Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong Page A

the field in patches, the way they looked back at one another, could get free sometimes, just the ball and boy then, the steady, rushed control. She often felt winded when it was over, as if she’d held her breath through the whole thing.
    After he had sat with his friends to take off his shoes and shin guards, pull on sweatpants, gulp down water, Ben had come over easily, happily, to her. They walked the fifteen minutes to the restaurant.
    â€œI think I chose,” he said, refilling his water with the jug the waiter had left on the table, then refilling hers. He’d been on officialvisits all up and down the coast and a handful out West. Stephen was obsessive, so Maya had backed off. Her son’s face was still flushed as he spoke to her and ordered his dinner. He was still, daily, slipping between all the various men he might one day be and then back again to the boy she’d always known.
    â€œOhio,” he said. They’d gone out there together, the three of them; Maya had needed to be convinced to leave Ellie home alone. She was nineteen then, but Maya had called her three, four times a day. The school had been small, bucolic, frighteningly quiet. She’d wondered the whole time how people stayed sane amid all that empty space. None of them thought he’d choose it. It was a smaller school, a smaller team, than any of the others. Even the coach had seemed sure Ben would play someplace else. Stephen had made light of the coach’s desperation, had suggested the competition was not of sufficient rigor. Ben seemed to know this now, looking at her, chastened, his chin dipped to his chest as he began to eat his pasta.
    â€œI guess,” Maya said. She wanted to say the thing that would prove he was right to tell her, that she could be trusted. That she would help him no matter where or what he chose. “It’s a great school,” she said.
    Her son nodded into his plate. This wasn’t enough, maybe, he needed more, she thought. “That sort of change,” she said. She thought again of all that quiet, all those trees. “It could be edifying, maybe,” she said.
    Her son smiled then, like he did sometimes when she drifted. “Sure, Ma,” he said. “It could be.”
    She laughed, took a bite of her fish. “We’ll miss you,” she said, once she’d swallowed. “Benny,” she said. She thought of El then, all that worry, the not knowing, the way it seemed to rush through every crevice of their lives that was not already solidly filled in. “We’ll miss you desperately,” she said.
    Her son gulped more water. He held his napkin to his mouth and scraped his fork along the bottom of his plate. “I need it, though, you know?” he said. “I think . . .” He stopped again. He brought his hands up to the table, his shoulders rose, his head went down, then up, “I need to get away,” he said.
    The way he’d looked then, the way he’d held her there, signaling a different sort of man than all the ones she’d seen in him before that, she’d almost asked if she could come along.
    The light changes and they cross. A large clock blinks atop a building: It’s twenty-eight degrees, not quite five a.m.
    As they cross the middle of the bridge, between the two arches, they pass a woman whom Maya sees often when she runs at this time, late sixties maybe. She wears the same long large mink every morning, a full face of makeup, and old Converse shoes. She swings her arms and walks, her feet crossing in front of one another, her gaze never straying from straight ahead.
    â€œI don’t want to go back,” Ben says.
    Maya keeps her eyes toward her toes.
    â€œTo school,” he says. “I hate it. I hate everyone who’s there.”
    It’s as if he’s been practicing these sentences for months.
    â€œWhat would you do?” she asks her son.
    They pass two women walking in unison,