The morning of the sectional meet I was standing at the kitchen counter at twenty to six with the blender going, making my younger son a peanut butter and banana shake with two raw eggs in it, and I did not hear my older son come in the back door.
That was not unusual. Luke came and went like weather.
He left the house every morning at five-twenty with a headlamp strapped over his ball cap, and he came back at some point after that, and on most mornings the first I knew of it was the sound of the shower running upstairs.
But that morning the blender cut off and there he was behind me, standing on the mat inside the door with his hands on his knees, steam coming off his shoulders in the cold of the mudroom. It was the last week of April in north Georgia and the mornings still had a bite to them.
His shirt was soaked through in a dark shape like a map of a country. His legs were spattered to the knee with red clay from the shoulder of Wilkie Bridge Road.
"You're back early," I said.
"Easy day." He straightened up and pulled the headlamp off and turned it in his hands. "Race day. Twenty minutes and some strides."
"That's right," I said. "That's today."
I want to be honest about that. I said it like I had known. I had known, in the way you know the date of a dentist appointment that isn't yours. It was written on the calendar on the side of the refrigerator in Tonya's handwriting, in green, because green was Luke's color on that calendar and red was Jesse's. Thursday the twenty-third had green on it that said SECTIONALS @ AMICALOLA VALLEY 3200 ~7PM and it had red on it that said SPRING PRACTICE DAY 4 4:00-6:45, and the red was in my handwriting, because I was the one who wrote down Jesse's things.
Luke went to the sink and filled a glass of water and drank it with his head tipped back. He was seventeen and a senior and he was built like a fence post, six feet even and a hundred and forty-one pounds, which I knew because he weighed himself every morning on the bathroom scale and wrote it in a notebook. He had his mother's narrow face and her habit of not saying anything until you'd stopped expecting him to. He had my hands, which looked strange on him, big square hands with thick knuckles at the end of arms like broom handles. When he was small, my mother used to say he would grow into them. He never did. He grew around them.
"Shake's for your brother," I said, because he was looking at it.
"I know." He put the glass in the sink. "I don't drink eggs."