Page 30 of The Husband Hour
Lauren nodded. “Are you…dating him?”
“Dating him? It’s not 1985. Go to sleep, Laur.”
The next time Lauren spotted Rory Kincaid in the hallway, she averted her eyes. Stephanie didn’t mention him again the rest of the year. But then came the article.
Every week, the fledgling reporters for the school paper submitted their pieces. Some were assigned, some were spec. Senior editors put the paper together on Thursday evenings, and the writers didn’t know until Friday if their articles made the final cut. But the kids who’d been around long enough knew that their chances for getting published were higher if they wrote something for the favored pages.
The editor in chief of the Merionite was a lanky, pale-faced guy named Aaron Rettger. His personal pet was the op-ed page, and he also paid close attention to the front page, the news section. The bastard stepchild of the paper was the sports section. According to Aaron, it was a waste of ink: “Anyone who gives a shit about sports goes to the games. They don’t even read the Merionite.” Lauren suspected his stance on the sports articles was based less on his instincts about their readership and more on his own bitterness over never having made a sports team in his life. In issues when they were tight on space, the sports articles were the first to be cut.
This made Lauren’s assignment to profile the LM hockey team, currently first in the division and headed to the state finals, a challenge. The dreaded sports assignment had little chance of being published. Still, Lauren was determined.
She strategized the piece; hopefully, there would be a game that week that she could go to. And she would schedule interviews with the coach and a few key players. She started with the facts: The Lower Merion Aces were in the western division of the Inter County Scholastic Hockey League, the ICSHL. That year, the highest scorer in the entire ICSHL was Lower Merion’s team captain, Rory Kincaid.
The first challenge of her journalism education would be getting up the nerve to talk to him. And then she remembered the Katharine Graham memoir and some advice Graham’s mother had given her: “Be a newspaperwoman, Kay, if only for the excuse it gives you to seek out at once the object of any sudden passion.”
In Matt’s room, Lauren refocused on the computer screen. His interview with Stephanie concluded with a few innocuous questions.
“What do you think?” he said to Lauren.
“I think that you’re wasting your time here. I mean, aside from Stephanie’s stunning revelations about the social strata of Lower Merion High School.”
He smiled. “Maybe you’d have something to say about other interviews. You could look at them and correct any misinformation. I’m interested in your perspective on what other people have said. Despite your cynicism, I do want to get this right.”
“You think this is about me being cynical? This was my life, Matt! I’ve worked really hard to find some sort of peace.”
“I get that. And if it’s any consolation, I’m hearing only good things about Rory. It’s all positive. Even the stuff about him hiding his concussions is totally understandable—”
Lauren froze. “He never had concussions. Okay, he had one and he sat out a month. Everyone knows about that.”
“That’s not how his former teammate Dean Wade remembers it.”
Lauren’s hands clenched, her fingernails digging into her palm. “Well, it seems you’ve got some unreliable sources.” How could Dean Wade have talked to him? And how could Dean’s wife, Ashley, not have told her about it? Ashley was her friend; she was on the board of directors for the Polaris Foundation!
“So help me get it right,” Matt said.
“Why should I do that?”
“You were a journalist. You must believe in the truth. At least, you must have at one time in your life.”
Lauren couldn’t think of a damn thing to say to that. All she could do was leave.
Beth lifted a box and felt a twinge in her lower back. She dropped the box and heard glass break.
“Darn it!” She stretched for a few seconds, making sure she hadn’t done any real damage, then cut through the tape. Inside, she found shattered dishes. At least it wasn’t good china.
“You okay up there?” Howard called from the bottom of the stairs.
“Fine,” she said.
She heard the clop of his footsteps climbing up. The last thing she needed was him bothering her.
“Did you break something?” he asked from the top of the stairs.
“No,” she said.
“Beth, don’t make yourself crazy going through all of this junk. Just hire someone to take it to Goodwill. If no one’s missed it in all these years, no one’s ever going to miss it.”
She looked at him incredulously. “I can’t just toss this stuff away sight unseen. What if there’s something important in here?”
