Shame by Greg Garrett

school, although some of us had been social off the court.
    â€œI guess we haven’t,” I said. “But this game is never going to come off. Don’t hang the whole reunion around it. It’ll just be a disappointment.”
    Caroline sat forward and spoke for the first time in quite awhile, maybe since we’d sat down to dinner; if Oz could rightly be considered quiet, she was a conversational black hole. “But, John, if it could happen—did anything happen that year that was more important than the state championship?”
    Oz nodded forcefully.
    Michelle and I each, without consulting the other, glanced quickly down the hallway toward Michael’s room, where he may or may not have been in attendance.
    â€œMaybe for some people it was momentous,” I said, finally. “But it’s just not going to happen.”
    â€œAnd why not?” Oz asked. “You can schedule the varsity for an exhibition like this. We can surely find a night during Christmas break when the gym isn’t in use.”
    I looked over at Michelle to see what she was thinking. Her bottom lip was in between her teeth and she was worrying it like she always did when she was trying to decide something. “The game could work,” she said, looking back and forth between Oz and me, “if you old folks will agree that it doesn’t mean anything, that it’s not a way to reclaim your lost youth or something ridiculous like that. Because you can’t. John’s high schoolers will beat you, no matter who you were twenty years ago.”
    â€œMaybe,” I said. I hoped they would. While much of what Michelle said made sense, I wasn’t sure yet that my kids could beat somebody’s seventh-grade varsity on a good shooting night.
    But there was more: “I also thought we could have a dance the night before the game,” Oz said. “Decorate the gym, all that. We could have rock, disco, country from the seventies. The game could be open to the public, but the dance would be just for the reunion folks.”
    â€œA dance?” I asked in mock—but barely mock—horror. “What will the pastor think when he hears that two of his deacons are planning a dance?”
    â€œI think that’s probably low on his list of worries,” Oz said dryly.
    Michelle’s teeth were still worrying her lip through this exchange, but at last she said, “I’ll talk to Sharon about it, see if we can get the information out in time, get some reaction. If we set this up for sometime after Christmas, we’ve got about three months.” She sighed. “That’s not much time, but if people really want to do this, I guess we ought to give it a shot.” Sharon was Bobby Ray’s first wife, yet another member of the class of ’75 marooned in Watonga, and as former head cheerleader, nobody had a better finger on the pulse of the student body, then or now.
    â€œEverybody I’ve talked to has been wild for the idea,” Oz said.
    â€œYou haven’t talked to Phillip One Horse,” I muttered.
    But it was clear that I was outvoted. I was just the court leader of one team and the coach of the other, so what possible weight could my vote carry?
    â€œA dance,” Michelle said later as I was climbing into bed and she climbed in after me. “I love to dance.”
    â€œI know,” I said. I myself did not. I could not scoot a boot, cut a rug, do anything on a dance floor that someone would recognize as rhythmic motion except maybe line dance, and there I could get by because mostly people were too busy to pay attention to what anyone else was doing. I could slow dance, for what that was worth. In fact, I preferred to, since my idea of dancing was that it should be something closer to passion than aerobic exercise.
    â€œI love to dance,” she said again, in a lower, throatier register, and she threw one leg over me, and bent low to nibble at my