“Yes, same dimensions, façade, fencing,” Michael says.
“Nothing’s different between the two stadiums?”
“This one has cup holders on the seats.”
“So they built all this for cup holders?
“And a conference center, hotel, that kind of stuff. I miss the old place. We can wager, make it interesting. Or maybe you’re afraid you’ll lose?”
They’ve been doing this bet thing since May, so she has a collection of wagers: The dinner, the time Rachel guessed right and Michael had to wash her car, the five dollar bet. “Anything in mind?” she asks.
“Not off hand.” He offers her a bite of his hot dog with mustard, relish and onions.
She chews and hands him a napkin while the runners tire the pitcher with their leads. He has too many places to eye and throws a lousy pitch. The batter pops it foul.
“How about you? Anything in particular?” Michael asks, watching the pitch and finishing the dog.
This may well be the last game she watches. The end of summer is in sight. If they can’t find a way to stay together, she needs to thank him for all he’s done since that first bowling night. “As a matter of fact, I do have something in mind.” She gives him a long look. “Dinner at Max. Tribeca. My treat.”
Michael returns her look completely. Somehow, she knows, he sees it in her eyes, the preparation for saying goodbye the same way they began, over a dinner wager landing them in a restaurant, a carafe of wine on the table, a candle’s flame flickering in a red glass globe. He turns back to the game. The pitcher studies the plate and takes too long with the pitch. Popped foul. The count stays full.
“It would be a nice way for you to meet my daughter,” he says.
She hears it. He refuses to go where her wager suggested. His new Yankees cap is on backwards, his elbows on each armrest, his hands clasped against his stomach. So you’d think he’s completely at ease, but he gives it away with the moment’s hesitation before he meets her gaze. He’s not.
“I’m not saying goodbye to you over some fancy dinner, Rachel. Not yet. As a matter of fact, not at all, sweetheart.” He takes a long breath. “It’s time for you to meet my daughter. At that dinner you’re going to owe me when you lose this bet.” He extends his hand to shake on it.
Rachel takes his hand and doesn’t let go. “So lights were not always there?”
“That’s right.” The pitcher tries to pick off second base.
“The Depression was in the thirties, so probably not then. It’s got to be either the nineteen forties or fifties.” The batter calls Time and moves from the batter’s box. Fifty thousand fans watch The Yankees do their dance. “The fifties was a family era. They’d be going to the ballpark a lot.”
“So you think night games started in the fifties?” Finally the batter swings. The ball does a slow loop high into the sky while he trots to first. The runners advance. Fifty thousand pairs of eyes stay on that ball, a white shooting star arching right over the wall. The crowd rises, a polite ovation rings. It is that kind of night.
“Well, it could have been after the war, too.” A pitching change is called. The crowd halfheartedly taunts the outgoing pitcher. Rachel studies the field, not calculating when the lights were installed, not visualizing the past. Not that past, anyway. Feeling Michael’s fingers linking through hers, she remembers instead their first night bowling, when she wanted only to find her best friend. “Nineteen fifty-three.”
Michael watches the next batter come on deck. “You’re good.”
“Hooray!”
“But not good enough.”
“I’m wrong?”
“During World War II, the lights of Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds revealed our ships at night. The ships in New York harbor. Out of respect to America, The Yankees didn’t install their lighting system until after the war. They played their first night game on May 28, 1946.”
“I’m wrong? Drat, I thought I was pretty tuned in to this place.”
Michael lifts her hand and kisses the back of it. “Tuned in to Yankee Stadium? My grandfather would have loved you.”
“Wait a minute. He worked there, didn’t he? He built that wonderful old stadium.”
“His very first job in America. Doing manual labor at the Yankee Stadium site. He and my grandmother lived in a tenement house a few blocks away. Walked to work every day with his toolbox and his lunch pail.”
“Do you know how amazing that is? I mean, every kid dreams of playing ball. And your grandfather came to America and helped build the most famous house of dreams. Wow.” She leans a little closer.
Michael slips his arm around her shoulders. “I can taste that Polla Capriccioso already. Warm Italian bread. Little side of ravioli.”
Rachel pulls into her driveway the next evening and takes a deep breath. For the past hour, she drove too fast and changed lanes too often.
So now she sits for a minute and considers her ranch home, her hands still gripped on the steering wheel. Her heart slows. The lawn needs to be cut and last week’s PennySaver lays beneath a bush. The impatiens she planted have spread around the maple tree like a magenta wedding band, and the petunias growing in the pot hanging from the lamp post explode into trailing vines of pink bells.
Wedding bells.
Everywhere, all she sees are weddings. The white siding on her ranch becomes the white chapel. The stone walkway winds itself into a silver carpeted aisle. Her front door is the altar.
It is this very thought that rushed her home, making her drive like crazy. Michael hasn’t said anything. It’s too soon to think marriage. But he won’t consider the ending, either.
The thing is, the summer has grown exquisite. Rachel can spend as much time as she likes at an old cottage at a special beach. And they’ve gone from Manhattan dinners to take-out seafood on a screened porch where they talk softly, like in a library, revealing their selves one page at a time, little stories. And that is how she knows.
Michael is as imbedded in New York as the gnarled roots of that old maple tree are imbedded in the rich, brown soil of her front yard. As the petunia bells are pot bound in their hanging pot. There is no uprooting him. It wouldn’t be fair to ask, and he wouldn’t be capable of doing so. All that he loves, all of New York, it nurtures his second chance at life.
She unlocks the front door and steps inside her house. The air is closed-up stuffy, so she opens windows and considers her home. A different light shines on it now, a light cast by another life.
In her beach room, low sunlight bathes the space in golden rays. She looks at Sara Beth’s portrait. Michael wants Sara Beth back in her life. Their friendship matters.
And Rachel so needs Sara Beth to dally with this Michael question and the real possibility of marriage. And the fact that he killed someone. That’s in him. Eventually she’ll face a huge decision. And Sara Beth will know how to find it in the tangled mess of love, and her worry about his hypervigilance along with the repercussions of ending a life, and his divorce, and Summer becoming her stepdaughter. And the danger inherent in his work. He’s got nothing to fall back on should he be injured or decide to switch careers. No other experience, no advanced education.
But that’s not why she rushed home.
It happened this summer over finding conch shells on the beach and lacing up bowling shoes. While standing on the Empire State Building and walking along an old, weathered boardwalk. She walked right into his life.
Now she has to look at her home in this new light, to study it and feel its history and let it possess her. Memories will surface. Emotions will rise. Especially this week, with the anniversary of Carl’s death. She’ll be alone that day. It’ll be like a photo album in her mind, turning the pages, remembering when, smiling, crying a little too, trying to find some way to hold on to what she has of Carl, and Ashley. Of holidays and birthdays and kitchen talks and snowy nights and Sunday dinners. Some way to put white corners on pictures of her life, close the album and take them with h
er. It is necessary to go through this. It is the only way to know if she can ever leave it all behind. To know if she can walk out of this life and into Michael’s.
But mostly, it is to say a last goodbye to Carl.
Chapter Twenty-Four
What is he doing?” Jen whispers to Kat on Sunday afternoon. They watch Tom taking Sara Beth’s hand on bended knee. “I thought I was going to help him wax the car. He said he’d pay me extra allowance.”
“Wait! I think he’s proposing!”
“To Mom? Eeew.”
“Shhh!”
Tom catches his daughters watching through the sliding glass door and motions for them to come outside onto the deck. “Stand over there and don’t talk,” he tells them. “You’re witnessing history.”
“Tom, what is going on?” Sara Beth asks. She’s sitting in the shade of the deck umbrella.
Tom reaches into his cargo shorts pocket and pulls out the velvet box. “Now this one’s temporary. Until we figure things out.”
“What have you done?” Sara Beth lifts her sunglasses and studies him.
He turns and winks at his daughters, then raises the box to Sara Beth. “Exactly what you’re thinking. But if you lose this one, if you get my drift, it’s seven hundred dollars, not seven thousand. I need you to wear a ring. So,” and he opens the box for her, “with this ring, we thee wed.”
Sara Beth looks from the ring, to Tom, to their daughters who quietly inched closer.
“We?” she asks. “We thee wed?”
And he points out the three round diamonds in the center, “Jen, Kat and Owen,” then the two tiny oblong diamonds on either side. “Me,” he says, touching one. “And your mom. Okay?”
“Tom,” Sara Beth stops him, her heart breaking with love and guilt at once.
“So I’ve got everybody in your life covered.”
“Well.” And Sara Beth wonders about it, her mother in the ring, and how she still hasn’t told Tom that if things were different that day, maybe her mother would’ve made it. And yet here he is, trying to keep her mother alive.
“You’re getting married again?” Kat asks, stepping closer and looking at the ring.
“Kind of,” Tom says. “We can do things different now that we’re forty. Help me put this ring on Mom’s finger.”
So when Sara Beth extends her left hand, three hands wrap around the ring and slip it in place.
“Aren’t you going to kiss the bride?” Kat asks.
Sara Beth stands and watches Tom, his frameless glasses low on his nose, his hair freshly buzzed. At this point, she doesn’t know what to expect.
Tom reaches for her hand. “Yes, you’re worth three days. You’re worth an antique shop, or whatever you want. I’m not abandoning you.”
“I didn’t abandon you guys,” she whispers.
“I know that now.”
Suddenly she feels very much alone with him, aware of his chest rising with each breath, of his eyes not leaving hers, the heat some wavering curtain around them. When he pulls her closer, she rises on tiptoe and kisses him hesitantly. The beauty of it is, he kisses her back and doesn’t stop, his hands cupping her face, taking her in like he is on one long inhale needed to live. She’s never felt so necessary.
“Gross,” Jen whispers behind them.
The next day, Sara Beth glances at the ring while her hand is on the steering wheel. The diamonds glimmer in the sunlight in a way her old ring never did. Her mother will always be in this ring now. The spontaneity of Tom’s gesture so moved her that she decides to do the same. Before taking Katherine and Owen to see their new kitten, Slinky, at the carriage house, she takes a spontaneous side trip down Rachel’s street. With such a great idea, they have to start talking again. Rachel’s car is backing out of her driveway so Sara toots the horn, parks at the curb and hurries over.
“I’m glad I caught you!” she calls out. She wishes she could tell her Tom’s agreed to look at the house, but that will come tomorrow night, if Rachel agrees to her invitation.
“Is everything okay?” Rachel quickly rolls down her window.
“Yes! Listen, I won’t hold you. Tom’s got a business dinner tomorrow. I thought we could try a girls’ night out and catch up with each other. We’ll take the kids to the bandshell, pack the cooler?” As the words come out, she catches sight of Rachel’s suitcase in the back seat. “Oh. Maybe not, then.”
“Sorry. I’m on my way to see Ashley.”
Something Sara Beth noticed when they talked recently were these awkward moments, the ones aching for what they used to have, when they didn’t have to ask How is she? In artwork, a cast shadow is the shadow that falls from one form onto another. Their lost New York weekend is that cast shadow.
“She misses you and her dad, doesn’t she?”
Rachel puts her sunglasses on top of her head. They still find the old nuances. Like right now. Nuances that make them both want Rachel to jump out of the car, pull Sara Beth over to the garden bench and tell her about Ashley calling and emailing every day. Instead she checks her watch. “I miss her too,” she says.
“I’ll bet,” Sara Beth answers, knowing all about missing someone. All about being miles and miles apart. If they can take a few precious minutes and talk about the kids, trying that tactic to find each other again, the miles between them would lessen. So much in her life seems to be almost in her grasp, this friendship included.
Rachel puts her car in gear. “I’m late. Ashley’s car needs brakes and she asked me to come and help out. You know, drive her to class, that kind of thing, while it’s in the shop.”
“At least that’s what she says, right? It gets her mom there?”
“Maybe she’s too far from home. I don’t know. But I’ve really got to go. She’ll be waiting.” She starts backing out. “Sara? How’s Katherine’s arm?”
“A bad sprain. The bandage comes off Friday.”
“At least it’s not broken.” She inches back out of the driveway. “Sorry I can’t make the concert,” she says out her window.
“Another time,” Sara Beth calls out. And then comes the worst part, getting back into her car and putting her purse on the empty passenger seat, where Rachel should be sitting for a ride with her out to the country to visit Slinky, all the while planning their girls’ night out at the bandshell. It’s always disappointing when you turn back to your life and it’s not what you wanted it to be.
The next morning, Rachel writes out a check to her daughter to cover the cost of the brake work. “Deposit this in your account. Then you can pay the shop yourself.” She sits at the desk in Ashley’s dorm room.
“Thanks. What’ll you do while I’m in class?”
Rachel likes observing her daughter in her own college space, seeing who she is growing into. Ashley wears a frayed denim skirt with a fitted tee and flip-flops, her hair pulled back, big gold hoops in her ears. “I guess I’ll do some shopping in town.”
“I’m cutting my second class, Mom.”
“Not on my account you’re not. I’ll be fine poking around the shops.”
“Oh just this once. It’s only Sociology. Which I still can’t understand why I have to take to be a nurse.”
“It gives you a wide reaching education, Ashley. That’s all.”
“Well I can skip it. We’ll have lunch and by then my car will be ready. That way you won’t have to drive home too late on the highway.”
“I don’t mind,” Rachel says, but sees the way Ashley is worrying about her driving at night. “Okay, we’ll have lunch.” Ashley breathes a sigh of relief, tucks the check into her purse and gathers her books in a pile. “Ash?”
Her daughter steps to her dresser, pulls out her elastic and quickly brushes her hair.
“Do you ever think about transferring to a local college? I’ve got plenty room for you.”
Ashley turns, elastic in her teeth, regathering her ponytail. “Mom. Why would you ask me that?” She pulls her hair through the elastic.
“
I worry sometimes. Maybe you miss the whole family thing, especially with Dad gone.”
“I do, sometimes. But I worry about you, more. All the time.”
“Me?”
“If you’re okay. If you can take care of that house alone.” She sits on the bed. “It’s the anniversary this week, Mom. I can’t believe Dad’s been gone two years.”
“I know.” Rachel moves beside her. “Time goes by so fast. Sometimes I think of him like he’s still here, you know, having a coffee in the kitchen, outside raking. A part of me always misses him.”
“That’s why I worry, Mom. About if you’re lonely, or sad.”
“Sometimes? I guess I am. Boy, what a couple of worry warts we are.”
“Well. I am your daughter. I can’t help it.”
“I know the feeling. But I was just thinking that if you wanted to, you could take a semester off.”
“I would if you needed me to. But I’m okay. Really.” She stands and goes to her dresser. “And we’ll always worry. It’s what we do, you know? It’s our thing?”
Her daughter is right. They would check up on each other even living in the same house, their How’s it going? or How’d you sleep? really a gauge measuring their daily emotions. She slips her checkbook back into her purse and tells her about Sara Beth suggesting a girls’ night out at the bandshell.
“She’s trying to fix things, Mom. Give her a chance.”
“I would love to have that old friendship back. But we never find the time. She jokes about needing to go away on some boat where no one can reach us.”
“What you probably need is another weekend in New York. Just to fix the first one.”
Inspiration comes at the oddest times, like right now, sitting with her daughter, thinking of boats, and Sara Beth, and a difficult promise to Michael about friendships and chances. Maybe another New York weekend would do it.
“How’s Michael?” Ashley asks over her shoulder.
“Oh he’s fine. He asks about you, too.”
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