Even still, there was an awful lot to get rid of. I went back downstairs for a second trash bag, then a third. Thinking back, I was glad Natalie had fought with me last year about coming over to take away most of Emily’s clothes, clean up the personal items like razors and toothbrushes and her books and knitting basket. It was good Natalie had stepped in. I hadn’t been able to do what needed to be done. I still kept some of Em’s things in a box in the closet, but I made sure to avoid that box. There are some things you just don’t let go of. When I got to the stack of our wedding photos, I held them reverently in my hands before tucking them into the drawer of my bedside table, where they’d be safe.
The Goodwill bags went in my truck bed and then I tossed my jeans in the wash. I found Rae’s number in the pocket, and before I could let myself think it over too much, I threw it away. King was settling in just fine. We would be okay. Another pretty girl was the last thing I needed to get myself mixed up with.
It felt good throwing all the clutter into those garbage bags. Everything I took out of my closet, it was like just one little piece of weight off my soul. The same as cleaning had been.
Maybe there was something to those letters.
Tomorrow, I’d go out and get some cleaning supplies, do it right.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You saw it, though, right? Boom, that ball is up in the air and then it’s gone, over the fence.” I was a high school junior, and I can’t say that anything mattered to me quite so much as how far I could knock a baseball or how many people saw me do it.
“That wasn’t nothing though,” Dave said.
Dave was my best friend. An alright pitcher, too. But a better friend than a pitcher, to be honest. We were in the hall, outside the cafeteria, waiting for first period. It was the best place to hang out before class, and we had a small crowd around us. Yeah, we were showing off.
“Anyone can knock a home run. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy as shit you knocked it out of the park when I was sitting on second. But naw, man, it was that catch.”
“I saw that shit,” Damon said. Damon played football. He said he hated baseball, but he went to every game. I guess I said and did the same in reverse. “That shit was dope, I didn’t think you were going to get it. When you dove for it, you probably ate so much grass the cops are going to be after you. But you came up with it and that kid was out, out, out. End of the game, end of the line. Go home, kid.”
Damon had everyone laughing, and everyone there who had seen the game was glad they had seen the game. Everyone there who hadn’t, they wished they had. By the end of the day, the story would go around so much that they’d think they had seen it. They’d seen me save the day.
“Yo, you hear there’s gonna be a scout next game?” Damon asked. He didn’t talk much shit like the rest of us did, but he was alright. He could throw a ball, and he always had your back.
“You’re shitting me,” Dave said.
“That’s cool,” I said. No big deal, just a scout. Just a chance to make something of my life, just a chance to make a life doing what I loved.
“He’s just getting you excited,” Dave said. “Why would he know, and we wouldn’t?”
“No, I ain’t shitting,” Damon said. Some of the crowd had wandered off to their lockers. We only had a few minutes before the first bell, and it was just us three guys left. Damon leaned in close. “Coach Mendez came into the locker room, was talking to Coach Pike. Said there’s going to be a scout at the next game. I think it was the next game, mighta been the one after, I don’t know. Said he wasn’t going to tell you fools because you’d get all worked up about it, said he didn’t want you fucking up or showing off or some shit like that.”
“That’s cool,” I repeated. No big deal.
The bell rang, and I was off to math. Math was alright, but I’d liked geometry better than pre-calc. Geometry was good for carpentry. Pre-calc, well, there was a guy who applied it to baseball. He liked to figure out trajectories of swings and stuff like that. But he wasn’t very good at batting. Geometry, that at least was practical.
“Who’re you going to ask?”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
I was sitting in English, half paying attention, half dreaming about how I’d show off for the scout. Jennifer Hales was sitting next to me, her blonde hair in perfect ringlets. She and the rest of the girls on the cheerleading squad were doing their hair in ringlets now.
“To the prom. Who’re you going to ask to the prom?” She cracked her gum and shot me a quizzical look.
“That’s not my thing,” I said. I don’t dance. Sports, I feel powerful. Dancing, I’d just feel clumsy.
“You should ask someone,” Jennifer said.
The bell rang for lunch, which was good because I didn’t want to think about prom anyway.
I sat down at the end of the table, our table. Dave was across from me, the rest of the guys on the seats beside me, and most of the girls from the cheerleading squad were at the table across the aisle. It was all smiles when I walked up. It was good.
Then Emily walked in.
Every head turned. Not just because she was new. Not just because she was beautiful, either, though it didn’t much hurt matters. No, Emily had something else going for her—a kind of quiet, self-assured confidence that radiated off her like sunlight. She walked with her head high and her blue-eyed gaze steady, as if she owned the place. As if high school was the least of her concerns, and certainly nothing to fuss over. You couldn’t help but stare.
“Who’s that?” Dave asked me, his voice lowered.
I didn’t know, so I leaned over and asked Jennifer. “Who’s that?”
“Emily,” she said. Jennifer kept track of everyone in school worth knowing. She even kept track of the people who weren’t worth knowing, to her credit. “Emily Jackson. Freshman. Just moved to the city. From Kansas, I think.”
She was cute as hell, but she wasn’t petite; there was muscle tone to her arms. She had a tan already, and it didn’t look fake. She wore a sleeveless flannel and had Levi’s tucked into her cowboy boots. Her hair was dirty blonde, like she didn’t care about bleaching it, but she’d done herself up enough to show she cared about looking good.
But cowboy boots? I mean, come on.
“Hey,” Dave said, as she walked by. She turned, half-nodded, kept walking.
“Nice flannel,” one of the girls said, sarcastically.
Emily kept walking, didn’t even turn to look at the girl who said that. Instead, she headed away, across the cafeteria.
I watched her go.
Later that day, I was walking to gym class and ran across the new girl at her locker.
“Hey,” I said. And then I froze.
Talking to most girls was easy, but Emily wasn’t most girls. She looked up at me, expectant—and, judging by the smile playing at her lips, slightly amused.
“Uh, I’m sorry about that girl,” I stammered. “The one who made fun of you like that. I didn’t catch who it was…” I started to tell her.
“I don’t care what those people think,” she said with a shrug.
She meant it, too. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I wanted to be someone whose thoughts she did care about.
“Alright,” I said, and since she’d turned back to her locker, I walked off feeling like I’d somehow said the wrong thing.
Every other girl at the school had seen me play ball—but not Emily. So instead of flirting with me or acting like I was someone she needed to impress, she’d sized me up as if waiting for me to impress her. It was kind of funny. And you know what was even funnier? I wanted to.
Two days later, I’d seen her around and I could have sworn she had smiled at me once. But to be honest, a girl as pretty as that, I was liable to convince myself she was smiling at me just because I hoped she had.
I was at practice, close in playing shortstop, where I belong in life. Crucial to the team, in with all the action. I liked playing shortstop. School had been out for a
couple of hours or so, and practice was almost over. No one was hitting anything anywhere near me, and I saw Emily walking through the parking lot. I could have sworn she was stopping to check out my truck.
A couple of the guys had newer trucks, trucks with bigger engines, more gears. Damon drove his dad’s dually. Sam’d had a lifted 4x4 until he’d rolled it a couple months back. But my truck—my dad’s truck—was something special. An ‘84 Ford F150. Nothing fancy, just a truck that was still running fine twenty years and three hundred thousand miles into her life. I know it’s the kind of truck I’d be checking out.
The ground ball rolled right past me and it took me five, ten seconds to even register it.
To hell with it. I let that ball stay where it was, ambled over to the parking lot. Let people yell all they want behind me—it was just practice. I had my priorities straight.
Emily saw me coming, and she stopped walking. She leaned up against the tailgate of that Ford and she put on a smile I would have killed someone for.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“My name’s Luke Cawley,” I said.
“I know.”
When she smiled that time, I knew it was for me.
She took me to see horses. I’m the one who drove, but she told me where we were going. It was her uncle’s brother-in-law’s farm, about thirty minutes out of town, and no one was around but she swore up and down they wouldn’t mind and Emily wasn’t the kind of girl to swear to nothing lightly. I knew that much, right off the bat.
“You like horses?” she asked as we pulled off the back highway, over the irrigation ditch and onto the farm.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”
“You’ve never ridden a horse?” she asked.
I was worried, for just half a second, that I’d disappointed her. But then she broke out into that grin again. The one that lit up everything around her.
“That’s amazing,” she said. “I get to put you on your first horse!”
I grinned back. It was getting easier to talk to Emily but in that moment I didn’t know what to say. Maybe there weren’t any right words anyhow. So I just smiled as I drove over the grass to a good spot to park.
“I rode horses all growing up,” she said. “I could ride before I could walk.”
“You were in the rodeo?” I asked. Jennifer had told me that much.
“I weren’t in it,” she said. “Wasn’t,” she corrected herself. It was cuter the first way, though. “My mom and dad were. Dad still is.”
“They split up?”
“Naw, but my mom says we got to live in one place now that I’m in high school. We tried it out in Kansas but Mom got a better job in the city so here I am. Dad’s home often enough.”
“The rodeo, though,” I said. It was easy to get her to talk about herself. That was even better than doing the talking, because you can’t say the wrong thing when you’re listening. If you only say a few things, and you say the right ones, people will listen to you. That’s what my dad told me.
“I’ve never known anything else, I guess. Just horses and roads and crowds.”
There were about six horses grazing in the field, and Emily walked up to one of them, a black and gray one. “This is Rooter,” she said.
“Rooter?”
“You get on him, and he doesn’t like to move. Just roots in one place, won’t listen to anyone. So they named him Rooter.”
She started petting him between the ears and down his neck. I must have looked nervous, because she took my hand.
That’s when I knew she had me. Right then. She didn’t snag me the first time I saw her, nor the first time we talked. It was the first time we touched. Her hand was warm but there was something more to it than that. I felt energy going between us in a way I couldn’t explain then or now, like us touching was its own living thing. But I didn’t need an explanation. The magic itself, that was enough.
While I was petting Rooter, she ran off, came back a few moments later with a saddle and some gear I didn’t recognize.
“Wait a second,” I said.
She put the bit in his mouth, strapped the saddle to his back. Rooter looked bored. I probably looked terrified.
“You said this horse doesn’t listen to anyone.”
“He’s my favorite horse here,” Emily said. “So I’ll teach you on him.”
I started laughing, and she smiled at me, and her teeth weren’t perfect but they were perfect.
She helped me up, and she taught me how to ride.
The sun didn’t last more than another thirty minutes, and that went by way too quick. We were back at the truck, and she was leaning against the tailgate like she’d done in the parking lot, and her legs went on for miles. And the cowboy boots? The cowboy boots made sense. They fit her.
“I should be getting home,” she said.
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“You’d better, Luke Cawley. I ain’t riding Rooter to my mom’s house.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “You were in the parking lot, where were you going? You’re not old enough to drive, right, so you don’t have a car in the lot back there. Were you...”
“Oh! Aren’t you full of yourself? Mister star baseball player. You think I was just out there waiting for you, hoping you’d come give me a ride?”
“Were you?”
“I shoulda thought of it,” she said. She reached out her hand, and I took it, and there was that magic again. “But I just went out to call my mom, have her pick me up, and I thought I’d watch you all practice. I didn’t hardly know you from Adam. Barely know you now. But you seem nice.”
I took a chance, then. I don’t know why. Something in me just had to.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I can give you a ride home if you want. Right now. But what I’d rather do, I’d rather drive a little further out, watch some of the stars before the moon comes up in a few hours.”
“Well ain’t you something,” Emily said, sizing me up in that way she had.
She put her hands on the tailgate and shoved herself to full standing, got close up to me. Emily was barely shorter than me. “Alright,” she finally said. “But you get me home by ten or else my daddy will find out.”
“Deal.”
“What do you want in life?” she asked. The heavens were open up above us, and we were lying in the bed of my dad’s Ford. It was just cold enough that it was right and natural that we were up against one another for warmth, but not so cold either of us thought about leaving.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“Tell me anyway,” she said.
I’d never met anyone as nice as Emily Jackson.
I took a breath. “First off, I guess I’ve gotta work with my hands, whatever I do,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go to school, play ball for Kansas State. If I’m being honest, I don’t think it matters much if I make it to the pros. Same as I love playing guitar but I’m not trying to be a country star. I’ll play ball as long as I can, and then...it’s kind of silly.”
“It’s not silly,” she said.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You couldn’t be silly if you tried.”
My stomach got all tight when she said that. She turned her head to look at me but I had to look away.
“Okay. I want to be a contractor. Work for myself, with my hands. Make things. That’s what I want to do.” The words tumbled out of my mouth and I kept going, afraid to look over and see if she thought what I wanted was small or dumb or just plain funny. “When I was a little kid, we lived outside of town for a couple years, in my uncle’s old place after he died. I must have been six, maybe seven. My dad was fixing up the place to sell. It was the first time I saw the guts of a house. I saw the plaster and the studs, and my dad started teaching me stuff. I realized that with my own hands I can build something like a house, some place where kids feel safe. I want some kid someday, some kid I don’t even k
now, to grow up in a house I built and feel safe. He doesn’t have to know I built it.”
I took a deep breath, exhaled. I could see my breath in the cold night air.
“That’s what I want,” I said.
“You’ll do it,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ve had a lot of guys tell me a lot of things,” Emily said. “Before I even ask, guys just say it at me whether I’m trying to hear them or not. Most of them, they say they want to ride off into the sunset with some beautiful girl like me and live off the land or stuff like that. Or they’re going to be bigger than Garth Brooks, or they’re going to ride better than my daddy. Ain’t no one alive going to be bigger than Garth Brooks or ride better than my daddy. And none of them have the heart you do, Luke Cawley. You’ve set your sights on something worth doing, and you’re going to do it.”
“Can I take you to the prom?” I asked. As soon as I thought it, I said it.
“Don’t that beat all,” she said, her voice gone quiet. “I move to the big city, and just like that I find a handsome, kind man to take me to prom. Well.” She took a breath. “Luke Cawley, the truth is, I’d love it if you took me to the prom.”
She took my hand in hers again, and I reckon I fell apart right then and there.
The next game, sure enough, there was a scout in the stands. It was dark out, and the lights were on the field. I loved that feeling, like all the light in the world was just on me and my teammates. But that night I didn’t care all that much about impressing the scout—I didn’t care all that much about impressing anyone but her. All that light was on me, lighting me up just so she could see.
I got a couple of good runs in, including a double that put two people across the plate. Got a few good outs. I felt alive in that way I’d only ever felt on the field, and I helped our team win a close game.
9 Letters Page 4