Excerpt: The Replacement Wife

They were running late for soccer. Turtle had, as usual, taken twice as long as necessary to get ready, but Cindy had forgotten to account for it. How long could it possibly take to put on shoes and a sweatshirt? But it wasn’t just that. It was the socks with the shin guards inside, and the jersey that had to be turned with the correct color on the outside, based on the schedule which, of course, they couldn’t find amidst the pile of school papers on the kitchen table. And then there were the shoes, themselves—special shoes just for soccer, with rubber cleats on the bottom. They fit tightly. The clerk at the shoe store had insisted they were supposed to fit that way, that they were designed to “cradle the foot like a glove,” but Turtle hated anything constrictive, so putting on the cleats generally involved taking them off and adjusting his socks and putting them back on and then repeating the process three or four times until the comfort level met with his satisfaction. He could feel the slightest wrinkle in the fabric, the tiniest amount of extra tension against his toes, and God forbid the socks had a pill or a loose thread. By the time they’d gotten out the door (the second time—the first time they had to go back for a forgotten soccer ball), it was already past the start time for the team warm-up and dangerously close to when the actual game was supposed to begin. At least, they hoped so. The precise times were on the schedule sheet which, of course, they’d never found.

As was often the case, Ev’s and Turtle’s games overlapped, so they’d worked out a plan. Kyle would go to Turtle’s game, Cindy would go to Ev’s, and they’d all meet up at the park concessions stand afterwards for hot dogs and game highlights. They’d taken to alternating who went to which child’s game, but Cindy knew they were really alternating which game Kyle attended and she, herself, had little to do with the equation. For Turtle, especially, Cindy was a sorry consolation prize. She cheered just as loudly and encouragingly as the other mothers. She brought the same granola bars and sports drinks for snacks. She did everything they did, but she wasn’t his mother, not his real one, and that fact hung in the air like an invisible curtain between her and the other parents. Kyle had no such curtain separating him from the other fathers. He stood on the sidelines with the comfort of a man who knew he was where he belonged and, though he wasn’t much for yelling, his voice carried loud and comforting over the crowd when Turtle most needed it.

Turtle was not a natural athlete. He spent as much of the game watching the sidelines as he did watching the action--whether Cindy was there or Kyle or both of them-- and it was a rare game when his foot actually made contact with the ball. More than anything, he seemed to actively avoid getting involved in any plays, running opposite the ball’s path when he bothered to look at it at all. It was a miracle he was still well-liked by all his teammates. Kyle worried the charity wouldn’t last as he got older, but Cindy, who had never played sports as a child and, admittedly, didn’t much understand the culture, didn’t see a problem. “If he stops liking it,” she said, “he can just quit, right?” Kyle stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language.