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athletically talented children, refusing to guarantee time on the field. One association’s head coach was said to hit on the players’ mothers, while another’s was suspected to be gay, not that there was anything wrong with that, but, you know …
    Rose didn’t know. But she also didn’t find out.
    She ended up picking the most popular league, which ranged somewhere near the middle on the competitive scale, and at which, so far, she had witnessed no sex occur, heterosexual or otherwise.
    Rose began shuttling the boys to practice in the afternoons and to games on the weekends. As they grew older, entire weekends would revolve around their game schedule since it often happened that if Isaac’s game was on Saturday, then Adam’s would be on Sunday, and vice versa.
    During games, Rose would watch the boys from the sidelines, trying to look interested. Clapping when Isaac made an assist, shouting when Adam blocked a kick.
    But, dear Lord, was it boring.
    So fucking boring!
    And the other parents didn’t seem to think so at all. She felt it was all she could do to smile, and they were screaming at their kids. High-fiving when they scored. So invested in the game, as if there were something actually at stake other than cultivating the competitive spirit in a bunch of five-year-olds.
    What was wrong with them?
    Or better yet, what was wrong with her that she wasn’t feeling “it”?
    Instead she hated the parents who bounced and clapped from the sidelines. And once she connected a child player on the field to his or her screaming, wailing counterpart on the sidelines, she found things to hate about the child as well.
    Sydney, whose mother questioned every decision the referee made, ate her boogers while waiting for the game to resume.
    Cooper, the goalie, had a ratty face. He looked like a smaller version of his father, who clearly viewed his son’s position on the team as equivalent to an NFL draft pick.
    Jaden-with-an-E tripped smaller kids.
    Jaydon-with-an-O didn’t share the ball.
    Emma wasn’t going to be very pretty when she got older. She didn’t look as if she were going to be very bright either.
    Rose would cycle through these judgments, finally turning her eye on her own children.
    She would see them the way she imagined others saw them.
    Isaac’s pretty mouth would sneer when another player stole the ball from him. She could tell when his wheels were turning. His eyes would get that nasty narrow look and Rose knew by the direction in which he stared during the breaks which player he was going to target with an “accidental” blow to the shin. More than once, it was a member of his own team.
    Adam was careless, daydreaming. Other players often had to shout at him to get him to pay attention to the game. More than once he had lost the team goals because he wasn’t attending to the action on the field.
    She could tell by the way the other parents would glance over at her when this happened—Adam was a loser.
    Rose hated herself so much.
    Hated herself for thinking horrible things about children. Hated herself for seeing anything ugly in her own. Hated herself for not being able to truly care whether it was the “Bobcats” or the “Pirates” that won the game, because all she wanted to do was get away from the noise and damp grass and screaming parents, go home, and take a nap.
    *   *   *
    Hemsford Fields was over an hour’s drive away.
    Though there had been no indication of that on the schedule, which had simply listed it as “Quarter Finals Tournament, Hemsford Fields.”
    Under which someone had typed, “Snack Captain—Isaac A.”
    Rose had been fortunate that she had overheard some players’ mothers complaining about the distance, how much it was going to cost them to get there. “The price of gas nowadays, minivans aren’t cheap.” Singsong voice: “But