When he was done, he started to close it. Then he stopped, and looked at me, and turned it around, and slid it across the table.
I want to tell you what was in that notebook, because I'd built it up in my head, after Jesse told me about it in the truck. I'd thought it would be some kind of diary. I'd thought there'd be things about me in it, about the fence, about the backyard, about all those nights he'd come home from a workout and gone up the stairs past the window where I was throwing with his brother. I'd been afraid of what it would say.
It didn't say anything. That's what got me. It was just running. Page after page, day after day, one line each. The date, the miles, the time, the weather. Sometimes the workout, in shorthand, with the splits in a row: 8 X 400 @ 64, 64, 63, 65, 64, 64, 63, 62. Sometimes a word or two at the end. LEGS DEAD. GOOD. HOT. RAIN. STOMACH. FELT LIKE FLYING. I turned back a page and back a page and it went on and on like that, months of it, and I wasn't anywhere. Not once. I'd spent seventeen years afraid I was the villain of that boy's story, and the truth was I wasn't even a character in it. He'd just been running.
Then I turned back to the last page, the one he'd just written. It said:
THU 4/23. SECTIONALS @ AMICALOLA VALLEY. 3200 — 1ST — 8:48.31 (SR PENDING). 65.4 / 66.2 / 66.3 / 66.6 / 66.9 / 67.2 / 65.2 / 64.5. 64 DEGREES, CALM. LAP 6 BAD. DAD, J, COACH H ON BACKSTRETCH.
That was all. Dad, J, Coach H on backstretch. Right after calm and before nothing. He'd written it down the same way he wrote down the wind. It was a condition. It was a thing that had been true that day, like the temperature, that a runner might want to know about later, looking back, to understand why the time came out the way it did.
I sat there and looked at it for a long time.
"Are you coming to state?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Okay," he said. He said it the way you'd say okay to a weatherman calling for sun. He took the notebook back and closed it and went upstairs.
I didn't sleep much. At five-ten I got up and put on my jeans and a flannel shirt and my boots and went out the front door into the dark. It was cold, colder than the morning before, and there was a wet mist lying in the low part of the field where the Rutledges' cows used to be, and the fans on the poultry houses along Wilkie Bridge were going in a long low hum like a far-off highway. I walked to the end of the gravel drive and stood by the mailbox. I didn't know what else to do. That's the truth of it. I still didn't know what a man was for, in this. I didn't have a rangefinder or a bag of balls. I didn't have a whiteboard. I didn't have anything to tell him. I just stood there.
At five-twenty the front door opened and the porch light came on and a headlamp came bobbing down the drive. He was in his tights and a long-sleeve and his ball cap, and he was almost to me before the beam of the light found me standing there, and he stopped short.