"Today? Yeah. Sectionals."
"Thought so." He spat in a Mountain Dew bottle. "My sister's girl runs for Amicalola. The hurdles. She was telling Darla about your boy at Easter."
"Telling her what."
"That he's fast." Ricky looked at me sideways. "Said he's in the paper."
"So I hear."
"Said there's some kind of record."
"Every meet's got a record," I said. "Meet record, school record. They got records for everything in track." I balled up my napkin. "He's trying to qualify for state. That's all sectionals is. Top four go to state."
"Huh," Ricky said, in a way that meant he didn't care either way, and that was a relief to me, and I didn't look too hard at why it was a relief.
Let me tell you about the two times I tried.
The first time Luke was nine. It was a Saturday in March and Jesse had a flag football game at eleven and it was nine o'clock and Tonya was at the plant on a weekend overtime shift, and Luke, who was a quiet, skinny kid with a bowl haircut who liked to read books about sharks, came and stood next to my chair while I watched SportsCenter and said, "How long does it take to run a mile?"
I said it depended who was running it.
He said, "Me."