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  “Casey,” he said, unlocking my door. “You know I’m proud of you, right? I always have been, always. You’re the best girl I ever saw. Better than any boy there ever was.”

  Even as I nodded and slipped from beneath his arm, I knew he was lying. In my seat, I aimed the air ducts fully at my face and waited for him to turn the key so I could dry my tears. It struck me, then, that he had never asked me what the matter was. Of course, this was because he knew. All along, through my many years of playing, he had been waiting for this day, knowing with certainty that it would come. Perhaps, when I was a little girl, he had hoped the interest would wane, all the while encouraging it because it satisfied something selfish within him to see his own child hitting the ball, running the bases. Maybe he thought I would just outgrow the desire.

  I was stunned by my own grief at this notion, that I had been set up to fail. How was I supposed to deal with the fact that each time my father watched me play, that every time he cheered for me or threw me the ball a little harder than he had before, he was expecting disappointment? What the hell was the point of doing anything at all? On the long drive home, the catcher’s squeaky voice echoed in my head, finishing Thayer’s words.

  Student Stories

  1998

  “So what are you up to this weekend, Miss Wells?”

  Putting away the last of the papers to be graded, I looked up to see that Mark was sitting on the edge of the table, waiting for me. It was Friday, two weeks before summer break, and the other students had high-tailed it out of the room like their asses were on fire. Mark, however, had broken his leg two weeks before and was already adept at using it to great advantage. He knew I wouldn’t kick him out today, as I sometimes did when the long looks and double entendres got to be too much. Mark was in my advanced creative writing class, a good student who wrote imaginative, if somewhat Hemingway-esque stories, and he was a ball player. Even though he was unable to play, it was perfectly clear, and not just because of the Pacific Northwest Community College tiger brandishing a baseball bat on his tee shirt. “He just looks like a baseball star,” the other teachers said in the faculty lounge, and I knew exactly what they meant.

  “This weekend? Not much,” I answered. “Maybe I’ll work in my garden.” My garden was two-foot deep in weeds and ablaze with the most gorgeous red poppies I hadn’t actually planted, remnants of the previous renters. At some point, when I could no longer locate my anemic tomato plants, I’d decided to let nature win. I hadn’t looked at the garden in a month. Mark turned back to me, or rather, swiveled on his good leg and steadied himself against the table.

  “That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  “Maybe not to you,” I admitted. Not to me, either. I was thirty-four years-old, a lifetime away from this kid, who couldn’t have been over twenty-one, or I’d have seen him drinking down the street at Three Bells, where all my older students went after class. Sometimes, a few of us staff made it there, too, but perhaps not often enough. I waited as he hopped over to the wall to retrieve his crutches.

  “I’m sure you could find something better to do than garden.”

  I was fairly sure I could, too. Mark held the door open, waiting for me to leave. I closed my bag and stepped up to the door. When he didn’t move, I ducked under his arm and out into the hall, empty in the early evening. I let him hobble out of the way and then checked the door to be sure I’d locked it. I might have my own office, finally, but the classroom was shared. If a single dictionary went missing, I’d hear all about how irresponsible I was.

  “You need a ride?” he asked, as if he could actually provide one with one leg in a cast.

  “I have my car. Goodnight, Mark,” I said, knowing he was watching as I walked down the hall.

  I wanted to be good. I have always wanted to be good, even when I was acting like an idiot. At my car, I found myself jingling the keys near the lock and glancing over to the bright lights of the college baseball field, casting its long shadow into the parking lot. A scattered cheer went up from the stands. It was a lovely hour, with the pearl strings of lights above the gray velvet road below campus. Just a bit further out, Puget Sound caught the last sunlight and dribbled it from wave to wave as if it were oil. Really, I told myself, it’s not that late. I opened the car door and dropped my bag onto the passenger seat.

  The field was small, and not nearly as big-budget as the stadium on the other side of campus, but it was pleasantly familiar; a bright, dirty spot in the pristine grounds. College baseball, especially community college baseball, is not a money-making enterprise. The only ones who stand to make anything are the players, and at a good school, they play like they know it. That night, we were playing a good school.

  I was parked in the student lot, on the edge of the baseball field, tempting myself nearly every night with the smell of Lion’s Club popcorn and the sound of a well-hit home run. On the other side of the main building, the faculty lot waited in all its tarmacked glory. I could have parked there, and avoided incidents like the time someone left a neat pyramid of empty beer cans on my hood. I chose not to admit my desire, the way my friend Alex Rushton over in the history department kept a half-empty bottle of scotch in his bottom desk drawer long after he’d decided to quit drinking. We all knew it was there, but no one, especially not Alex, would comment on why he hadn’t thrown it out.

  A metallic whack was followed by another small cheer. After a moment, a booing erupted, the collective sound of realized expectations. The Tigers were popping them up again. Leaving the car, I walked across the parking lot to the gate of the field. The security guard nodded as I passed, bored by the small crowd, the slow trickling loss of the game. Though we weren’t exactly on a first name basis, he knew me well enough that I no longer had to flash my ID.

  I made my way through the bleachers, sitting in my usual spot, just below third base. The line of sight toward the pitcher was best there.

  Mark was already there. He smiled as I sat, clearly knowing he had just come out ahead. He was cracking sunflower seeds, a small mound already forming at his feet.

  “Who’s hitting?” I asked.

  “You mean theoretically?” he replied, easy. I smiled at him. Unlike many of my students, many of the players I had known, he was intelligent and rather sweet. “Dave Rober just fouled, as usual. You staying long?”

  I shook my head.

  At the mound, the pitcher released the ball and the batter swung. There was a brief, hollow pop and the ball sailed nearly straight up, landing in an infielder’s mitt, ending the inning. Leaning forward, I watched as the teams traded sides, jogging to warm up in the cool spring air. Mark leaned forward as well, his face effectively becoming my view.

  “So,” he said, not looking at me. “I read your book.”

  Inwardly, I groaned. I didn’t want any of my students to read the damn thing, because once they did, they immediately stopped respecting me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I particularly liked the part where the gorgeous woman falls madly in love with the handsome ball player. Great stuff. Very funny.”

  The only really funny part was the blurb on the cover that talked about the book’s “autobiographical nature.” While I had certainly fallen in love with my share of baseball players – okay, just two – neither one had gone on to sweep me off my feet and make my life complete. The last one, Chris Hernandez, had been a hitter for the Mariners before they were good, and was burned out by the time they improved. The first had been a terrible childhood crush on my father’s protegee, Ben McDunnough, who had seemed to disappear and reappear in our lives like a ghost, until one day he just took up residence near my father and didn’t go away. By that time, I had.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. No really, I did like it.”

  One more tiny royalties check to supplement my measly salary. Having given up my dream of playing baseball, I concentrated instead on what seemed to be my only other viable skill: constructing really elaborate lies. T
hree years after finishing my novel, I could track its performance at those on-line, up-to-the-minute bookstores, watching it slide from number eight thousand twenty-one to eight thousand twenty-six.

  But at the very least, the book got me my job. I didn’t even have to apply; I was simply begged to come join the faculty. I had no idea what they really thought of the book, but my editor’s sister headed the department. I was only required to publish something short every few years, and they would allow me to have my own sunny little office with its hot plate and computer and slouchy old chair forever, if I wanted. I wasn’t at all sure that I did want it forever, but I wrote a few short stories or an article each year anyway, just in case.

  “You up for some dinner?” Mark said it as if it really didn’t matter, as if we weren’t teacher and student.

  “Not tonight, Mark.”

  He laughed and toed his pile of seed casings. “Ever?”

  At that I turned. He was half-smirking, aware.

  “You know how it is, Mark,” I said, mostly reminding myself. There was no way he really understood how it was, not for me.

  “There’s no rule,” he said. Just like there was no “rule” against sleeping with my married news editor, but I had learned quickly how wrong that was. I rose and stretched.

  “I’m headed home.”

  The opposing batter stepped up, to a few boos. Mark gave me his best leer.

  “Have a good one.”

  The pitcher stung the batter in the side with a curveball that refused to break. There was a quiet groan from those close enough to see. Tossing his bat toward the dugout, the opposing team’s player skipped to first base as if it were Little League. I knew then for certain we would lose tonight, though there never had been much room for doubt.

  I was making my way back to my car when there was sudden resounding smack, the sound of a well-hit ball on an aluminum bat, followed by a few desperate screams of anger. Turning back, I watched in surprise as the ball sailed over the fence. I had to duck as it came toward me and barely cleared my head. There was a soft thump as it hit my car and rolled to a stop in the gravel. I picked up the fallen ball, turned it over and rubbed the warm, dry surface, feeling the dent left by the bat’s sweet spot. For a moment, I let my fingers search out the laces to help me define a fastball, then I tucked it into my pocket.

  I spent most of the evening as I always spent my Fridays, cooking a small pot of pasta, drinking iced tea and pretending that I was interested in anything my students were writing. The long weekend loomed ahead. It wasn’t that I didn’t like teaching: I did. But in the end, I was sure I was missing out on something.

  Sitting in front of the silent television, half-watching a game with the sound off and half-reading a student story that began: “She was six feet tall, stacked, Swedish and could kill people with her mind ...” I was interrupted by a knock. I could have claimed that I had no idea who it would be. It was nearly eleven.

  Through the peephole I saw Mark, holding two beers and trying to support himself on his crutches. I wasn’t sure where he’d managed to snare the beers, though it was a college campus, so it really could have been anywhere. He was still wearing his baseball shirt, and maybe that was what finally did it. Or maybe it wasn’t really about the shirt at all. It briefly crossed my mind that maybe he thought my body contained some sort of famous-pitcher mojo. Maybe I believed something like that, too. Either way, I didn’t even bother to figure out which one of us had won.

  I let him in.

  Concrete Reality

  1998

  On a warm spring morning, the air in Tampa smelled exactly like sweat socks. Not particularly pleasant, but true, Ben thought as he entered the athletic department. Making his way through the early-morning crowd of students, mostly swimmers or runners or others who practiced during the off-hours, Ben smiled at the occasional familiar face.

  “Morning,” a kid said, nodding as Ben passed.

  “Yo, McDunnough. See you this afternoon, man,” came from one of his boys.

  Ben shoved open the door to the office he shared with Billy Wells and set his bag, filled with the usual paraphernalia of coaching, down by his desk. Billy, already red-faced in the rising heat, shifted the phone from one ear to the other, yelling.

  “Jesus, Jake, what the hell have you two been doing with all that cash?”

  Ben pretended not to notice, sliding into the squeaky wooden chair he had been given when he started at DeSoto, seventeen years before. It barely rolled on its ancient metal castors across the bare wood floor beneath his desk. Billy was shouting at his son-in-law, gathering an increasing head of steam with each sentence until at last he slammed the phone violently down onto the receiver. Ben had a daydream, when he was in the mood to allow it, where Billy was given his own office somewhere upstairs with the fat, ex-military football coach and that six-foot woman who coached volleyball, Mrs. Oaks. Then the little office, with its large east-facing window and cluttered shelves of trophies and scorecards, would be his. And then, for once in the many years he had worked there, it might just be quiet.

  “That boy,” Billy said, and Ben knew he was talking about Jake, who was at least thirty-five, “is a jackass. I have no idea why Lee married him. Except that he’s probably well hung. Hell, I know he is. I coached him long enough to have witnessed the thing a time or two.”

  “Jesus, Bill,” Ben said, shuffling through the ever-increasing pile of papers on his desk. He did not want to know the size of Billy Wells’ son-in-law’s penis.

  “You’re as sensitive as a goddamned girl, Ben.” Billy settled back into his seat, tipping back and staring at the ceiling. “You watch the game last night?”

  “I did,” Ben admitted. “Very exciting.”

  “The problem,” Billy began, leaning forward earnestly, “is that in the end, it isn’t ball, you know? Where’s the defense against a man who can hit a ball five hundred fucking feet, fifty times a year?”

  “Pitching?” Ben said mildly.

  “Fuck pitching,” Billy said. “The fielders are slacking off, the infield’s a shambles and no one remembers how to hit a good solid grounder so that when one of these behemoths actually hits the ball out of the park, there’s a man on base.”

  “This is why no one’s ever asked you to go on Sports Center,” Ben said. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “Agenda?” Billy asked, raising an eyebrow. “Agenda? I thought we might, you know, play a little ball. See how the boys do now that we’ve drilled the shit out of them.”

  “Sounds good,” Ben said. “And maybe we could finish the expense reports from last week.”

  “Oh yeah.” Billy was tapping his pencil wildly against his teeth, giving his words a lisp. “That’d be just a great time.”

  Already tired, though it was only nine, Ben simply pushed Billy’s report to the bottom of the stack sitting on his desk and stood, stretching.

  “Coffee?” he asked. Absently, Billy nodded, the pencil still clicking against his canines.

  The faculty lounge was one of Ben’s least favorite places. He had never enjoyed sweating it out in the windowless room with the other coaches for meetings or even worse, potluck dinners. He didn’t want to stay behind at the university and talk about sports theory. He looked forward to the concrete reality of eating dinner off one of his mother’s Norman Rockwell TV trays, preferably during Baseball Tonight.

  Ben smiled at the department secretary, who looked up from behind her desk and snorted at him, as if she were thinking: typical, here he comes again for something, the bastard. Ben was never sure what appeased these women. He suspected it would involve not being secretaries.

  “Just getting some coffee,” he explained. She didn’t answer, so he slid relatively unmolested into the back room. Janine Oaks stood at the copy machine, leaning on it and watching the TV sitting on top of a bank of file cabinets.

  “Ben,” she said, glancing away from the TV.

  “Janine,” he answered. “How’r
e the girls doing this year?”

  “Fourteen and six,” she said.

  Selecting two mugs, Ben poured the thick black coffee into one of them. “Good for them.”

  He tasted the coffee and winced. Clearly, Ed Black, the track coach, had been making it again, although he’d been specifically asked not to. Ben added about half a cup of milk from the mini-fridge and two heaping tablespoons of sugar. It still tasted more like sludge than coffee.

  “So, I was thinking...” Janine said slowly, her voice in perfect cadence with the long clack of the copier behind her.

  “Hmm?” Ben asked, pouring the second cup.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she said and he turned.

  “Sure.”

  Janine Oaks was an attractive woman, if you liked volleyball players. Ben wasn’t really sure if he did or not, though she was pretty in a big-featured, smooth-haired way. Frankly, she looked like she could hold her own in a fight and though the thought intrigued him, it also frightened the hell out of him.

  “Would you, um, be up for dinner tonight?”

  Tonight? Ben swallowed and for a moment considered making up some wild excuse to get out of it. Such short notice, he would waffle, commitments to the team, game tomorrow… anything to get away from Janine Oaks and her sizable set of breasts, the top edge of which, just visible under her low-necked t-shirt, were colored a soft pink with embarrassment.

  She was embarrassed. It seemed like such a monumental thing, suddenly – the knowledge that a woman would find him attractive enough to blush from head to toe.

  “Sure,” he said, smiling. “I’d love to.”

  “Great.” She relaxed, sliding almost bonelessly along the copier until he worried that she might be about to kneel. “I know this great restaurant. Stan and I used to go there all the time...” She trailed off and then shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t have plans and it’s a Friday and I drove past the restaurant yesterday on the way to my sister’s and I thought, damn, I haven’t been there in ages. Who can I ask out to dinner? And you were the first person I thought of.”