Free The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner

occur to you otherwise. She was from around here. Even the New Guy could tell.
    Come on. Get your head in the game. Harold asked him to show up and try to maintain appearances. So here I am. See? Everything’s under control. He looked around, wondering how long it would be until the other moms on the sidelines realized that Carl wasn’t the only one of their friends missing now.
    Meanwhile, Danny Fitzsimmons glanced back at him, making sure he was doing the right thing, and then disappeared into the scrum of boys surrounding the ball.
    “Stay on it, Danny!” he shouted, wondering how the hell he was going to make a graceful exit. “Go for the ball!”
    Once you put a foot in these things with kids who’d lost a parent, you had to chew your own leg off to get out of them. A week after his dad disappeared, Danny got a bloody nose at practice and said he didn’t want to play anymore. So Mike had to start calling the kid’s house every day, telling him that the other guys really needed him. Because what the fuck else were you supposed to do when the roof was falling in? Stand there, waiting to get crushed?
    He started to trot toward the scrum with the whistle in his mouth, ready to break things up before the tears began. All right, you’re stuck for the moment—play the part until the ball goes out of bounds. Keep up the game face. Act like everything’s perfectly normal. But then he saw a skinny white leg kick out stiffly and the ball squirt out of the jam. Javier, the little ringer from Ecuador, tripped and fell going after it, and then all of a sudden Danny was breaking from the pack, running past him, chasing it toward the goal at the other end of the field. The kid ran like a crippled sandpiper, matchstick legs staggering and arms flapping uselessly at his sides, but he was getting there. He hesitated for just a second, still not sure if he should really cut loose, and then reared back and kicked the ball with the side of his foot. It hit a rock, bounced, and then rolled into the far corner of the net.
    “Yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about.”
    And hearing a grown man’s voice celebrating his little victory, Danny threw his arms up, let out a war whoop, and came flying over to give his coach a hug.
    The odd thing was, up until two weeks ago, Barry had hardly noticed the other people on the train ride home. Usually he was so deep into reading or looking out the window that everything else just seemed like background noise. But tonight the Metro-North car seemed emptier than usual. He realized that most times he caught the 8:07, the same guy would be sitting across the aisle. Always wearing the same kind of navy Men’s Wearhouse suit, white shirt, and red tie. Always breathing hard and sweating like a horse when he first got on, as if he’d been running for the train. It usually wasn’t until they were well out of the groaning bowels of Grand Central and clearing the clotheslines of Harlem that he’d seem to relax a little. And then he’d slump against the window, an automaton turned off, oblivious to the expanding glory of the Hudson, the blue bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, the little sailboats rocking gently on the current. Once or twice, Barry had found himself imagining the guy’s life. Probably just another poor shlub trying to hold on to a cubicle at Citicorp and a saltbox in Hawthorne, working the phones all day and then being too tense and tired to deal with the wife and kids when he got home. He remembered smugly thinking that he’d never allow himself to live like that again, always running late for the train. But something about seeing that body this morning had made him just a little more attentive to his daily routines. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen the guy since the Eleventh. And as the train rolled by the old Jack Frost sugar refinery in Yonkers, he saw the sun melt into a red puddle on the river and turned to the Times “Portraits in Grief” section to see if he recognized