by Linda Holmes
“Oh, Evvie, thank you,” Monica said, reaching over and squeezing her elbow. “Next time’s on us, okay?”
Evvie put her hand over Monica’s. “Absolutely. Next time.” She slid the tip money under the edge of her plate, then she went up to the counter to pay the check. Andy and Monica waved to her on their way out, their fingers casually tangled together, and then they were gone. Standing by the cash register, she felt eyes on her. They wouldn’t be used to seeing her cleaned-up on a Saturday morning, they wouldn’t be used to seeing her leave this early, and they wouldn’t be used to seeing her standing by herself. They’d be used to seeing gossip that continued out the door, and then the hug by his car. Not today.
THAT AFTERNOON, EVELETH AGAIN CLIMBED into Dean’s truck, and again he said, “All right, let’s do this.”
This time, he took her to the soccer field at the high school. “Dean, I am not a sports person, particularly, but I do know this is not a baseball field,” she said as they walked across the grass.
“That’s true—that’s your first win on your first official day as a pitcher. As it happens, there’s a JV game on the baseball field, and all you’re doing today is throwing a ball. You don’t need anything except a ball and a glove.” His right hand came up from between them with a baseball in it. “So take this.”
“Is this, like, a sacred thing, taking a baseball from you? Do I have to promise to uphold the laws of the—?”
“Take the ball,” he said, and his voice got sort of low and sandpapery. He turned and stood right in front of her, holding the ball between them, so close it almost touched her ribs. She took it, and he reached into a duffel that was over his shoulder and produced a black baseball glove with hot pink lacing.
“You’re joking,” she said.
“Take it.”
“It’s pink,” she said, not touching it. Leaning back a little to not touch it.
“It’s not pink, it just has pink.”
“I’m not wearing it. I object.”
“Why?”
“I think…the patriarchy.”
“Evvie, I’m not doing that well with the patriarchy myself. I got chased out of New York by guys on the Internet who spell ‘loser’ with two O’s. Would you please put on the pink glove?”
“It’s not pink, it just has pink,” she groused as she slid it onto her hand and tentatively fit the baseball into it. “And I don’t think you understand the patriarchy.”
Dean gestured with the beat-up glove on his left hand. “I probably don’t. Okay, walk backward until I tell you to stop. And don’t fall over.”
“Is this part of your coaching? ‘Don’t fall over’?”
“Absolutely. I say it in a really wise way, though. With the benefit of experience,” he said as he held up a hand for her to stop. “Okay. Now, don’t think too hard about it, just throw me the ball.”
She turned her left shoulder toward him, remembering with her body a lesson her father had once given her. She took a step as she threw to Dean. It sailed a little and he reached across his body to his left and caught it. “That’s a good start. Do it again.” He flipped the ball back to her, and as he did, she couldn’t help thinking about poor Mackey Sasser. She turned the glove palm-up to make the catch, cradling the ball as it reached her. “There you go,” he said. “You have talent.”
“Really?”
There was a pause. “You could have talent.”
She laughed. They did this a few more times—she threw reasonably consistently for a person who never threw anything except maybe crumpled-up tissues into a garbage can, and she caught what he gently lobbed in her direction about half the time. “Okay, I want to show you something,” Dean said, and he walked over to her. He came and stood right behind her until she felt heat coming off him all up and down her back. “If I handle you a little while I show you this, is that okay?”
She turned and looked him in the eye over her shoulder. “Yeah, it’s okay.”
He might have winked. He might not have. It was a tough angle. But he put his hands on her arms and repositioned her with her left shoulder facing the target again. “You have this part right. But then when you throw, lead with your elbow, and before you release the ball, I want you to flop this wrist”—he grabbed the wrist of her right hand—“flop this wrist back like this before you throw. Palm up. Like you’re about to raise the roof.”
“Raise the roof?”
He put his palms up and pumped his arms. “You know.”
“Oh my God, forget I asked. If the kids you coach see you do that, they’re never going to listen to you again.”
“All right, Muscles, are you ready to get serious?” She felt him pull a couple of inches away from her, and she smiled.
“I’m ready, I’m ready.” She cocked her arm behind her.
He was against her back again. His left foot crept forward and nudged her left foot a few inches forward. “You want a little more space here.” He curled his right arm along hers, right up to the back of her hand, where he rested his palm. Five seconds passed. Five more. “What are you doing?” she finally asked.
“I’m hanging out,” Dean said, directly into her ear.
Eveleth had always hated how blushing felt. It was accompanied by such a miserable desire to cease to be, utterly, to turn into a fog that could be waved away. This blush, though, was like blooming, like she might look down and see petals flutter from her own shoulders. She sucked in her breath and they stayed like that. She started to worry that he could feel her pulse in her wrist, because she could feel it in her temples and was afraid her whole rib cage might be going thmm-thmm-thmm. Before she could even try to inch away from him, he reached up and laid two fingers against the side of her throat. “I’m checking your heart rate. You know, making sure you’re nice and relaxed. It’s part of my system.” Thmm-thmm-thmm. “Wait,” he said. And he blew on her neck. He blew right on her neck, which made her whole arm break out in goosebumps. He looked down at her skin and said, with a mix of curiosity and satisfaction, “Huh.”
She looked over her shoulder. “You blew on me.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Because?”
“You had a bug on you.”
“Oh, please. Get back to work, Coach,” she said firmly.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Next time I see a bug, I’ll let it crawl down the back of your shirt.”
“Great. Next time you blow on me, I’m going to elbow you in the gut.”
He laughed from somewhere in his chest, somewhere pushed up against her shoulders. “So, you’re going to turn as you throw. Like I said, you’re going to lead with your elbow.” He moved his hand up from her hand to her elbow. “That’s going to go first. Then as you throw, you’re going to pick up this foot”—he reached down and tapped her right hip with one finger—“and wind up facing forward, right? So you’re going to turn your body front.”
She looked over her right shoulder again and narrowed her eyes. “I feel like this isn’t how you teach high school boys to throw.”
“It’s not. They smell terrible.”
“You know this is incredibly transparent,” she said.
“Hey, I’m working a method here. Take it or leave it.”
“Carry on,” she said.
“So here, take your glove hand”—he bumped her glove with his—“and put this elbow up. Point it where I’m going to be. Then you’re going to flick your wrist, follow through, come around with this leg, and that’s…that’s throwing a baseball.”
“Now I can throw like you do?”
He stepped away from her. “These days, yes, you can probably throw exactly like I do.”
She scrunched up her face. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t.” He jogged away from her a little, then he slowed and turned back. �
��Okay, hit me,” he said, punching his glove.
She turned so that her body was perpendicular to him. She scooted her feet a little farther apart. She pulled her arm back with the ball in her hand, and she aimed her left elbow at Dean. Weight forward, elbow forward, flick, follow through, rotate. She threw the ball directly at the ground. “Oh, uh-oh.”
He ran forward to pick it up, laughing. “No, no, it’s a lot to remember.”
“I want to watch you throw. I feel like it would help.”
He stood up with the ball in his hand and seemed to weigh it. “You were just watching me throw.”
“Throw for real,” she said.
“Eveleth, I don’t think that’s—”
“Not at me, you goofball, you’d kill me. Throw it at the fence.” She gestured with the glove that had pink.
He eyeballed the gray fence that bounded one side of the soccer field. “I don’t know, Ev.”
She walked toward him until she was close, and then she folded her arms. “It’ll help. Just let me observe.”
“Fine.” He turned toward the fence, stepped, and she watched his body operate. She felt like she could see every muscle and bone and tendon that he arranged, pulled taut, and then let go like a slingshot. His shoulders rotated, his hips twisted—she even saw something shift in the back of his neck. The ball flew and made a sharp bang against the fence. He turned back to Eveleth, who nodded a little.
He opened the bag on the ground next to him and turned it sideways, and ten or so baseballs rolled out. He threw them one after another, bang, bang, bang, first looking like a guy who knew how to throw, but then looking like a pitcher. He fiddled with the brim of his Calcasset High School cap. He rubbed his hand against his hip. By the time he threw the last one, he was fully kicking his leg in the wind-up, and Eveleth even saw him sneak a look at a first base that wasn’t there.
He was out of breath at the end, and a pile of baseballs had accumulated at the base of the fence. He stood with his hands on his hips. Evvie stood next to him for a minute, mimicking his stance and his forward gaze. Then she walked over to the fence and gathered up the balls, dropping them into a little pouch she made with her shirt. She came back and dumped them on the ground in front of Dean. He nodded. He picked one up. Bang.
They hit at what looked to her like a very consistent spot. After a while, she could see the marks where they were hitting, and they were close together, grouped like a basket of peaches. But mostly, she watched Dean. His forehead got a little damp, until a little swirl of hair stuck to it. There was a story in it for him somewhere in there, somebody to beat, and once, she heard him whisper what she was pretty sure was “Yeah, there it is, fucker.”
Dean threw like big cats pounce in nature documentaries. She could know it was coming, she could watch him settle, she could watch the twitches while he waited, but every time it happened it was still surprising how merciless it was and how silently it was done. She gathered up the baseballs and brought them back and put them at his feet, but this time he stopped with his hands on his hips and said, “How much of this do you need to see?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, how much of it do you need to do?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Nah, this is for you, Minnesota.”
“You sure?”
He looked at her, a little out of breath. “Why are we out here?”
She walked over to the fence with her hands in her pockets and peered at the marks on it. “This doesn’t look to me like you’re throwing all over the place,” she called over to him. “What am I missing?”
“Fuck’s sake,” he said, looking at the bright blue sky. “Evvie, it’s inches, pitching. It’s inches. The fact that I’m not throwing it over the fence into the road doesn’t mean anything has changed. Why are we talking about this again?”
“Because if I could do anything as well as you do that, I’d want to keep doing it as long as I could. And I think you do, too. I’ve seen what it looked like when it wasn’t going well. You weren’t doing that.” She pointed at the little cluster of marks on the fence. “So something’s different. You’re not even curious?”
“I quit. It’s done.”
She walked toward him. “If it’s done, why did you sit on a boat called Second Chance and let them take your picture?”
He shifted on his feet. “It was a photographer. It was his idea. It was that or the Natural Booty.”
She shook her head. “Don’t do that. You know what I’m talking about. You know what you said in that interview, you know that you go out in the middle of the night—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he told her firmly. “If I’d wanted to talk about it, I’d have told you about it, like I said the last time you asked me about it.”
“I don’t think you’re ready to give up. I think that’s why you sneak around.”
“Evvie…do you ever quit?”
She was right in front of him again, and she rested her hand on his pitching arm. “There’s a game every year, an exhibition game, between the Claws and this team from Freeport. They play, they raise money, the money gets split between their PTA and ours, with a bonus for the winner. Sometimes there are guests who play on one of the—”
“Are you kidding me? Fuck, no,” he said. “You want to bring a hundred reporters here to write about how sad it is that I’m pitching in a charity game? These people are just now getting bored with me; I’m not giving them anything.”
“We’re not going to announce it,” she said, moving fluidly into the future tense. “We’ll tell the team. It’ll be a surprise for everybody else. The kids you coach are going to love it. And you can see how it goes. You’ll pitch an inning.”
He still had a ball in his hand, and he kept running his fingers over the stitching. “You’re not listening,” he said.
“I know.”
THE CALCASSET CLAWS AND THE Freeport Explorers played an exhibition game they called the Spring Dance every year on the last Sunday in May. They alternated between the two ballparks, had a carnival beforehand in the parking lot, and, every year, the host team tried to top the year before. There was laser tag in Freeport one year; there was a virtual reality room in Calcasset the next year. There was a dog show in Calcasset one year; there was a bull rider in Freeport the next year.
This was Calcasset’s year, and the organizers were understandably enthusiastic when Dean Tenney sidled into their temporary office at Dacey Park a couple of weeks ahead of the game to tell them that if it was okay with the team, he wanted to show his gratitude for how he’d been welcomed by pitching an inning. Freeport might have had a vertical wind tunnel last year, but Calcasset was going to have a news story. It would remain a secret until he walked onto the field; that was his only condition.
When Dean had closed the deal with Liza, who ran the whole thing, he exited the office and stepped into a cinderblock hallway. The way he’d come, to the right, led back out to the lot where he’d parked his truck. The other way led to the field where he’d only ever been at night. He went left. As he walked, he took out his phone and texted Eveleth. They went for it, he wrote. Now I have to do it.
She sent back a blue heart.
* * *
—
He opened a gate with a squeaky latch and stepped onto the field. The first baseball field he’d ever been on was in Lansing, Michigan, where he was born.
He used to lie under the bleachers when his brothers were playing and listen to the ball instead of watching. It was the sound of it hitting the catcher’s mitt that had hooked him. Thump. For so many guys he knew, it was the sound of the bat. They’d loved to hit, growing up craving first the clang of the Little League aluminum bat and then, if they made it that far, the gunshot sound of the major league wooden bat. But for him, it had always been the ball hitting the mitt. He firmly believed that good pitches sound
ed different from bad ones, and when he had started to fail, he had craved that good sound, that satisfying sound of the pitch that was where the catcher wanted it.
The last time he’d walked off the field at Yankee Stadium, the crowd had been happy to see him go and unhappy not to be given the opportunity to drop an active beehive right on his head. He’d known—he’d known—that he might never pitch again. Walking onto the field in Calcasset was going to be his first pitching gig since he’d handed the ball to the Yankees’ pitching coach and walked into the dugout, accompanied by a guy he heard, clear as day, yelling, “Get the fuck out, ya fuckin’ head case!”
He walked out onto the grass, crossing from the dugout through the infield until he was on the pitcher’s mound where Evvie had once found him surrounded by flashlights. With his hands on his hips, he stood and stared at the plate. He thought about her, and about smashing the dishes in her kitchen. She’d been so calm and so determined, one plate leading to the next and the next, and he hadn’t been sure she even knew he was there at times. He’d looked down and seen her bleeding, and for a second, he’d known what to do and been able to do it.
He kicked the dirt once and walked off the field, thinking about the way he had peeked at the back of her neck when he was standing next to her at the sink, pressing down on the cut on her hand.
* * *
—
The next few weeks were an exercise in plotting. Liza spoke to the manager of the Claws, and he in turn spoke to the team about Dean. One or two of them expressed surprise that he wanted to do it, but who could resist the pull of a comeback story that would get written up everywhere, that might happen on their own home field? To a player, the guys who had met Dean liked him, found him funny and surprisingly smart for someone who’d been talked about like he was a bit of a nut.
They made Dean a uniform that said TENNEY on the back. They asked him whether he wanted his old number, but he said no. Instead, for luck, he asked them for 26, because Evvie’s address was 26 Bancroft Street. When he got home and he showed the shirt to Evvie, she said, “Hey, look. That’s my house number. Maybe it’s lucky.”