With one down and one to go, she walked over to the low half-wall that gave the illusion of dividing the larger locker room into two halves. She took a cookie from the jar that rested on top of the half wall and casually walked toward the back of the room and then to the other side. Cipriani’s locker was right there. She noticed Anderson Sparks watching her from three lockers away.
“Hey Anderson,” she said nonchalantly and took a bite of her cookie. Who cared if he ratted her out to Cipriani? As easily as picking up a stray magazine in a waiting room, she picked up Cipriani’s baseball mitt and calmly inserted a tampon into each of the fingers. Sparks watched the entire thing. He stifled a giggle but didn’t say a word. When she was done, Brenda gave him a polite nod and went back over to where she had been sitting.
The payoff came after the National Anthem, when the Indians took the field. Pasquela put on his glove as he ran out to his position at second base. Brenda had gotten into the habit of going out to the bullpen at the start of the game, but today she stayed in the dugout by the railing to get the best possible view. To her surprise, Anderson Sparks came and stood next to her, an amused look on his face.
It was obvious Pasquela had discovered there was something in his glove. Ryan Teeset was warming up the infield, throwing hard grounders to second, short, and third. Teeset threw to Landers at third and then to McGall at short. He went to throw to Pasquela, but the second baseman was searching with one finger inside his glove, trying to remove a foreign object. When he pulled out a tampon, his annoyance was visible from halfway across the field. Brenda had made sure not to shove them too far into the fingers. She didn’t want to delay the game, just annoy him.
To her left, Sparks was laughing silently, his big square shoulders shaking helplessly as they watched Pasquela get the second of the tampons out.
From her other side, she heard Mark Munson say, “What the hell’s the matter with Fred?” She hadn’t even noticed Mark standing next to her.
“It looks like he has something in his glove, Skip,” Sparks said, barely able to contain his laughter.
Landers and McGall had both noticed Pasquela’s trouble, and McGall trotted over to help. She couldn’t hear everything being said, but saw McGall approach Pasquela, saw Pasquela hold the glove out and say something to McGall, who threw back his head and laughed his hee-haw like laugh that carried all the way to the dugout. McGall was smaller and leaner than Pasquela, and he dug into the glove with one skinny finger and retrieved the last of the tampons just as the home plate umpire yelled, “Play ball!”
When the team came off the field later that inning, Brenda made sure to give Pasquela a wide berth. Even so, he came storming up to her in the dugout.
“What the fuck was that about?” he snapped, his sweaty, red-tinged face only inches from hers. All noise and action in the dugout suddenly stopped.
Brenda thought she should be scared or nervous by his anger, but she hadn’t done anything that he hadn’t done to her or Teeset or any other player. “What the fuck was what about?” she asked.
“Putting . . .” He quieted his voice. “Messing with my glove,” he said, as though Brenda had defiled a sacred vessel.
Brenda was very aware that every man in the dugout was looking at her, even Dave McGall, who was in the on-deck circle. From the other side of the dugout, Munson watched, seemingly wondering if he needed to rescue her. “Is there anything wrong with your glove?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then how did I mess with it?”
“You put . . . Stay the hell away from my locker.”
“You do the same,” she said, making sure everyone in the dugout heard her reply.
Art Groggins and Doug Stone chose that moment to intercede, Art putting a hand on Pasquela’s shoulder and telling him that was enough, and Doug sidling up to Brenda and saying, “You’ve made your point.”
This was enough to reset the mood in the dugout back to something manageable. Sparks’ inability to keep a straight face made Cipriani suspicious, and he went digging in his glove before he even went out to the bullpen. Pasquela was still visibly seething, but he didn’t say anything to Brenda, and neither did anyone else until Dave McGall scored on a Ryan Teeset double. He came back to the dugout and walked up to Brenda.
“I believe these belong to you,” he said, and placed two dusty but still wrapped tampons into her hand.
Not knowing what else to do, Brenda just said, “Thanks” and put them in her pants pocket.
“And they call me crazy,” McGall said with a wink.
•◊•
Excerpt from the transcript for Today in Sports with Charlie Bannister, ESPN, September 1:
Charlie: In tonight’s highlights, we start with Boston at Cleveland. Top of the eighth, score is tied at three with men in scoring position. Brenda Haversham on the mound in relief. She serves up a fastball high and tight to Boston’s Barney Cornwell, who sends it up the middle. Fred Pasquela jumps and misses. It looks like Boston will take the lead, but wait, here comes Art Groggins charging in from centerfield, he dives, makes the catch, and stops the Red Sox rally dead in its tracks. Cleveland ends up winning 4-3 in extra innings. Great play by Groggins, who, incidentally, has announced that he’ll be retiring at the end of the season. He’s definitely going out at the top of his game.
Chapter Twenty
•◊•
The game went into a disappointing loss in ten innings, and by the time Brenda got home, the rest of the house was asleep. School started in the morning, and she hoped Adele had been able to get the boys to bed at a reasonable time.
Adele was sleeping on the sofa, even though Brenda had repeatedly told her mother to just sleep in her bed upstairs. She had left on the light over the stove for Brenda, and it cast just enough light for Brenda to study her mother’s face as she slept. Adele’s too-red-to-be-natural-at-her-age hair was poofed out against an old pillow, her face relaxed, almost smiling.
She walked down the short hallway to the boys’ rooms. She peeked in on Jon first, who was sleeping face down in the middle of a mass of blankets, one bare foot hanging off the edge of the bed, the other stuck in between the bed and the wall. His notebooks and folders and other school supplies were precariously stacked on top of the little desk next to his bed. Brenda gently moved both feet so they were on the bed and covered him up. His new Ohio State hoodie was draped over his desk chair and his new sneakers—though not the expensive ones he had wanted—on the floor next to the bed. She was glad Adele hadn’t caved into his pleading and made him keep to the agreed-upon budget. As she stood there in the darkened room, looking at the new sneakers, she felt a jumble of emotions—gratitude that her mother could act in loco parentis, guilt that she wasn’t doing the parenting job herself, and even a bit of envy at all the time Adele had had with the boys over the summer
She moved on to Andy’s room. During the past year, he had slowly become less of a sloppy kid and more of a neat, organized young man. His backpack was sitting on his desk chair, and Brenda could see that he had already loaded his school supplies into it. The last book from his summer reading list was sitting on the edge of his desk, a bookmark on top of it. Apparently, Andy’s growing tendency toward cleanliness and organization hadn’t done anything to cure his procrastination, but he had his school supplies, he was under the covers, he had clean clothes. There wasn’t anything for her to do. More and more, it seemed as though Andy had grown up while she was gone.
Within a week, Brenda knew she’d practically have to drag Jon out of bed in the mornings, but on the first day of school, he was up and noisy at 6:00 a.m. Brenda managed to drag herself downstairs to greet him. Jon was in the living room, his notebooks and other school supplies spread out on the coffee table in the living room. It looked like he was taking last-minute inventory.
“Good morning, sweetie. Are you ready for your first day of fourth grade?”
“Absolutely.”
“Great. Where’s your brother?”
“Probably in the bathroom. He’s in there all the time now.” Jon looked slightly disgusted at the thought of his older brother’s foray into decent hygiene.
“Leave your brother alone. It’s good that he wants to look nice for school.” She sent Jon off to get dressed and wandered into the kitchen to make some coffee and start breakfast. As usual, Adele had beat her to the punch and was getting glasses and bowls out of the cupboard.
“I can do it,” Brenda said. When Adele paused, the break in what had become her morning routine obvious, Brenda added: “I really want to.”
“Dobre rano to you too,” Adele said with a smile. “How was the game?”
“Long, and we lost.”
“You’ll get ’em next time.” Adele gave her a kiss on the cheek and sat down at the kitchen table. “By the way, if you hadn’t noticed, Jon is on a Lucky Charms kick. And it appears that eighth graders don’t eat breakfast. At least not with their families.”
Brenda had the big cast iron skillet in her hand, with the thought of making pancakes. What had the boys eaten for breakfast the last two days? She couldn’t even remember. “What does he eat for breakfast?”
“I bought a bunch of protein bars. He can take one of those. And some fruit.”
“That’s it?”
Adele shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Who am I to argue with what my grandson wants?”
“Then I’ll pack their lunches.”
Adele looked skeptical. “You might want to double check what they want. Rumor has it that bringing your lunch is passé in junior high and the cafeteria in the fourth grade building is actually good. They’ve both said they’d rather buy their lunch.”
“I can’t afford to have them buy their lunches every day,” Brenda said. It was an automatic response, honed by months of watching every penny.
“Actually, you can,” Adele said. She sounded almost apologetic. “I know that doesn’t mean they should—it just means they know that you can afford it now.”
Brenda slumped down in a kitchen chair across from her mother. “I don’t want to have to deal with this,” she said. It wasn’t as bad as having to sit down with the boys and tell them that she and their father weren’t going to live together anymore, but it was one more teaching discussion she had to have with them. One more instance where she had to stand up and say the right thing and teach the right thing and not be lazy and frankly, at this particular moment, lazy sounded wonderful. “Okay, I’ll let them buy it today because it’s the first day, then they start bringing their lunch. And once a week they can buy lunch. How does that sound?”
“They’re your children. I’m just the enforcer,” Adele said with a smile.
Brenda managed to convince the boys to eat a bowl of cereal before the school bus arrived, but Adele was right. They weren’t interested in brown bagging it. “Everybody says the cafeteria at Greenview is really good,” Jon kept saying. “And the first day they always have pizza.” She gave them some lunch money and stuck an apple into each of their backpacks, trying to make herself believe they’d eat them.
Adele went back to her own house after the boys left, and Brenda went back to sleep. She spent the day doing laundry, returning phone calls from friends who wanted game tickets, and going to the grocery store. The house didn’t need anything—Adele was taking good care of the boys. It was more the idea of doing something for the family that compelled Brenda to buy more fruit and vegetables.
She spent twenty minutes in the cereal and snack aisles reading labels, trying to find the healthiest take-along snacks she could for the boys. Then suddenly it was time to go to the ballpark and the boys weren’t even home from school. She wanted time to sit and listen to Jon tell her stories about his new school building and how many kids there were compared to the elementary school and what he liked and what he didn’t like. She wanted time to talk with Andy about how it felt to be an eighth grader at the top of the heap (the idea that he was going to high school in a year seemed impossible). Instead, she studied film of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup, looked at scouting reports, and retired both of the batters she faced. And at the end of the long day, she found the windshield of her car littered with fliers from a local “gentleman’s club.”
When Brenda got home, she found Adele reading a book in the living room. Seeing her mother on her sofa always gave Brenda a tiny lift of feeling like a little girl again. She was too tired to smile but said hello and asked if the boys were in bed.
“Jon is asleep. Andy is a little too worked up to sleep. I know it’s a school night, but I let him stay up a little late. He’s downstairs, playing on the computer.”
“Why is Andy too worked up to sleep?”
Adele made a production of picking up her bookmark and marking her place in her book and putting it on the coffee table. “Now I don’t want you to get upset . . .”
“Oh God . . .” Brenda said as she plopped down in the easy chair opposite the sofa. She took a deep breath—better to rip the bandage off fast than to linger. “Hit me with it—how bad?”
“He got into a fight.”
“On the first day of school! What the hell?”
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Adele said.
Brenda leaned back in the chair, wishing she could just disappear into the cushions for a month or so. Her head hurt and closing her eyes felt so good she could have fallen asleep on the spot if her mother hadn’t said: “Go down and talk to him.”
Brenda opened her eyes and looked over at her mother. At that immediate moment, the idea of having to be The Responsible Parent wasn’t all that attractive.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Adele repeated.
With a heavy sigh, Brenda got up and walked downstairs to the rec room. Andy was in his usual spot in front of the computer. As she walked in, she saw the computer monitor flash to a new image. In spite of herself, she asked, “Homework on the first day?”
Andy quickly spun around in the desk chair to look at her. “Yeah, but I did it already,” he said. “Just downloading some music and stuff.”
She noticed that his new Gismo was on the desk and plugged into the computer. “I’ll take your word for it, Andy,” Brenda said, leaning against the door. “But I do want to remind you that a lot of what’s online is for adults, and even though you’re thirteen, that doesn’t make you an adult.”
“I wasn’t looking at porn,” he said in a surprisingly patient voice. Now that Andy was facing her head-on, she could see that he had likely gotten the worst of the fight. There was a bruise on his cheek and a long scrape on his left forearm, as though he had fallen and slid across the pavement. The thought made her shudder.
Mother and son regarded each other for a moment, then Brenda asked, “How does the other guy look?”
Andy managed a small grin. “You mean other guys?”
Other guys? How could Adele say it wasn’t as bad as she thought? Brenda went to him and gave him a hug. “Oh sweetie, what happened?”
Andy didn’t pull away from the hug, but he wouldn’t meet Brenda’s eyes. “A couple of guys at school were saying stuff that was really nasty—you would have said it was sexist. And I told them to shut up and they didn’t, and then we got in a fight.”
“How many boys were there?”
“It started out with three, but then a couple other guys joined in.” Brenda felt her heart skip a beat when he said this. “But my friends were there too.”
“Is everyone else okay too?”
“Yeah. We’re all fine. Did you know that Matt Manning is a really good fighter?”
“No, but somehow I’m not surprised,” Brenda replied. “Andy, I’m just glad you’re okay. I admire that you were standing up to somebody who was being a sexist jerk, but fighting . . .” S
he sighed, trying not to think of how much worse it could have been. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” she repeated.
“I watched the game tonight,” Andy said. “You did really good, but why don’t some of the other guys on your team talk to you? Like when you’re all walking off the field at the end of an inning, most of the guys talk to each other or something. But hardly anyone talks to you, and Pasquela never says a word to you.”
Brenda quickly considered what her response should be. “I don’t think he likes me,” she said simply.
“But he’s on your team. You’re supposed to back up the other people on your team.” Brenda didn’t say anything. “People give you a hard time, don’t they? Like other players and people online and people in the stands.” He didn’t hesitate or think before he asked any questions, which made Brenda wonder how long he had been thinking about all this.
“Yes,” Brenda answered. There was no reason not to tell the truth.
Andy was silent for a moment, as though he was sifting through what she hadn’t said. “These guys at school kept saying that you didn’t belong in the majors and they called . . . they said some really lousy things about you. And they said that the Fricker guys are right.”
“Do you think they’re right?” Brenda asked.
“No.” This felt like a major accomplishment. “I mean, there’s no point paying attention to those Fricker guys because they’re idiots. You’re . . . good,” he added. He almost sounded surprised when he spoke the word “good,” and Brenda knew how difficult this realization must have been for him.
“Thank you.”
Although she hardly saw Andy the rest of the week, when she did, he actually talked to her. Sometimes it was about the previous night’s game, other times it was about school or what one of his friends had done. He even asked her about what kind of music she liked. It was a joy just sitting or standing in the kitchen, chatting with her son. Jon dominated most of her free moments, keeping up a steady stream of banter about his friends and baseball and fourth grade and his new school building. It was joyous kid talk and Brenda loved it, but it could be tiring. Talking to Andy was starting to feel like a conversation with an adult. He was starting to think more and more for himself and not just repeating what he had heard his friends say or what he had read.
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