I didn't understand him. I need you to know that. For a second, standing there, with my son in the red jersey thirty feet behind him on the practice field, I thought he meant Jesse. I thought, What state record? It's spring practice. There's no record in spring practice. I actually looked over his shoulder at Jesse like there was something I'd missed.
Haskell watched me do it. Something passed over his face. I'd call it pity if I'd thought him capable of it then.
"Not that son," he said.
"Luke?"
"Luke."
"Luke's at sectionals," I said. "He's up at Amicalola. He's just trying to qualify. Top four go to state. He said so this morning, he's just—"
"He's not just trying to qualify. He's going to qualify if he jogs. There's nobody in that section within twenty seconds of him except a junior from Amicalola named Hightower, and Hightower's running the sixteen hundred tomorrow and he'll sit in the back of the thirty-two." Haskell said all this without any hurry, like he was reading it off a card. "Marlene Ogletree texted me at three-fifty. Your son told her this morning on the bus that he wanted to go out in sixty-six-second laps. Sixty-six times eight is eight forty-eight. The state record in the thirty-two hundred is eight forty-nine point four. It's been eight forty-nine point four since nineteen ninety-eight. Nobody's been within five seconds of it in nine years. Your son ran eight fifty-six point eight at the Dogwood Invitational three weeks ago in a thunderstorm, on a wet track, alone, and Marlene says he's been running workouts this month she's never seen a high school kid run, and he's healthy, and it's sixty-four degrees up the mountain and no wind. He wants it. He's going for it tonight. The thirty-two is scheduled for seven-oh-five and they're running about ten behind." He looked at his watch, a big plain black Garmin. "It's six-eighteen."
I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it.
"You can make that if you leave right now," Haskell said. "Fifty-two up through Damascus, cut over on Burnt Mill. Thirty-six minutes if you don't get behind a truck."
"Coach, I didn't—" I stopped. I didn't know what I hadn't. "I didn't know it was like that. He said it was just sectionals."
"I know he did."
"How do you know about the record? How do you know eight forty-nine—" I was stumbling. "How do you know all that, Coach? You're a football coach."