The Laws of Average by Trevor Dodge Page A

Grady’s mother understood this.
    But Coach Noah understood. He’d felt the same fever in the palms of his hands and tips of his fingers that now burned on the peak of her nose and on the hills of her cheeks, the grip and contraction of her from the inside, the build and release and spill that was no more. Yeah, he understood it perfectly: her machine-gun texting, the nightstand still in tremble for hours after he’d holstered his phone on his hip and left for work; her swimming the parking lot in a constant, slow, awful circle; her gerunding her way into his daytime and his defiant resistance extending permanently now into her nighttime. It hadn’t always been this way, of course, and Coach Noah was okay with it. Grady’s mother, though? Not okay. Largely unfamiliar with okay. Pretty much never touched okay, and on the rare occasions she had, she totally pushed it away. The surge of drama a rollercoaster inside her, up and up and down and down. All the okay boys bored the hell out of her, never did even as much as smell her. And Coach Noah was so beyond the threshold of okay—his stature, his goatee, his construction-ravaged jeans—well, the spin of him left her wrung totally dry.
    So when they called the game right then and there, and all the people slid-stepped back to their cars, and the fruit snacks and granola bars and rack of weird little bulbous water bottles remained absolutely still in the back of Coach Noah’s pickup truck, not a single Juice Box scaled the big tires to hop over the side. Not a one. No one had to instruct them otherwise. Some things, they learned that day, are absolutely clear and require no sound.

Home
    And then, one afternoon, they sat on a squat set of metal bleachers and figured it all out. Everything that had gone wrong and why, every disappointment and hurt feeling tallied, every argument and curt exchange in the entire history of their relationship scored and settled like an accountant’s balance sheet or itemized list of charges on the monthly phone bill. All disputes settled, all whys and whatnots aired and retired. They looked one last time and breathed. The aluminum underneath them absolutely quiet as neither shifted weight even the slightest fraction.
    â€œI hope it was worth it to you.”
    â€œIt wasn’t.”
    â€œSo what happens next?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNext. Where are you going after this?”
    â€œHome.”
    Her eyes widened but she said nothing. She just stared.
    â€œHome.”
    â€œAnd where is that now?”
    â€œNowhere. That’s gone.”
    â€œNo it’s not.”
    She turned her wrist and unlatched her elbow from her side, so she could move both at the same time.
    â€œStop it.”
    The aluminum groaned one last time before his tinny footsteps pittered away.

Plausible Deniability: A Parable
(with Wendy Peterson)
    He sat one spring afternoon munching on his lunch. He had to run an errand to Boise and he thought he’d stop by Del Taco and grab himself a Chicken Macho Combo, mostly because it was the only drive-thru burrito to use the word “macho.” He looked at the bible on his dash and chuckled. The book was always within easy reach on his dashboard to pass time during the push-pull of his commute or for quick reference when the kid or the girlfriend or the other girlfriend were acting up. Except that day. That day required some explanation.
    It was a winter day, if he remembered right, the first time all that torridness happened out in the hangar, out in that slutty little town just north of Bliss; his hometown; someone else’s secretary. It was in the pickup, the big red Dodge, the one on permanent loan from his dead father, with the extended cab and short bed, where the seats lay back just enough to get a woman to arch her back in just the right position. He kept the book at the ready to pull out when he needed that extra special verse that he just