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lightly. “A pit. We need a pit.”
    And, remarkably, Gwen nodded. “Of course we do.”
    “Gwen likes the soft sell,” Coach T. whispered to Katie, shaking his head in wonder. “And no one sells softer than Eric.”
    And that very night, all of them flush from old wine and something called drunken prawns, they walked into Gwen’s study and watched as she flipped open her massive white-leather checkbook binder and, fountain pen in hand, signed in her swirling script.
    All for that inground landing pit, which, Katie calculated, cost more than a year of their mortgage payments.
    “It’s a must for Elite training,” Gwen told Katie, as if Katie didn’t know. As if these very words hadn’t come directly from Eric himself. “We shouldn’t skimp on our children’s dreams.”
    “No,” Katie said, “we shouldn’t.”
    “It’s a disgrace,” she added, handing over the check, “that we’ve waited this long.”
      
    All of this, Eric managed. As if he were born to it.
    It was an Eric Katie hadn’t seen in years and years, maybe even since their first, frenzied dates, those seven-, eight-hour adventures of shots and pool and soul-sharing and Katie hanging over the edge of a mattress, breathless with wonder over him. Nineteen-year-old Eric, who wanted so many things he couldn’t begin to name them all. Or any of them.
    More than a dozen years later, two kids, a creaking split-level with water stains but strong beams, loose shingles but copper pipes, both working in jobs they wouldn’t have chosen but wouldn’t have fled, and where had all that energy, that exuberance, that sense of limitless possibility gone?
    For Eric, for both of them, it went to this.
    After all, who wouldn’t do anything for one’s child?
    Especially when that child worked harder and wanted something more than either of them ever had? Who wanted in ways they’d long forgotten how to want or had never known at all?
    *  *  *
    “This is just the beginning,” Eric said, unscrolling the design plan for Coach T.’s approval, Gwen flanking him, smelling strongly of perfume. Katie, behind everyone, unable to see.
    “We’ll have to go dark,” Coach T. said, reading glasses slipping down his nose. “And find another place to practice. But hell, I’m grateful.”
    During practice, high up in the family viewing section, all the parents could talk about was the pit.
    “Teddy’s been dragging his feet on this for years,” Molly Chu said to Gwen. “And you and Eric, it’s all because of you two. Our pit at last!”
    Gwen twitched a smile. “It’s simply required for a competitive gym,” she said. “And why Teddy hasn’t installed one is a major concern for me.”
    “The building owners wouldn’t allow it,” Molly said. “That’s what he told me.”
    “He told me good spotting means you don’t need one,” Kirsten Siefert said.
    But there were whispers among the boosters that Teddy’s true reasons were more personal. Rumors of financial strain—two sons at expensive colleges and one in law school, a house renovation, a new deck. It was his gym, of course, but given the high fees he charged, couldn’t he invest more in BelStars? And when Eric filled out the booster club’s tax forms and saw how much Teddy paid himself, he had to admit to Katie that it was frustrating.
    “Well, now we have everything,” Katie said, looking down at Eric on the gym floor, hands on Devon’s shoulders, talking and talking and talking.
      
    Construction took place during the Summer Olympics, the BelStars buzzing with Olympic fever, holding viewing parties and even, among the boosters, a small betting pool.
    Practice was relocated to the nearby middle school, an arrangement made possible, of course, by Gwen, though no one knew how.
    Meanwhile, under Gwen’s vigilant watch, a crew of men of Portuguese descent worked seemingly around the clock to dig the pit, splitting the floorboards like matchsticks, pouring concrete all day.
    When one of