And now it was built on making room for Betsy.
“Found what I was looking for,” said June, waltzing back to the table. She handed something small to Betsy, studying her face as their hands touched.
Betsy’s expression matched what she read from the tube. “‘Heavens to Betsy.’” June and I smiled at each other while she twisted it open and stared at how beautiful it was. And when June handed her a small pearl mirror, she smeared the lipstick on and gasped.
“The best pink,” Betsy said.
The three of us finished our tomato‑and‑cucumber sandwiches and tried not to leave lipstick on the bread. Betsy forgot about her hair, but June didn’t, and she trimmed it right up. I forgot about last summer’s Betsy, and all of us forgot about the heat.
“We should get back to the stadium. Rally prep, right?” I didn’t know if June meant her or us, but it didn’t matter. She cleared our plates and put them in the sink, and while she puttered around the kitchen for another minute or two, Betsy and I snuck back to that wall of pictures.
“Look at this one, Derby—it’s some kind of a wedding announcement in an old newspaper,” Betsy said. “She was supposed to get married, June’s daughter.”
I’d missed it the last time I was there, when I’d broken in by accident. As soon as I read the printed words that were fading right back into the page, I swear that humid house gave me shivers.
ENGAGED TO BE WED:
MISS PHOEBE SUSAN MATTINGLY TO MR. FERDINAND HENRY GLASGOW.
MR. AND MRS. FRANKLIN MATTINGLY ARE PLEASED TO WELCOME HIM AS THEIR SON FOREVER.
No wonder he’d been sharing tissues at Franklin’s service. Ferdie was supposed to be June’s real kind of family.
Twenty-Four
IT was hard to rally up any excitement for the afternoon’s game, because my heart had already taken as much as I thought it could in one day. But then I saw Garland back at the Grill, and he was always good at making hope float on top again.
“Sunshine!” he said.
“Hey, Garland. Where’s Triple?”
“You beat him this time,” Garland said. “Peter made him forget all about the onions.”
I took the pistachio‑shell bag out of my pocket, the one that had Peter’s deluxe meal inside, and set it on Garland’s prep area, trying to be casual and not revealing the heartbeat that wanted to jump out of my skin.
“Do you know who Phoebe Susan is?” I asked.
“Is that Miss Houston’s name?” Garland tied and retied his apron strings, and that’s when I knew how deep June’s once-upon-a-time was. Even Garland didn’t know.
And then my shine turned back on a little, and I danced around the Grill doing the onions and prepping the mustard. When Triple hopped into the Grill, all three of us twirled around each other until Garland said that we both better get out of there because “Three’s a lot of love, but three’s also a crowd.”
So I grabbed Peter’s dinner and Triple’s hand, and we headed out to the game.
“Here,” I said, handing Triple the bag. “This is for Peter, the perfect vegetarian meal for a turtle.”
“Pistachios?”
“Look inside,” I said. “It’s Rockskipper grass, straight from the outfield, so it’s the most paid-attention-to lawn in all of Ridge Creek. And if you ever need any more, just go see Marcus in the bullpen. If you call him the Skipper, he’ll do anything you want.”
“Awesome,” said Triple, and he stuck that dinner right in his pocket.
The sun beat down on the scene, on the line milling around June’s box office and under Ferdie’s words, which seemed so far from the words of Opening Day. The hot pavement seared through the soles of your sneakers if you stood in place for too long, so everyone had a little extra bounce in their step.
“How was the creek today?” I asked, afraid he’d bring up Twang, afraid he’d be upset that I’d missed another day for high-fives and turtle practice.
“Oh, Derby, it was awesome,” Triple said. “Charlie came by looking for a new one today. She said she had to start over because her mom left the lid of the tank open and her best racer escaped.”
“Well, that’s a real shame,” I said.
And I only sort of meant it. Triple had me and Garland as examples for how to treat people nice, and that was it. I didn’t want him to grow up like a jerk, but I did want him to beat Charlie Bell.
“I know,” he said. “Such a shame.”
“Derby!” For the umpteenth time that day, my name spilled out of a Plogger’s mouth, and mostly in a way that said Hello and How are you and Nice to see you.
“Hi, Lollie,” I said, and thought an extra Blue cow, just in case a laugh might be coming on. “Betsy. You guys remember Triple, right?”
Triple seemed a little bit stunned by the two of them, because he turned the color of Heavens to Betsy itself. “Hey,” he said, and ran up into the stadium.
“Do you want to sit with us tonight? We like the first‑base side, and I know you guys are good bosses over there on the other,” I said, not meaning bossy in a bad way, but it’s what came out first.
“Sure,” Lollie said. “Right, Betsy?”
“That’d be nice.” She squeezed my hand on our way up to the seats, and as nice as Lollie was, it was even nicer to share a secret with only Betsy.
So the four of us got our Rockskippers posters and sat in the seats behind the first base dugout—Triple, Lollie, Betsy, and I. When Marcus caught my eye from the bullpen, he looked real confused. I just shrugged and laughed and was glad I could use the Heritage Inn bathroom for the rest of the summer without some kind of inquisition.
“Too bad Marcus won’t be around, since he’s so busy fixing up the grass,” Betsy said when she saw me looking his way.
My loyalty to Marcus ran deeper than I could reach, because I blurted out, “Turf management, that’s what it’s called. It’s not some old lady’s gardening club.”
Those Plogger ponytails whipped around in perfect precision, like they had planned a routine to start when someone said turf management. Triple looked at us like he’d rather be over there in the bullpen, and the three of us girls laughed, all together.
“It’s so hot out here,” Lollie said, after the laughing ran out. Betsy and I looked at each other, and I knew it was because this hot was nothing compared to the hot it had been in June’s house. Where Marcus knew all about the outside, Betsy knew all about the inside.
“She needs a better fan, right?” I asked Betsy. “Or an air conditioner for her window or something?”
“She sure does. It’s not right to be so lonely and miserable at the same time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We can fix one of those parts, at least.”
That’s when Lollie grabbed Betsy’s elbow to convince her it was time to start the wave, time to rally for the Rockskippers. So that’s when I added a wrinkle to our plan to rally behind June. We could fix up the outside of her home, and we could cool down the inside. Ridge Creek was no place to be in the summer without air conditioning, especially if you lived in a real home that didn’t have wheels and didn’t have a fryer.
And then, as I stood up and sat down on the count of Betsy and Lollie’s wave, watching Marcus rake the field free of bumps, I saw Ferdie across the way. Something in that moment stuck, and I wondered if I could make that something work.
I also wondered where I could find a bunch more pennies to wish on.
Twenty-Five
WHEN it was the top of the ninth inning and I was still thinking about those pennies, I figured it would be a good idea to leave early and get back to the Grill. The Rockskippers were up by a lot, so the bottom of the ninth wouldn’t need to happen, and all of those fans would get a head start on their cheeseburgers and celebrating.
“Triple!” I yelled through my rolled-up poster, because my voice needed all the oomph it could get against the crowd. “Let’s go!”
He was moving at the opposite speed of Peter, off collecting all ki
nds of things. From where I stood, it looked like leftovers and trash, but to Triple, it could have been an orchestra.
“Look,” he said, walking over with a stack of popcorn buckets, so many that he had to use his chin to balance them. “This is awesome.”
“I see that,” I said. “Do you need some help?” So Triple handed me a bunch of those buckets, and somehow I got the ones that still had kernels and crumbs inside.
“Do you think Peter would eat this?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Derby.”
Blue cow.
“Okay, right,” I said. “And what are your plans for these things?”
Triple looked at me with a face that was happier than I’d seen it all month, happier even than when he’d plucked Peter from the creek.
“Drums, Derby,” he said. “The drums.”
Blue cow. Blue cow. Blue cow.
“Well, okay. Let’s go find you some drumsticks, kiddo,” I said. Since he could still hardly see over his stack, I put my hand on his shoulder so he’d know when to turn and that I wasn’t about to let this instrument face any danger.
We crossed back over to the spot we called home, stuck on that hot pavement like tar bubbles, squeezing everything we could out of this season. And when we got back to the Grill and Triple went to check on Peter, I took two of those popcorn buckets. He’d found so many, I didn’t think he would even notice if a couple were gone. And even if he had, the Rockskippers had a game the very next day and popcorn would be on the menu.
I grabbed the empty tip jar from the table outside where we kept the mustards. It wasn’t so much a jar as a mustard tub that had run out a long time ago, but still, I snuck it back into my queen room with the popcorn buckets. And then I pulled the shower curtain door behind me and cut small rectangles out of my brand-new Rockskippers poster.
I taped a sign that said LUMP EMMETT to one popcorn bucket and FRANKLIN MATTINGLY to the other, and then I made a bigger sign that asked WHO’S YOUR FAVORITE ROCKSKIPPER? I loved Lump Emmett as much as anyone except for maybe Marcus and Mrs. Emmett. And I know Franklin wasn’t ever on the team roster itself, but he sure was an honorary Rockshipper.
Between the two of them, I was sure we’d collect a whole bunch of extra tips tonight. If people had a choice, then taking just one of the buckets wasn’t like I was stealing from the Grill. That’s how I convinced myself that this wasn’t a sneaky thing after all, even though I felt a little bit swoopy in my stomach.
So I stacked those two new tip buckets, stuck them under my arm, and grabbed two wooden spoons from the kitchenette so Triple would have a pair of drumsticks. Then I walked back over to the Grill like nothing important was happening.
“Derby,” Garland said from above in the window, “can you help me out up here or what? That crowd storming over makes me think it was a winning kind of night.”
I put the popcorn buckets down where the old tip jar used to be. My Christmas Nutmeg pocket had thirty-nine cents in it and the pennies were all old, so I threw that bunch of change into Franklin’s bucket to get it started.
Twenty-Six
UNDER the marquee that night, Marcus and I counted the money from Franklin’s bucket. He didn’t let on whether he wondered about the one with his dad’s name, colored in red marker and propped up by the mustards. And I didn’t ask.
“How much do you think a fan costs? Or an air conditioner? They have those, right, for windows?” I didn’t know too much about that, because the Rambler’s air only worked if we were driving over sixty-five miles per hour, and Garland is, after all, a rambler.
Ridge Creek had given Franklin’s bucket sixteen dollars and ninety-three cents’ worth of wishes.
“Garland’s letting you keep all these tips for June?” Marcus poked around in the bottom for the pennies. “But you’ll need more than this for a fan.”
It’s funny how you think you are doing something nice for somebody else, and then something sweeps that feeling away, something that says Garland might not understand after all. He didn’t know we’d had more tips than the ones I’d given him from the Lump bucket.
I didn’t answer Marcus’s question, just helped dig for shiny pennies. “Here’s one,” I said, grateful for its year.
I peeked at the marquee above, but this time it was empty. Ferdie had already taken the poster news down, making the stadium silent again. Marcus and I each put a thumb to that new penny, and I pushed a little extra hard because I thought that might help with the wishing.
“What did you wish for?” Marcus flicked the penny over his shoulder, and it spun around on its edge for a while before it settled down.
I didn’t know if it was possible to feel something in common with a penny, but in those seconds while it tumbled, I knew exactly how it felt. The thing about wishes is that they are the same as secrets, only it’s okay to keep them. But when Ferdie walked over with his box of letters, I wanted to spill my secrets and wishes and everything in between. I wanted all the wobbling to quit.
“This, this right here,” I said. “This is what I wished for.”
“The marquee?” Marcus asked. “I don’t think it’ll fit in the Rambler.”
I gave Marcus a look that must have been one he’d seen before, because he said Sorry to me before I even squeaked out a syllable.
“I mean Ferdie. Here right now,” I whispered, after accepting his apology and before Ferdie got close. Because our plan wasn’t just about turf management and flowers.
“Evening,” Ferdie said.
“Hi, Ferdie.” I pulled Franklin’s bucket onto my lap, trying to get out of his way and make him see me all at the same time. “You forgot to come by for sweet‑potato fries!”
He laughed real slow and gravelly, like a wheelbarrow with a busted wheel that kept getting stuck on a rock. “One of these nights,” he said, and that was good enough for me.
“Okay,” I said. “And can we get into the stadium the night before the Rally? The right way?”
I thought by being honest about getting in on a non–game night, and not trying to sneak in through FILLING and BELLIES, that I might be able to erase whatever that thing was, that thing I didn’t want to admit, that thing that Garland might not understand after all.
But Marcus and Ferdie both looked at me like I’d asked to umpire the game itself.
“Please,” I said. “It’s for June.”
Ferdie set his box of letters down and wiped some sweat from his lip with the collar of his shirt. And then he put his hands on his hips and said, “For her, anything.”
I’ve believed in wishes ever since.
June 20
Twenty-Seven
ON the eve of the Rally, the Ridge Creek Rockskippers were probably all piled on a bus together, making their way on back roads from a string of away games. They’d get the next morning to wash their uniforms and maybe eat breakfast with their families, and then it was time for their long day of getting honored and eating pie and exhausting themselves before they had to get to work.
But before that happened, Marcus and I had some work of our own.
Since it was real late, everyone looked a little different from how they did in the daytime. That must have been what the first day of school felt like when you hadn’t seen a friend all summer, like the deep-down person you knew was there somewhere but it was a little hard to tell, with a new outfit and a summer tan. Marcus had showered off all of the bullpen’s grit, and it might have been the first time all summer that you could see the brown skin on his elbows. Betsy and Lollie came in matching pajamas—pink ones—because they’d told Candy that they weren’t feeling too good, that it must have been something they’d eaten at the Grill, and that they were going to lie down in the lobby, where it was cooler.
I didn’t have to worry about telling stories to get out of the Rambler, on account of my log-sawers back there. They’d sleep through anything.
Thanks to Ferdie, we got to walk in the front gate of the James Edward Alle
n Gibbs Stadium like proper guests. He carried a key ring that was as big around as a mixing bowl, and there were about twelve keys on it, jangling and clacking against each other like some fancy lady’s jewelry.
He didn’t say anything after he turned the key and swung open the gate. He only smiled the kind of smile you get when someone’s unwrapping the birthday present you picked out for them, the smile that says, I know this is what you wanted, and so it’s become what I want too.
I think he knows those boards in the outfield are still bent.
I think he likes sharing this place.
And then Ferdie handed me a different key, one that hung off a strap along with a whistle, and said, “In the dugout, next to the batting helmets.”
“Thank you,” I said, and the four of us ran into the dark stadium.
Marcus, Betsy, and Lollie followed me, and I snuck through the rip in the net behind home plate first.
“How did you know about this?” asked Betsy.
Marcus looked at her. “How did you not?”
“Marcus,” I said, “that’s not something the Skipper would say. Come on.”
Betsy stuck her arm through the net, pink fingernails and all, and I reached out to help her squeeze through. I did the same for Lollie, but Marcus shook all six of our arms off. I think he feels more at home on a riding lawn mower than hanging out with girls in pink pajamas.
“You know we could have just hopped over the dugout from that front row,” Marcus said. He was right, but some things are tradition.
I led the way to the dugout, Marcus on my left and the Ploggers on my right. The moon above was split in half, helping out with the darkness. We’d need that light for the letters, and we’d need the dark for the wish.
The dugout smelled like spit and sweat and grass and gum, but it had the best view of second base and the best view of home. Marcus might never have been invited into the dugout, but the way he sat up on the edge of the bench, feet on its seat, he looked more like the Skipper than ever before.
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