“We’ll have to go dark,” Coach T. said, reading glasses slipping down his nose. “And find another place to practice. But hell, I’m grateful.”

During practice, high up in the family viewing section, all the parents could talk about was the pit.