It was the best and worst thing I've ever felt, and I've felt them both together most days since.
It was twenty minutes before he came to us. There were things that had to happen first, and Haskell explained them to me while we waited, standing there at the fence. The meet referee had to go up to the press box and look at the finish-line camera picture. The timing company had to print the result and sign it. Marlene Ogletree went around the track to the finish to be with him, and before she went she bent down and picked her second stopwatch up out of the grass and handed it to Haskell, for no reason I could see, and he held it the whole time.
Then the team came jogging around the outside of the track on the gravel path, cooling down, the way Haskell said they always did, eight or nine boys and girls in red Cagle County warm-ups, laughing and shoving each other, and in the middle of them, in a red long-sleeve with a white towel around his neck, walking, not jogging, was my son.
He saw Jesse first. I watched it happen. He saw the football pants and the cleats and the eye-black, and his face went blank with surprise, and he said, "Jesse?" And then he saw Haskell, and his eyebrows went up. And then he saw me.
He stopped walking. The other kids kept going a few steps and then stopped too and turned around to look.
"Is Mom okay?" he said.
I didn't understand him for a second. Then I did, and it went through me like a current through a bad glove.
He'd looked at me standing there in my work clothes on the backstretch of a track thirty miles from home, on a Thursday, and the only thing he could think of, the only reason in the world his father would be standing there, was that something terrible had happened. That somebody had died, or the house had burned, or his mother had lost a hand in a machine at the plant. I was a bad-news man to him. I was a man who'd come only to tell him something was wrong.
"Mom's fine," I said. "Mom's at work. Everything's fine. Nothing happened."
"Then why are you—" He looked at Jesse again, and at Haskell. "Why are you here?"
"I came to see you run," I said.
It sounded stupid. It sounded like something a man would say in a commercial for life insurance. But there wasn't anything else to say because it was the only true thing, so I said it again. "I came to see you run, Luke."