Throw Like a Woman

by Susan Petrone

  Throw Like

  a Woman

  •◊•

  Susan Petrone

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Story Plant

  Studio Digital CT, LLC

  P.O. Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2014 by Susan Petrone

  Jacket design by Barbara Aronica Buck

  Print ISBN-13 978-1-61188-199-8

  E-book ISBN-13 978-1-61188-200-1

  Visit our website at www.TheStoryPlant.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except as provided by US Copyright Law. For information, address The Story Plant.

  First Story Plant Printing: March 2015

  Printed in The United States of America

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  Dedication

  •◊•

  For Mamie, Connie, Toni, Maria, Julie, Ila, Justine, Tiffany, Eri, Chelsea, Mo’ne, and every other girl and woman who ever decided she’d rather play baseball.

  Acknowledgments

  •◊•

  Thank you to Dennis Lamp, who graciously shared his major league experience with me, along with the secret of why he had the best sinker in the majors. Thank you to Bob DiBiasio of the Cleveland Indians for giving me such an extensive tour of the clubhouse and the ballpark. Thanks to Becky Kyle, Stu Shea, Christopher Johnston, Nancy Marcus, Monica Plunkett, Bob Price, Toni Thayer, Jean Cummins, Catherine Donnelly, Jeanne Mallett, and Rich Bowering for reading and commenting on early drafts. Thank you to Joe Posnanski for helping out a fellow fan. Many thanks to Michael John Sullivan and Debbie Mercer for their assistance and friendship. A huge thank you to Josh Getzler for his spot-on editorial suggestions and to Jane Dystel for her kindness and professional expertise. My undying appreciation and thanks to Mary Doria Russell for her wisdom and humor. A biscuit to Juno and Mason for always keeping me company while I write. And most of all, thanks to Ella, for being the most encouraging, delightful, inspiring, creative little human I know, and to Mike, for holding the string of my kite.

  Chapter One

  •◊•

  Brenda Haversham’s father taught her how to throw a four-seam fastball when she was nine. The four-seamer is the go-to pitch when you need a strike. It is the heat, the pitch that makes batters tremble. The four-seamer should be gripped loosely, gently, to minimize friction between the hand and the ball and allow for the quickest possible release and maximum velocity. “You hold the ball like an egg, and it will fly out of your hand like a bird,” her father would say in his slightly accented English. Brenda believed him and dutifully followed her father out to the park every weekend. Her sinker sank and her curveball curved, but she never managed to make the four-seamer fly. Without a team for a girl to play on, there was no reason to make it fly. She didn’t find a reason until thirty-one years later, on a balmy day in March when Ed didn’t show up.

  The day had started out promising enough. Andy and Jon were waiting for their father at ten to ten, loaded down with their baseball gloves, bats, and a bag of balls in addition to Andy’s ever-present mp3 player and Jon’s equally ubiquitous DS. In the kitchen, Brenda decided to get a head start on the bills. She had a few other chores to do before meeting her best friend, Robin, for lunch. Undying love for her kids aside, she welcomed the break every other Saturday. Their bungalow was small enough that she could hear Andy and Jon fussing with each other in the living room as they waited. She heard Andy say, “Would you quit it?” followed by the sounds of scuffling.

  “What’s going on in there?” Brenda called. She didn’t need to look up to find the proper tone of voice that indicated she may or may not have seen who the initial perpetrator was.

  Jon answered first: “Nothing,” he called. That meant he had thrown the first punch. Since the divorce—rather since the night Ed left in a manner not unlike the Colts slinking out of Baltimore—Jon had become a bit more aggressive and prone to tantrums than a nine-year-old should have been. Andy, at twelve, was generally a calm, almost indulgent older brother. Lately, however, his patience seemed to be wearing thin, and Brenda wasn’t sure if this was because he was getting tired of Jon’s trying ways or just hormones. She tried to pretend that Andy was still a little boy, but he’d be thirteen before the end of the summer.

  With the boys quiet, she focused on making the perpetually tiny total in her checking account stretch in unnatural ways. She had moved on to unloading the dishwasher and cleaning the counters when she heard footsteps. She looked up to see Andy standing in the door to the kitchen, one ear bud hanging around his shoulder (his single concession to politeness, courtesy of Brenda), his pale blue eyes looking slightly red.

  “Dad isn’t here yet,” he said.

  The clock on the stove read 10:40. “I’ll call him, Andy. He’s probably just running late.”

  “Let me call his cell and see where he is,” Andy said. “He’s gotta be on his way here.”

  “”I’ll call him, honey. Don’t worry about it.” Ed answered on the fourth ring. All he had to do was say “Hello” and Brenda knew the boys wouldn’t be seeing him that day. She could almost see him stretched out in bed, one hand making grabbing stabs at the telephone, the other running through his bristly brown hair, as though his brain needed to be massaged before it could begin functioning properly.

  “Hi, Ed. The boys were wondering what time you think you’ll be getting here.” She chose her words carefully, because Andy and Jon were now standing in the kitchen.

  “Wow, I didn’t realize it was so late.” Ed coughed, his voice sounded raspy and dry. She recognized it as Ed’s hangover voice. “I’m definitely coming down with a cold. Would you believe I just woke up?”

  “Yes, I would,” Brenda replied, still trying to sound neutral.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to see the boys today. I don’t want them to get sick or anything.”

  “I understand, but you should probably be the one to tell them that,” Brenda handed the phone to Andy before Ed could protest.

  “Dad?” Andy said. “Where are you? What time are you getting here?” Brenda watched Andy’s face go from questioning to disappointed to concerned. He was actually concerned because Ed said he had a measly cold.

  “Let me talk to Dad,” Jon said, trying to grab the phone.

  “Wait a minute,” Andy snapped.

  Before they resorted to a tug-of-war with the telephone, Brenda told Jon to wait a moment and asked Andy to finish up so his brother could talk.

  Jon didn’t take the news that his father wasn’t coming that day as well as his brother had. After he hung up the phone with Ed, he stood by the kitchen just staring out into the backyard. Then he kicked the door and yelled, “It’s not fair!” again and again. Brenda counted to ten (which was also ten kicks) then went over and enveloped Jon in a bear hug. He resisted for half a second, then melted into his mother, crying and repeating “It’s not fair,” over and over.

  “I know, sweetie. I know,” she whispered into the blond hair that was as thin and fine as he. After a few minutes, he calmed down and was pestering her for a snack. A few crackers and some string cheese later, Jon was placated but Andy was nowhere to be seen. She went down the short hallway to his room.

  Andy was sitting on the edge of his bed, glove on, throwing
a baseball into his mitt over and over. It made a certain satisfying thwump each time the ball hit the worn-out leather. He was moving up to the twelve-to-fourteen Little League division and would need a new mitt. He had used this one since he started in the nine-to-eleven group and it was too much of a little kid’s glove for this division, where the older boys were practically men. By the time his birthday rolled around, it would be too late for a new glove. She could possibly get Andy a new mitt by calling it an early birthday present and giving Andy’s old mitt to Jon. That might satisfy them both. She was so engrossed in momentarily planning how to keep both boys in decent sports equipment she didn’t even hear Andy the first time he asked, “So now what?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Now what? What are we supposed to do all day?” he said without looking up.

  Brenda didn’t have to think—she just gave the first answer she knew would make her kids happy. She could do the chores later and reschedule lunch with Robin. “We’re going to play baseball,” she said.

  After a few days, where the weather had teased and hinted at spring, the day had unfolded to full-blown perfection. The sky was the brightest blue it had been in months, and the last remnants of snow from another Cleveland winter had finally melted. The infield at Quarry Park wasn’t too bad, but the moment she stepped on the outfield, Brenda could feel her sneakers squishing into the soaked grass. Andy and Jon had their cleats and were kids besides, so it didn’t seem to bother them, but Brenda knew she’d be walking around in wet shoes and socks until they got home.

  Brenda had always hoped both boys would inherit their father’s height. At this point, it wasn’t clear whether either of them would reach Ed’s six foot two. Andy was stocky, with a thick torso and hips and broad shoulders. His low center of gravity made him an ideal catcher, and that had been his position the past couple of seasons. Jon was slight and small for his age. He was getting ready for his first season with kid pitchers instead of parent pitchers, and the thought of some eleven-year-old throwing a baseball as hard as he could at her baby gave Brenda heart palpitations.

  Jon wanted to hit and Andy wanted to get behind the plate, so Brenda was enlisted to pitch batting practice. When Andy said, “It’s okay for you to pitch to Jon. The younger kids don’t throw that hard either,” she tried not to be insulted. She just took the mound, threw a couple of warm-up pitches, and then Jon stood in the batter’s box.

  Pitching to Andy without a batter wasn’t much of a problem. It was like playing catch with someone who happened to be squatting. It was only when Jon stood in that she wavered. She didn’t want to hit him. Of course, when she said this, Andy said, “It’s not like you’re gonna throw it hard enough to hurt him.”

  She tried to focus on the general vicinity of the strike zone, that tiny space between Jon’s narrow chest and perpetually skinned knees. She could almost see the rectangle demarcating the strike zone, like they sometimes used on ESPN when analyzing a game. She tried to focus on it, but Jon’s presence made the rectangle shrink to almost nothing. After throwing ten pitches, all of which the boys called balls, she heard Jon, her darling little Jon, mutter to his brother:

  “I wish Dad wasn’t sick. At least he knows how to pitch.”

  “I know,” Andy replied.

  Her sons’ words lingered in the dead space between the plate and the pitcher’s mound. The boys didn’t know that there had been no custody battle, that Ed had never once said, “I want the boys to live with me,” while Brenda had gotten an ulcer wondering if she could get full custody when she didn’t have a job. They didn’t know that Ed never checked their rooms in the middle of the night as she did, making sure that they were covered, that the rain wasn’t coming in their open window, that they were still breathing. Andy and Jon knew nothing of this. They didn’t even know that Ed wasn’t really sick today. It wasn’t fair that she got the arguments and the homework and the dirty dishes and the laundry and the chauffeuring and the tears and, frankly, all the crap and Ed got to sweep in every other weekend (or not) and play the good guy.

  It pissed her off.

  “Jon, stand in!” she yelled. “Andy, where’s that target?”

  Andy squatted down with a sigh and lazily held his mitt in the general vicinity of the strike zone. Jon stepped back into the batter’s box with a half-hearted stance.

  “Get the bat off your shoulder,” Brenda said. “Here comes the heat.”

  She heard one of the boys mutter, “Oh please,” but she ignored it, instead focusing on the catcher’s mitt. She stared at it, transforming its brown leather pocket into Ed’s face. All at once, she saw that rectangle demarcating the strike zone, and it was as though she could see thin golden lines running from her right hand straight to the mitt like a tunnel. All she had to do was throw the damn four-seamer as hard as she could down the tunnel and into the mitt.

  She heard a thwump and an almost simultaneous, “Holy shit!” from one of the boys (when did they start swearing?) and saw Andy fall backwards. She ran to him as fast as she could and bent down over her first-born. “Are you okay, sweetie?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “Holy shit, Mom,” Andy said with a huge smile. “That was a great pitch.”

  “Really? Thank you.”

  “That was awesome, Mom,” Jon said, a little breathless at what he had just witnessed.

  “I finally found the strike zone,” she laughed, surprised that she had actually done something her sons admired.

  “That was a strike and it smoked,” Andy said.

  “Can you do it again?” Jon asked.

  “I can try.” She trotted back to the mound, wondering if she could indeed do it again. It had been a great pitch, that she knew. How to do it again seemed like a mystery. She stood on the mound, stamped her right heel on the muddy pitching rubber a few times, and tried to remember the invincible feeling that comes from being nine years old and making your father proud. She went into her windup, threw, and the ball hit the backstop far above Jon’s head.

  “Come on, Mom,” Jon said. “Throw it like you did before.”

  “Right in here, Mom, “Andy said, slapping his hand in his mitt. “Right here.”

  Brenda tried to clear her mind, tried not to think about what she was doing. Thinking about her dad didn’t mesh with the rush of power she had felt when she thought about Ed. Focus. She stared down Andy’s mitt. Again she saw Ed’s face in it, this time with the falsely innocent smile that had, in the past, accompanied many a lie. She could hear the lame excuse about why he had to disappoint the boys today. The fucker. This time she didn’t think, just threw the ball down the tunnel. Again she heard a satisfying thwump and watched as Jon swung at the air.

  “Wow. Nice one, Mom,” Andy said as he threw it back. She noticed he gave his glove hand a little shake.

  “Do it again. I’ll hit it this time,” Jon said.

  The second good pitch was a surprise because it meant the first one wasn’t a fluke. Brenda looked at the mitt, visualizing Ed’s face again. “Asshole,” she muttered, went into her wind-up, and threw. She threw about a dozen good, hard strikes in a row, none of which Jon touched, but he seemed too much in awe to care. Andy tried standing in, but Jon didn’t want to catch, so instead she pounded the backstop with another series of hard fastballs. Andy whiffed on all but one, and that one was a foul tip. At one point, Andy swung and missed so hard that he fell on his rear end. Jon burst out laughing. Andy sat in the mud and looked from his brother to his mother. Brenda ran over to the plate to see if he was all right. Jon was still giggling as Andy stood up. She tried to ask if he was okay but one look at her mud-covered son made her snort back a laugh.

  “I’m fine,” Andy said then added, “Snorty McSnorty.”

  “Snorty McSnorty!” Jon yelled, as though it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  Brenda looked at Jon and said, “Giggles Mc
Donald,” which made him laugh even harder.

  Andy’s expression went from annoyed to a smile. “Muddy McDufus,” he said. This made Jon scream even harder with laughter, and he made an overly exaggerated fall in the mud. In a heartbeat, the three of them were chasing each other through the muddy infield. For a few minutes, the world consisted only of her and two dirty, laughing boys.

  When they got home, she made the boys leave their shoes by the back door and herded them into the downstairs bathroom to get cleaned up. She brought their muddy clothes down to the basement laundry room and threw them in the wash. While she was down there, she saw that one of the boys had left the computer on in the adjacent rec room. It was a small room, but the glass block windows let in plenty of natural light. It was supposed to have been her studio, back when she still felt she had something to say as an artist. Now she couldn’t even remember the last time she had picked up a pencil.

  Brenda went upstairs to her bedroom, which was the only place in the house where she could find a modicum of privacy. When Ed first left, the room had seemed cavernous, but now it felt cozy. The bed was still by the front window, but the dormer where Ed’s dresser had been now held a small bookcase, an old easy chair, and a lamp. After seven months, it was finally feeling like her space, not space that had once been occupied by Ed.

  She was cleaning up in the miniscule half-bath attached to her bedroom when the phone rang. A few minutes later, she heard Andy yelling that grandma was on the phone.

  Brenda grabbed the cordless phone from the bedside and plopped down on the easy chair in the dormer. It was only when she sat down that she realized how tired she was. “Hi, Mom,” she said.

  “Weren’t the boys supposed to be with Ed today?” her mother said.