“Did you see that?” Miriam says. She is pointing across the field. “That kid tripped him. He almost went down.”

“Where? What kid?”

Her tone is sharp; she lifts her eyebrows with impatience, and all at once he returns to her. Miriam. The race. A bright cold day in fall.

“The tall one, Art. At the starting line.” She frowns incredulously. “How could you have missed it?”

He smiles; she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about. “Well, no harm done. Or was there?”

“Sometimes, it’s like your head is a big empty dance-hall, Art.” She squeezes his arm. “No. No harm done.”

As O’Neil predicted, for the next twenty-five minutes, until the runners return, they have nothing to do. To keep warm they walk around the infield, where students and other parents, about thirty of them, have gathered in little groups to talk and pass the time sipping hot cider from foam cups. For a while they fall into conversation with a man and his wife, parents of one of O’Neil’s teammates, up from New York City for the weekend. Arthur wonders about Sandra, if she has arrived yet, but supposes she hasn’t; O’Neil would have said so, even just to tease them, to make them guess. He is thinking about this and looking over the crowd to try to pick her out when a cry goes up.

Impossibly-so little time seems to have passed-the first runner has appeared at the edge of the woods. Like the point of a wedge he leads the other runners in a long arc around the field, a jostling mass of gold and violet. Arthur looks for O’Neil, doesn’t find him, then does, about midway through the first pack, five or six runners off the leader. Everyone scrambles toward the finish line, where both coaches are counting out the seconds on their stopwatches.

“Where is he?” Miriam is saying. She bounces on her toes, looking over the heads of the crowd. “Where is he?”

“There.” Arthur points, and then it happens, as it always does: all the memories he carries inside him of track meets and soccer games and piano recitals and class plays-twenty years of watching his son from the sidelines of playing fields and the back of dark auditoriums-suddenly organize themselves, like the plot of a novel or movie, leading to this moment. Excitement wells up inside him, a huge and desperate desire to see his son do well, a feeling so intense he would step out of his body if he could. He hears his voice, and Miriam’s, the two of them yelling:

“Go, go, go!”

For the final moments of the race everything seems to slow. As the runners take the last turn around the field, O’Neil makes his move; he has kept something for the kick and in a burst he uses it, passing one runner and then another, his arms and legs moving in perfect headlong syncopation. Even so far away Arthur believes he can see his son’s face, and the pain that is etched across it.

“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

The first runner crosses the line, the pack just steps behind. Arthur can hear his voice, yelling his son’s name, and he is yelling still when O’Neil crosses the finish, a split second off third place. He expects his boy to collapse on the ground, utterly spent, but this doesn’t happen. O’Neil slows to a stop, grinning, his chest heaving, his hands riding his slender hips, and then looks upward toward the bleachers, his eyes narrowed in a squint. Arthur, at the finish line, is about to call out O’Neil’s name to show him where they are, but then O’Neil finds who he is looking for-not Arthur and Miriam, but a girl whom Arthur knows is Sandra. Somehow he has missed her; or perhaps she has arrived late, after Arthur had stopped looking. She bounds down the aluminum bleachers and at once is beside him.

Arthur hears Miriam whisper, “God.”

“Steady,” Arthur says, and takes her elbow. “Let’s go see.”

O’Neil is almost too euphoric to notice them. “Can you believe it? Fourth place.” He shakes his head in utter amazement. “I’ve never done that well. Not even close. It was the last turn when I knew I could do it. I saw myself passing those guys, and then I just did.”

He introduces Sandra, who shakes first Miriam’s hand and then Arthur’s, meeting his grip with a firmness that is at once surprising and completely natural. The last runners are crossing the line, and in the confusion Arthur has the chance to look at his son’s new girlfriend-to examine her without seeming to. She is prettier, even, than in the photograph-her eyes are somehow brighter, bluer, her hair a truer shade of gold-but her beauty, Arthur decides, is not the kind that everyone would necessarily notice, nor something she herself is aware of, as some pretty girls are. She is wearing jeans and a wool cap, like a beret, and a puffy nylon ski jacket, navy blue and zipped to the collar against the cold; Arthur can see, peeking through the neckline, a pink oxford shirt with a threadbare collar that he recognizes as his son’s-a shirt, in fact, that used to be Arthur’s. He can tell she is as surprised as Arthur is that O’Neil has done so well, and that her surprise is part of his son’s happiness; it is an unexpected gift he has given both of them.

When the last runners have crossed, the coach steps up and claps O’Neil on the back. “See what I’m saying? About the kick?” He puts his bearded face close to O’Neil’s and thumps the middle of his chest with the butt of his fist. “You have to go in.” He turns to Arthur and Miriam and shakes their hands again, as if meeting them for the first time.

“Your son ran quite a race,” he says. “I don’t know what you fed him last night, but do it again sometime.”

Despite O’Neil’s surprising finish the team as a whole hasn’t done that well. Most have finished in the second pack, well behind the leaders. Their strongest runner, whom they were counting on to place in the top three, twisted an ankle out on the course and was forced to drop out. O’Neil points him out, an ordinary-looking boy hobbling around the infield with a sack of ice in his hand.

“I guess he didn’t go in,” O’Neil says. “To tell the truth, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a good runner, but that’s not everything.”

Arthur looks away from the boy and returns his gaze to O’Neil, who is putting his sweats back on and sucking a wedge of orange that someone has handed him. The pleasure he feels in his son, he knows, is something new. He is watching his son step into himself, into life. Suddenly Arthur knows that, from this day, the love that he feels for O’Neil will be a different kind of love. His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

“Let’s celebrate,” Arthur says. He turns to Miriam, realizing suddenly that he has almost forgotten she is there; he has forgotten Sandra, too, walking beside his son with their arms wrapped around one another’s waists, like any couple.

At the edge of the field O’Neil stops. “Great,” he says. “Well, actually, I should go back for a while.” He tips his head over his shoulder toward the bleachers, where the two teams are still gathered. “It’s the last meet of the season. Sandra has a game to get ready for too.”

“That’s right.” Arthur gives her his best smile, though he is disappointed; he would like to have O’Neil to himself for a while. “Field hockey, right?”

She shrugs modestly. “It’s just JV.”

“JV nothing,” Arthur says. “I hear you girls really kick some ass.”

Sandra laughs at this, knowing, as she must, that she is hearing O’Neil’s words played back by his father. They agree to meet instead for dinner, after her game, and that Arthur and Miriam will spend the day shopping in town. The question of Sandra’s parents turns out to be no question at all; they are out of the country, she explains, sailing in the Caribbean.

“Did you notice the shirt?” Arthur asks later. They have returned to their room to change for lunch; they are planning to eat someplace nice, to make up for last night’s bad meal at the hotel. Miriam is sitting on the bed, wriggling out of her jeans and into a pair of warm wool slacks. Arthur, at the mirror, slides the knot of his necktie to his throat.