by Lisa Wingate
“It’s plastic. It doesn’t have laces,” Kemp pointed out, but I barely heard him. My mind had snapped back in time. I saw my father’s fingers twisting over the ball. I heard Gil say, Dad, no raising the laces! For a moment, I was there, on some overgrown ball field in a park someplace. We were all there—Dad, Mom, Gil, and me. Mom was laughing as Dad gave the play-by-play. Her face was turned upward, her long blond hair floating on the breeze, her smile radiant. We were happy. All of us were happy. I saw myself, a stringy ten-year-old girl in an oversized T-shirt, jittering on second base, pigtails bouncing, knobby sun-browned legs protruding from cut-off shorts that might have been converted from jeans on the spur of the moment because the weather had turned warm.
Burn it by him, Dad. Burn it by him… .
Dad threw a pitch, Gil hit a grounder, and we pretended we couldn’t field it. He ran the bases, his chubby little legs pumping for all he was worth. We were laughing. Everyone was laughing… .
I heard something whiz by my ear, and I jerked back out of reflex, realizing Kemp had just thrown an inside pitch.
“Steee-rike one,” Kemp announced. “And Hilda’s back off the plate. Paige’s on the corners today. He’s a master… .”
I blinked hard, tried to focus, but my mind was still foggy with the memory. Where were we that day? It felt like the best place in the world, a day I’d wished would never end. We’d played until dark because Gil and I wanted to. Gil wasn’t sick. His skin was ruddy and tan, his face streaked with red clay dust. Mom had kicked off her shoes. Her feet were red, like the hills in Oklahoma. Maybe we were in Oklahoma then… .
Another pitch flew by. “And he burns one right down the middle, but Hilda doesn’t like it. She’s waiting on her pitch,” Kemp narrated.
My team gave a collective groan. “C’mon, Hilda,” one of the high-school boys complained. “That was a fastball right down the middle.”
Stepping out of the batter’s box, I shook my head, shedding the memory like droplets of water in my eyes. “I’m ready now,” I said, and stepped up to the plate again. The announcer told the crowd I had steel in my eyes this time. The pitcher leaned forward in the stretch, narrowed his dark lashes, gave a wicked little sneer.
I felt a giggle tickle my throat. “Cut it out and pitch.”
“Whoo-hoo, Coach!” Kemp’s players cheered. “Cut it out and pitch.”
“Unless you’re scared,” I challenged, and the boys cheered again.
Kemp adjusted the brim of his ball cap. “Sure you’re ready?”
“I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got.”
“You’re 0 and 2.” His eyes focused on mine, and a tingle traveled through my body. “Last pitch.”
“Hilda only needs one.”
He answered with a wide, white smile, his eyes disappearing behind his cap. He stood up in the stretch, drew the ball back, lifted a foot. I loaded the bat. The ball sailed through the air, hung up like a curve, then started to drop. I waited on it.
Dad, stop throwing curveballs! Gil complained in my mind.
I knew how to hit a curveball. My father threw them all the time.
The ball lofted over the plate, I swung the bat, and I heard the crack of plastic on plastic.
“Whoa!” Sly cheered. “Good hit!”
The ball sailed through the empty space at second and dropped before center field could catch it. I ran to first, and the winning run came home.
Kemp announced the end of the game, and my side cheered. Suddenly, I was a hero.
After several minutes of gloating, Kemp wound things up, his players gathered the equipment, and the smaller kids disbursed. On the way back to the field house, Kemp’s students were still debating the catch in the outfield.
“I didn’t trap the ball, Coach,” the outfielder argued, holding up his mitt with the Wiffle ball still in it. “I had it. Andy really was out.”
Lashes lowered, Kemp frowned. “It’s Wiffle ball, Riley.”
Riley flushed behind a peppering of freckles. “I know. I was just saying …” His gaze met Kemp’s, then he ducked his head. “Never mind, Coach.”
“Go hand the kid his ball back.” Kemp pointed to the ball, then patted Riley on the shoulder. Giving the ball a surprised look, Riley spun around and trotted off after Sly, who was headed home, dragging his plastic bat behind him.
When we reached the field house, Kemp’s players went in, and Kemp and I stopped outside the door. “You’d probably better wait here, unless you’re up for skin, jockey shorts, shoe stink, and fart jokes.”
“Eeewww, yeah, no thanks.” I stopped at the pipe fence by the door. “I’ll wait here.”
“Good choice, probably,” he agreed, then went inside.
I sat down on the fence and waited, listening to the high-school boys talk trash and snap towels inside the field house. The boys’ voices slowly faded as I gazed at the empty field, and I heard my family again, felt the warmth of the memory wash over me. How long since I’d thought about all the times we’d camped out at empty city parks, picnicked, and played Frisbee, hide-and-seek, and baseball? How long since I’d thought about those years before Gil got so sick?
So long I’d almost let those memories go, allowed them to fade completely. I’d convinced myself that things had always been bad, always been uncertain, unstable, on edge. I’d stacked up all the unhappy memories, all the resentment and pain like building blocks, mortared them together, and allowed them to dry in the sun—a wall that blocked out everything, even the light, even the laughter, even the times when the freedom to stop at a park in the middle of the week and spend all day playing baseball felt like the greatest thing in the world.
There was a time when I looked at other kids, normal kids, and knew that their parents would never drop everything and just play. For other families, a Tuesday was just a Tuesday—the same routine every week. For us, a Tuesday could be anything.
Tears prickled in my nose and the field went blurry. Something calming and peaceful settled over me. I felt a darkness lifting, floating away, allowing the memories to return.
Maybe nothing’s perfect, I thought.
Maybe life was always a balancing act between the things you chose and the things you sacrificed. Maybe my parents were feeling their way through the adult world just like I was now, trying to find a place that seemed right. Maybe they were doing the best they could. Maybe they weren’t prepared to raise a terminally ill child, or handle the difficult decisions that had to be made about Gil’s cancer treatments. When they found out Gil was dying, Mom was younger than I was now. Maybe she was as confused about her life as I’d always been about mine.
Players started coming out of the field house and walking to their vehicles, and I wiped my eyes. When all the boys were gone, I ventured inside. Kemp was standing in the middle of the locker room next to a massive pile of towels, athletic shorts, sweats, T. shirts, and hoodies. Hands braced on his hips, he sized it up, shaking his head.
“Looks like they left a mess,” I commented, thinking that, as tempting as it was to offer to help in the cleanup of sweaty boy clothes, I needed to head over to the vet clinic to retrieve Radar.
Kemp scratched the dark curls near the nape of his neck. “Sometimes they surprise me. Usually, you can’t get those kids to clean out their lockers. There’s junk in there from two, three years ago. They throw it in a duffle bag at the end of the year and stuff it back in the locker the beginning of the next year.” Gesturing toward the pile, he shook his head. “They just sorted out all their stuff, because they thought the evacuees might be able to use it.”
Suddenly, I understood the awed expression on his face. “Wow,” I whispered.
“Yeah. Guess I’ve got laundry to do.”
“I’ll help,” I offered, thinking that Radar could wait a little while. Bending over the laundry mountain, I started sorting lights and darks. “Looks like you could use it.” I noted that all the white sweats were already various shades of pink—a testament to the fact that
someone had been washing lights and darks together in the past.
After some disagreement as to whether the reds and the whites actually needed to be washed separately, Kemp and I loaded two industrial-sized washers in the back room. We ran out of detergent and Kemp had to go get some from the bus barn, so I waited at the field house while he zipped across campus in the official athletic department limo—a rust-streaked golf cart with an office chair welded in to serve as a driver’s seat.
I’m not usually the type to snoop, but once I was in the field house alone, some curious, nosy girl I’d never met before possessed my body, and the next thing I knew I was tiptoeing around the building, checking out Kemp’s territory like a CSI investigator looking for clues.
A grouping of newspaper articles on a bulletin board caught my interest as I wandered near the coach’s offices. There were pictures of Kemp and his team posing after the district championship, an action shot or two from the state playoffs—Kemp with his arm around one of the boys, talking strategy, Kemp giving signals to the catcher, a series of action shots of Kemp trying to outrun a Gatorade bath after a winning game, a shot of him with his players praying at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting.
I settled on that one for a moment, studied his face. His eyes were closed, his lips parted slightly, his arms resting on the shoulders of the boys beside him. Below the photo, the title of the article read “FCA Chapter Finds New Life After Six-Year Gap.” Scattered among the text were pictures of student athletes engaged in service projects around town—cleaning up the city baseball fields, mentoring younger children at a challenge camp, leading prayers at See You at the Pole, building a wheelchair ramp for a crumbling house while an elderly man looked on from the doorway. According to the text, the man, whose nickname was Oats, had been the groundskeeper at the school for forty-five years before suffering a heart attack.
In the middle of the article, a quote from Coach Kemp read,
When I played here, Oats and I were the first two at the ball field every morning. Usually, the sun was just coming up, but the mound had already been raked, and a bucket of balls was waiting with a can of Dr. Pepper that had an oatmeal cookie balanced on top. I never forgot that. Oats was quiet about his job. He picked up the trash kids left in the dugout, scraped chewing gum off the cement, scrubbed graffiti, and took care of the crabgrass and the fire ants. If you forgot your glove on the field after practice, it’d be back in your locker the next day, cleaned up with a little oil on it.
As I read the words, Kemp’s voice played in my head. I could hear him saying them, his tone slightly tender, filled with fondness.
Oats never offered a word of complaint. He never said the weather was too hot or too cold. He never decided he needed to sleep late, or go on a vacation, or call in sick for a mental health day. He never criticized anyone or said a cross word about anything, or griped when we made extra work for him. He just led by example. He served. It’s important for these kids to know how to do that. We all like to win games, but it’s not the scoreboard that really matters. Sports are a vehicle to teach the things that count in life—service, dedication, compassion, unselfishness, patience, perseverance. We have to look at the lessons these kids take away from the field. If their involvement in sports doesn’t teach them something more than just how to play the game, then we haven’t done our jobs.
At the bottom of the article, Kemp was popping a wheelie in grainy black and white as he pushed Oats up the wheelchair ramp. Oats was laughing with his hands in the air like a roller coaster rider’s. I raised my fingers, touched the photo, imagined the moment.
Finally, I left the bulletin board behind and wandered into Kemp’s office. The place was surprisingly bare—just a desk, a computer, some baseball equipment piled in the corner, a file cabinet and a stack of boxes next to it. Picture frames protruded from the top box. I wandered over and peered in. I felt like a voyeur, but I looked anyway. The thick shadowbox frame in front held a game ball, a picture of Kemp, and an article about a no-hitter he’d pitched at the University of Texas.
Glancing over my shoulder, I silenced a pang of guilt, touched an index finger to the corner of the wood, tipped the frame forward, and leaned over the box to look at the next one. It was upside down. Twisting like a corkscrew, I took in a neatly matted combination of a pitching portrait and a Rangers’ ticket stub from last year. There was a shadow over the picture, so I couldn’t quite see it. I lifted it a little—just enough to make out the photo of Kemp sending the ball toward home plate, thousands of people only a blur in the stands behind him. His face was intense, determined, his eyes steely and focused.
In my mind, I compared that moment to the one in which he was pushing Oats up the wheelchair ramp. Trying to mesh one with the other was like trying to overlay transparencies that didn’t match. There seemed to be pieces of the coach that didn’t fit the pitcher, and pieces of the pitcher that didn’t fit the coach. What was he thinking of in those two very different moments? How did he feel? Which moment mattered the most to him?
Why were the frames in a box, rather than hanging on the wall?
I found myself wondering about Kemp, trying to figure him out like a cipher for which there was no answer key. Who was the man behind the clever quips, the pile of pink laundry, and the mean curveball?
As I thumbed through the rest of the box, peeking at articles, awards, and another glass-enclosed game ball, a new question scratched the surface of my mind. Who had carefully collected and framed all these treasures? These didn’t look like the creations of a man who couldn’t even sort the laundry. Some of the photos sported creative mats with cutsie little scrapbook stickers of tiny baseballs, bats, gloves, and printed cheers like Home run! Curveball! RBI! Strike three … he’s out!
Behind that question, there was the original one. Why were these carefully preserved mementos—everything from high-school letter jacket patches to ticket stubs from the first major-league game Kemp had pitched—in a box, chunked haphazardly upside down, right side up, and sideways atop a stack of boxes, in the corner of his office?
The clink-clink of tires rolling across the threshold into the locker room made me jerk upright like a cat burglar caught in the act. I left Kemp’s office and met him as he turned off the limo and dismounted the seat.
“Eureka!” he cheered, holding up a bottle of laundry soap like a giant diamond. “We’re in business. Let’s wash some clothes.”
“Gotta like a guy who’s enthusiastic about his laundry.” The comment was meant to be a joke, but it came out sounding flirty.
Kemp cocked his head, answering with a wry lip-twist.
“Sorry,” I said, “little bad laundry humor there.”
“Dirty joke.”
“Ohhh,” I groaned as we headed for the washroom. “Now that was bad laundry humor. You’ve been cooped up with the pink sweat pants too long, Coach.”
“Probably,” he admitted, and now he was the one sounding flirty. “I think I need a change of scenery.” The sentence was open-ended, an invitation to something, but I didn’t know what. He waited for me to respond.
Possible answers twirled through my mind, fluttering like brightly colored dragonflies, tickling where they landed. What did you have in mind? Me, too … The scenery looks pretty good right here… .
This is a hurricane evacuation, not a date.
The last realization fell like a bucket of cold water. Splash. There was no point even thinking about some guy who lived in a place I’d be leaving in a few days. Once the immediate chaos subsided, I’d have to report in to work, figure out whether I was catching up with the ship for this trip or meeting it for the next one. I was still under contract, after all. Sooner or later, reality would come calling and I’d never see any of these people again. Daily, Texas, would be just a memory—an odd but cozy port of call on the way back to real life.
The idea felt heavy in my chest, uncomfortable and unwieldy. On some level, I’d been settling in here, imagining I’d be s
taying longer than I really would—that, as time went on, I’d learn more about Daily and about Kemp. Maybe, if I got my courage up, I’d borrow a car and drive over to McGregor. I’d see if Grandmother Miller’s big clapboard house was still there beneath the live oaks, the tall white porch pillars stretching imposingly to the second story, the concrete lions still frozen at the gate, their mouths in a perpetual roar.
Maybe I’d walk through the gate, climb the steps—seven, I remembered—and knock on the door.
I hadn’t even realized those thoughts were in my head until now. They’d been hiding in the shadows, just vague images, pictures without text. When they took on dialogue all at once, it was overwhelming.
“Whoa, what’s that look for? You’re as white as a Sunday shirt.” Kemp swiveled to check behind himself as we crossed the washroom and stood by the machines. “There a rat back there or something?”
“How far away is McGregor?” As soon as I said it out loud, I wished I hadn’t. Now he would want to know why.
He stopped checking for rats and turned back to me, perplexed. “Fifteen miles or so. Why?”
I shrugged. “I was just curious.” Fifteen miles. Only fifteen miles. If Grandmother Miller were still there, would she know anything about my father? Did she ever think about us at all? Did she ever go visit my brother’s grave? Did she keep it tended? Gil was buried in McGregor. In the family cemetery. Grandmother Miller wouldn’t pay for it any other way.
That seemed so long ago now, another life.
I’d never even gone back to visit.
“Curious about McGregor?” Kemp’s voice broke into my thoughts.
“Long story. I used to know someone there. No big deal. Are there really rats in here?”
“Just little ones.” Raising the washer lid, he dumped in some detergent without bothering to measure, then turned on the water. “Cute little ones with big brown eyes and big furry ears.”
“Cute little rats?”
“Field mice,” he offered. “It’s a field house, after all.”