Coaching the Weekend

Grady stands at the edge of the practice field and watches a battered old robot spin in circles, dragging its claw behind it like a broken wing. The kid driving it is panicking. The kid's teammates are panicking harder. Grady makes a note on his clipboard and decides not to panic himself, because he is fifty-five years old and has learned that robots spin in circles for many reasons, and most of them are fixable by Saturday afternoon.

It is Friday morning, warm for early spring. The convention center smells like cardboard and energy drinks. Two hundred teenagers, a hundred banners, and Grady's whole life arranged around it for the next three days.

And Mickey is coming tonight.

He does the math again, standing there with his coffee going cold. They have been together two and a half years now. Met her at the coaching conference in March, three years back, actually, when she wandered into his workshop on sensors by mistake and stayed for the whole hour anyway. Started dating six months after that. So the math is good. The math is always good with them.

But the other math is worse. He counts back and realizes it has been four months since they had a real night together. Not a quick goodnight after her grading and his practice runs. Not a Saturday split between her lesson plans and his build sessions. A real night. A slow one. The kind where nobody checks the clock.

Four months. He knows because he counted, and because he is a little ashamed of how carefully he counted.

So when Mickey offered to come help him chaperone the championship weekend, he said yes faster than a coach should probably say yes to anything. She teaches art all week, fifth graders with paint up to their elbows, and she still offered to give him her Friday night and her Saturday and her Sunday. He is going to try very hard not to waste it.

His team's practice rounds end Friday at six. He texts her from the pit.

Grady: landing secured. Hotel across the street. Room 214.

Mickey: room 216. I can see your lobby from my window. Bring your driver down, i'll buy him dinner.

His driver is a sophomore and turns red all the way to his ears. Grady walks him back to the hotel by seven and hands him off to the other chaperones, and then he goes looking for Mickey.

He finds her in the lobby in a green dress she probably wore to work today, sitting in one of the big chairs by the window with her feet tucked up under her. She has a book. She has a glass of cheap wine. She looks up at him and smiles, and that smile still does it to him, three years in, the same as it did in a workshop full of strangers.

"Hey, coach," she says.

"Hey, teacher!"

He sits across from her. They talk about the tournament, about her week, about the girl on his team who rewired the whole arm in forty minutes. It is easy talk, comfortable talk, the talk of two people who know each other's days by heart. At some point the wine glass empties. At some point her sentences get longer and slower.

By ten she is asleep in the chair. Book open on her lap, falling shut against her knee. Her head tips toward the window.

Grady does not wake her. He just sits there and watches, which sounds strange written down, but there it is. She is fifty-two and she fell asleep in a hotel lobby chair at a robotics tournament, and he watches her like she is something on television. The lamplight on her face. The small lines around her eyes that were not there when they met. Her hand loose on the armrest, fingers curled a little, like she is still holding the book.

He remembers how that smile used to undo him. Still does, honestly, when she aims it at him awake. There was a year, he thinks, when she smiled at him like that every single day and he walked around school feeling as if he had won something. He wants that back. Not the new-relationship part, not the fireworks. The aiming. The part where she turns the smile toward him on purpose.

A chaperone from another team walks by and gives him a look. He mouths that she is with him, that she is fine. The guy nods and moves on.

"Mickey," he says softly, near eleven. "Hey. Bed's better than a chair!"

She stirs, blinks at him, gets her bearings. "Oh, hell. How long?"

"Hour, maybe."

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Come on. Across the hall, practically."

They walk to the elevator together, her arm through his, and at her door she squeezes his hand and says goodnight, and he says goodnight, and it is warm and real and entirely too brief, and then his door closes on it. Four months, he thinks. Not tomorrow. But closer.

* * *

Saturday morning the convention center opens at seven and the coffee station opens at seven and both of these facts are important to two hundred adults wearing lanyards.

Mickey comes down at seven fifteen in jeans and one of his old tournament shirts from three years ago, the one with the cartoon robot on it, and she looks better in it than he ever did. She finds him at the coffee station, which is a folding table with three urns and a stack of cups, and she stands beside him and reaches for a cup at the exact moment he reaches for one.

Their hands touch. Actually touch, fingers against the back of his hand, three seconds of it while they both pretend to be looking at the urns.

Neither of them pulls away right away. That is the thing. On a normal Tuesday that touch would be nothing, would be passed over in half a second. Here, this morning, it goes through him like current. He looks at her. She looks at the creamer with enormous concentration, and her ears are pink, and she does not move her hand for a second longer than she needs to.

"Well," she says.

"Yeah," he says.

She pours her coffee. He pours his. They stand there in the little crowd of sleepy coaches and chaperones, and Mickey stirs her coffee for much longer than coffee requires.

"Your team looks good," she says.

"They look terrified."

"Good. Terror builds character." She takes a sip and looks at him over the rim of the cup, and there it is again, the aimed smile, the one from three years ago. "Grady. What are we doing tonight?"

"Eliminations end at six today. After that, nothing. Absolutely nothing until the awards Sunday morning."

"Nothing," she repeats, like she is tasting the word.

"Nothing at all."

"Well then." She bumps his shoulder with hers, soft, deliberate. "I'll see you at six, coach."

And she walks off toward the bleachers with her coffee, and Grady stands at the folding table holding his own cup, and the whole day is suddenly just something to get through before six o'clock. A kid from his team runs up asking about a battery. He answers. Somewhere in the back of his head, all day, three seconds at a coffee urn keep replaying.

Saturday drags. Grady runs his kids through two elimination matches and they win one and lose one and both feel like the Super Bowl to the kids, which is the whole point. He checks the clock in his head about forty times. Six o'clock. Nothing until awards Sunday morning.

At three there is a break in the schedule, some kind of judging backlog, and the hall goes loose and quiet. Mickey appears at his elbow near the pit tables, holding two bottles of water.

"Walk with me," she says. "I've been sitting in bleachers for six hours and my spine has opinions."

They walk out of the main hall and into the expo hall, which is empty this time of day. Rows of folded tables. Stacked chairs. A lone banner from some 3D printer company drooping over its stand. The cardboard smell is thinner back here, more like dust and floor wax.

"So how's the team?" she asks.

"Alive. One robot caught fire yesterday, small fire, very educational. The driver panicked so hard his teammates started panicking, and then I panicked a little, and the fire was out by the time anyone important noticed."

"Good coaching."

"The best." He drinks some water. "How are your fifth graders?"

"Livid. One of them made a poster that says GO COACH MICKEY even though I'm not coaching anything, I'm just standing near robots. She spelled robots wrong. I'm keeping the poster forever."

They pass the whole row of empty tables and come around again. Then Mickey stops, near a stack of chairs, and looks at him in a way that makes him stop too.

"I want to tell you something and it's not a complaint," she says. "Okay. It's a little bit a complaint."

"Those are my favorite kind."

She laughs, then goes serious. "I miss when we used to touch without thinking. You know? Like when we first started dating, my hand was just