Thursday Reading

Quick note: If you'd like a communal Gangrey critique, shoot me an email suggesting as much and I'll try to get people to bite. Or post your link in the comments somewhere letting folks know what you're looking for.

-- Ben

Robin Gabby Fisher and Judith Lucas with a serial: Her husband had been dead a little over an hour, and all she could focus on was how Doc Figliolino was flicking the ashes from his cigarette into the cuffs of his gabardine trousers.

It was the middle of the night and a half-dozen people were milling around her living room, amid the lingering smells of Thanksgiving dinner the day before. Frances Figliolino, who delivered each of her five children, was chain-smoking in a corner. The Langs, rescue squad volunteers, had come after hearing the radio call. Father Harold Hermanns, the chaplain for the Rahway Police Department, had given her the news.

As soon as she had seen Father Hermanns, standing at the front door, the rain and wind lashing his umbrella, she knew why he was there.

Dugan Arnett: WAUCHULA -- It's a steamy afternoon in July, and Tim Price, the first-year head coach of the Hardee Wildcats, is sitting behind a cluttered desk in his office at the Hardee High School football stadium, talking about the future.

He is cloaked, as most high school football coaches are, in gym shorts and Nike tennis shoes, and strewn in front of him is the detritus of his chosen trade: mail from various universities, a few inspirational books, some notes on various plays, the execution of which he -- and a town of 4,300 -- is hoping will carry the Wildcats deep into the state playoffs this fall.

It's been five months since Price took the reigns of one of Florida's most successful high school football programs. Five months since the former Wildcats assistant accepted a position that, in the town of Wauchula, might be more illustrious than that of the mayor's.