ON SHERMAN'S FIELD BY DAVID LINKER
July, 2005
Sherman’s Field sits back behind Town Hall, which had once been the local high school but had, long ago, been converted from classrooms to office space, though, with the exception of the Mayor’s suite, no one has yet removed the blackboards. The field itself is neatly groomed, the grass is mowed weekly and the diamond re-limed after every home game and passing shower, but still the field is too small for a high school-level game. It was built with Pee-Wee Leaguers in mind, maybe it’d be good for when the garbage-men play the teacher’s union in softball, but with good contact, a sixteen- year- old power hitter can easily send the ball over the short left field porch. For years, opposing high schools have complained about playing on Sherman’s Field, but with the growing popularity of girl’s sports and the slow starvation of school budgets, no one in any position of power has been willing to push for new athletic facilities, much less for new fields when Sherman’s and the old Cuoso Field back by the train station go all but unused half the year.
Built on the cheap on land the town eminent-domained in the midst of the post- war housing boom, Sherman’s Field has no dugouts and no bullpen to speak of. Teams have to sit on the first row of seats in the stands, and relief pitchers warm up in foul territory, or if necessary, in the parking lot. Five years ago, Paul Byrd blew out an elbow on his first pitch, after being called in to relieve for the North Harrington Panthers. The ball rolled towards, but never quite made it to, the plate, and Paul was rushed to Danbury Hospital for immediate arthroscopic surgery. He never pitched an inning again, not that he had much of a career in it waiting anyway, though his parents still sued the town for making the kids play on a field with insufficient space for them to warm up. The case was settled out-of-court and the fields were left as is, though parents who still complain invariably point to Paul Byrd’s injury as proof of the town’s outrageous penuriousness and/or willful negligence. Nancy Kitt had herself just recently stood up at a Board of Education meeting and threatened to sue. She didn’t think she should have to wait for her son, Jim, the team’s star pitcher and third baseman, who currently posted a 12-1 record, despite the team being only 18-20, and was batting .417 going into tonight’s game, to be injured first. That the town would put its brightest star in harm’s way, she believed, was criminal in-and-of-itself. Nancy Kitt was not one to hold opinions lightly or to keep them to herself for long. The Board of Ed, which was stocked with the mayor’s cronies and Mrs. Ball, who couldn’t hear well, life-long New Englanders all, didn’t take well to vocal or emotional appeals. (They preferred prudence, back-room brokerings, and whatever was in the best interest of keeping taxes low.) Their collective disposition made a mockery of their constitutionally mandated public meetings, which were supposed to allow for the airing of public grievances, but they let it be known frequently, and again whenever someone seemed as upset as Nancy Kitt, that they saw nothing worth getting angry over if getting angry meant spending money. They actually told Ms. Kitt to return when she could regain her composure, which only made her lose whatever composure she might have had left. (Her voice turned from a pitched shout to just shrill.) Nancy had a hard time keeping hold of her emotions her whole life, but increasingly more so over the dozen years since she’d been widowed. Her husband, Big Jim Kitt -- he’d tried going by his given name, James, after the birth of Jim Junior, but it just didn’t fit on a man of his easy laugh and santa-sack gut -- had worked late one night and returned home on the last train only to find his car battery dead in the train station parking lot. It was one of those lingering summer days when twilight doesn’t fade though the stars don’t shine, and so Big Jim thought he’d walk his way home rather than ring home for a ride, take a taxi, or even get out the AAA card and call a damn tow. There were no sidewalks in all North Harrington, no streetlamps, just the fading day’s light and the shoulder of the road for safety. From the way he was run down, the Police believe he must have seen it coming and then zigged back and left when he should have zagged forward and right. The driver didn’t slow down. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and had been slaloming the yellow lines like that because he was dreaming he was driving through a circus. He woke up thinking he’d run into the pole that held up the main tent. No joke. That’s what he told the police, who found he had a blood alcohol level near three-times the legal limit. All this when Jim Junior, was all of six and just starting to get the hang of T-ball.
Tonight’s the last game of the season before the play-offs start, and Nancy Kitt has heard that there might be scouts on hand. She’s kept an eye out for a man in a cheap suit. (She imagines baseball scouts to be like gym teachers, sweaty, flushed, simple men with little wisdom beyond the importance of always giving it a one-hundred-and-ten percent and long-held, deep-seated suspicions of compact cars.) She figured he’d be easy enough to pick out, being that North Harrington games rarely garnered in a crowd and those few who do come to watch were always familiar. But it turns out that the opposition, Old Greenwich High, has a decent shot at the state title and has brought a throng of parents along. Nancy is still dressed from work in a peasant dress and complicated shirt that’s too light for such a breezy, cool late April evening. She teaches grade-school art in Westport, which is only a half-hour drive down winding Route 57. Before she married Big Jim, she’d dreamed of a bohemian’s life, living hand to mouth in run-down walk-ups, sculpting phalli from found objects, sleeping with strange men with squat bodies simply for the subject matter. It didn’t work out quite that way. She rented the squalid loft of her dreams in the East Village right after college. Her father offered to pay for something nicer (by which he meant safer and door-manned) but she refused. This was the early-early seventies, post-hippie, pre-gas lines, and she was determined, if nothing else, to be genuine.
But then she met Big Jim at a party thrown by a mutual friend. He was working in real estate at the time, and they were the only two at the party not getting stoned. He impressed her not by pretending to know anything about art but by being wowed that she did. She could talk to him without worrying about sounding pretentious or, worse, silly. They went to galleries and museums, hand picked clay, and took long weekends in backwoods Vermont to learn about the fine points of soft metal soldering. He proposed when she told him that she was pregnant, though he had the ring already bought. He just had to go get it, which quelled her worries (he always did) and made her fall in love all over again. She said, “I’m pregnant,” and he said, “Good,” got up, got the ring out of a dresser drawer, got down on bended knee, and got himself a wife. They moved to Connecticut for the same reasons everyone else did -- to raise children. This time she let her father help out, and they bought a house on a rise in the land, with a small barn in the backyard that was a perfect setting for her studio.
Jim Junior, kept her from her work initially, but she was able to find the energy for a few hours after his bedtime, that is until Big Jim lost his real estate job when New York City nearly went bankrupt. She was only planning to be a substitute teacher -- this was not a career move, after all -- but then the former art teacher took a job at some boutique ad agency for three times the salary and her position was offered to Nancy. In dreaming her life, she’d never once considered teaching. It seemed beneath her somehow (those who can’t and all). But she couldn’t deny that she liked it. The kids were young enough that they just enjoyed the clays and paints for the feel itself. She loved the smocks, seeing little boys and girls swallowed in their daddy’s old shirts on backwards. And the kids loved art class. It was a break from the drudgery of reading and writing, and she could be as crazy and silly and wickedly inventive as she wanted to be and the kids played along without question. Her own work slacked, of course. Between teaching and raising Jim Junior, and helping Big Jim through his own crisis of confidence, she was exhausted and happy, a bad combination for anyone who aspires to greatness.
She objected at first when Big Jim asked if he could store the lawn mower in a corner of her studio, but she relented eventually. It was such a bother parking it in the garage. She was always swinging a car door into it and snagging grocery bags on its rust- peppered metal handles. But once the first barrier was down, the studio slowly filled with the artifacts of suburban life -- golf clubs, chain saws, old bicycles, a wheelbarrow caked with mulch, sad bags of soggy charcoal. Big Jim eventually found a new job as a mortgage broker, making twice what he used to and on more regular hours. He told Nancy that she didn’t have to keep teaching, and she said that it would be her last year then. She was determined not to get sucked into easy solutions. She was an artist, and Big Jim didn’t disagree. If anything he believed in her talent more than she did, but he also believed that nothing was worth much if you weren’t happy. So, if teaching made her happy, he’d argue, let it. And so eventually she just did. She never took her resignation letter out of her classroom desk drawer. That summer she used a copy of it in an elaborate papier-mâché she made (she never stopped her own work; she just gradually phased it out of her day-to-day). She became what she’d once most despised -- a dilettante. She was no better than those craft-show housewives who try to sell their hand-made, clay-thrown, lop-sided mugs, the ones with the encephalitic-headed, primary color children all hands- across-America around the rim. She’d always believed that there was a distinction to be made between artists and dilettantes, and though there was nothing wrong with being a dilettante, they should save their work for Christmas gifts for family members or for their husband to use to decorate a desk at work. Dilettantes should not display, should not sell, should not aspire to. They should enjoy themselves and stand back while the serious artists labored towards significance. And Nancy badly wanted significance, whatever that meant, though she knew for sure that teaching school certainly wasn’t it.)
When Big Jim died, she locked the studio shut and tried to flush the key down the toilet. She couldn’t get it to go and had to satisfy herself with spiking it into a sitting garbage can. At every point, she had let her aspirations make her doubt herself. She let her art get in the way of her life, and she swore that she would never let that happen again. All the times she’d barricaded herself in that studio, desperate for inspiration when she could have been with her husband, made her sick to her very soul. No more. Her dreams might have stolen time from her husband, but her son would have nothing less than her full attention. She was a teacher, a good one at that, and a mother, and that would be her epitaph. They paid a local kid to mow the lawn because she refused to open the studio again, even just to get out what they needed. Ashes to ashes, she told Jim Junior, the last time he’d asked for the key. Let the fucking thing rot into the ground.
Nancy knows on first sight that the man in the visitor’s section with the writing pad flapping out of his front pocket and the stopwatch in hand must be the scout. He seems to be alone and too eager to take notes. He is also eyeing Jim anxiously, as if by squinting he can somehow better make out what was so special. Jim is warming up off the mound (he’s the game’s starting pitcher) and she can see that he’s over-throwing his curveball. It’s breaking late and high. They’ve developed a series of signs after she’d embarrassed him by pulling him aside between innings during little league. Now she just points to her watch and waits for him to look over, which he does two or three pitches later and then nods his head. She knows he’s nervous. Unfortunately, he was born with her unshakable jitteriness. If he could have inherited anything from his father, Nancy wishes, it could have been Big Jim’s self-assurance -- his unerring talent to see the bright side, his confidence before challenges, his ability to get relaxed with just a single deep breath. Instead, Jim Junior, turned out to be his mother’s son, anxious and self-critical, prone to depression and lethargy, and altogether unsure of his ability to be anything he wants to be. Athletes are not supposed to be analytical, but Jim can’t ever leave well enough alone. The good is always luck, and the bad, destiny. If his father were alive... Who knows? Big Jim certainly couldn’t cure her, but he at least he could get her to laugh. She remembers then a car ride in to the city. Jim Junior, couldn’t have been more than six. Back then they had the old Dodge Station Wagon that would eventually die in the driveway. She had to pay one of the Cuoso boys just to tow it away for junk. Big Jim was driving and they had this eight-track of disco hits that had this one song on it -- ‘Don’t Rock the Boat, Baby’ -- that Jim Junior, loved. He had this whole little dance, and on the straight-aways when the chorus came on, Big Jim would join in, doing this complicated hand-jive that she could never get right. She remembers blue skies and sunshine, the New York skyline in the distance, the window half-opened, and a hot Bronx-borough air on her face.
The umpire calls for coaches to come to the mound to trade line-up cards. Eddie Cleary is behind the plate for today’s game, which bodes well for Jim. He teaches second-grade by day and he has an elementary school teacher’s tendency towards lenience, which means a wide strike zone and close calls to the runner. Eddie’d actually asked her out on a date last year. He invited her to dinner at the Applebee’s in Danbury, which he said was his favorite restaurant and a good place for good conversation, which, Nancy realized when she saw it printed at the top of the menu, was, in fact, the chain’s slogan.. When he drove her home, she shook his hand under the dim glow of the front porch light, lest there be any chance of misunderstanding.
Jim breaks away from his friends and sidles up to the edge of the stands to call his mother over. “He here?” he wants to know, and Nancy can’t help but tell him the truth. The man in the checkered jacket, over in the visitor’s section, is the scout.
“Don’t think about him. Don’t worry about him. Just do your best, and you’ll be fine,” she says as if she knows the first thing about how this should work.
“What team you think he’s from?”
“Coach said Baltimore, didn’t he?”
“Excellent,” Jim says, punching a fist into his glove. “Baltimore. That’s not too far away.”
Ever since the idea of being drafted was mentioned, Jim has become increasingly nervous about being taken by, say, Seattle or Arizona -- far away. Nancy knows he is terrified about leaving home and that he hates the idea that the decision is out of his control. Baltimore, she knows he reasons, would be perfect -- a train’s ride away. He could come home whenever he wanted. He’d already been accepted to Yale, not far away at all, even though he didn’t have an athletic scholarship. (Ivy League schools don’t give athletic scholarships.) He’d already decided that he would go to school instead of play ball if he were drafted to the West Coast. He made that very clear: I’m not going far away. Nancy tried to discourage him. She tried to explain that an opportunity to play baseball for a living was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. College would always be there. The life insurance settlement was more than enough to pay for school, whenever he decided to go. But secretly she understood because she was terrified, too. For one thing, she’d have to move. Without Jim Junior, the house would be way too big. After Big Jim had died, she considered selling but she kept breaking into tears looking at other houses without her husband there. Not because she needed him for guidance. Frankly, she was the household accountant. She knew better what to do with their money than Big Jim ever did. It was more that when they’d moved from New York to North Harrington, they did it to fulfill a dream, to start a family, in expectation of things to come. They expected to GROW. Now she was looking to shrink. She didn’t need three thousand square feet and two acres of lawn to mow anymore, not for a long time in fact, but she kept it regardless. Paid the property taxes year in and year out as a sort of penance -- as if this alone would keep such a tragedy from ever happening to her again. But when Jim Junior leaves for school or spring training, there’ll be far too much space for any one person to fill. She’ll be the last falling flake in the gift-store snow globe. “You deserve this,” she says, a hand under his chin. “Remember that. Now, go do your old mom proud.”
“Okay, Mom,” he whispers through clenched teeth, noticing then that the team is watching. “I gotta go.”
“So go. And don’t over-throw. Not everything is a fastball, right? Let the ball do the work, kiddo.”
“Okay, Mom, I get it,” and he breaks away and hustles to the mound. She watches him go, blows a kiss, and then notices that the scout is watching and without thinking, she blows him a kiss, too. He immediately focuses back on his notepad, and from his squat behind home plate, Eddie calls out in his most authoritative voice, “Play ball!” And on that, Jim Junior looks in for a sign, shakes the catcher off twice, and throws a fastball two feet over the batter’s head. The ball clanks against the chain-link back-stop and Jim kicks at the rubber like he’s blaming the mound. His next pitch, the curve, hangs and the batter smokes it, but, fortunately, straight at the second baseman for an easy out. Before the innings over, Jim’s walked the bases full only to get out of it by sheer luck with a hard grounder to short that the Panthers turn into a double-play. Nancy’s signaling for Jim to calm down. She knows from the way he holds his shoulders that he’s tensing up, thinking too much, when he should be “in the zone,” just up there throwing the ball. She took him to a sport’s psychiatrist when coaches first started to mention his talent while shaking their head, wondering aloud if he had the stomach to compete. Doctor Glick had a small office downtown, over the Baskin-Robbins, and after examining him for an hour, he claimed that Jim Junior suffered from a mild anxiety problem that could probably be cured through breathing exercises and low doses of Xanax, which they tried for awhile until Nancy noticed that Jim’s tendency towards lethargy and circumspection had taken a turn for the worse, rendering him zombie-like and practically mono-syllabic. He was pitching better, if he’d lost a bit of zip on his fastball, but his constant smile reminded her too much of the dope-fiends she knew back when she lived in the East Village. Her neighbor, for instance -- the installation artist. He used to smoke pot walking down the street, always with that same glassy ‘it’s-all-good, baby’s look on his face. Two weeks before his Junior-year season started, Nancy cancelled the doctor, cancelled the drugs, and told Jim Junior tearfully that they were going to do this on their own, naturally, without any help from anyone – just like they always did. And Jim took it in all blank- eyed with just a shrug. “If that’s what you think is best,” he said. He couldn’t sleep for a week while the drugs got out of his system, but when the season started, he had an extra few miles on his fastball back along with his habit for letting one mistake snowball into a disastrous inning. And as he bounds to the first row, stepping careful over the foul line, cursing himself she can see, she wishes briefly that she hadn’t acted so rashly. Maybe they could have re-medicated, even if just for today. She can see the scout taking notes, scribbling she can only imagine what, and it’s all her fault that this chance will pass her son by. If Big Jim were alive... But she shakes her head, will not allow herself that thought, nothing good can come from doubting the wisdom of what cannot be changed.
Nancy gets up and crosses behind the backstop over to sit in the visitor’s section, sure in what she has to do. She takes a seat next to the scout as Andy Dwyer steps into the batter’s box, shaking his bat as if he’s hoping to prove that he’s not desperately hoping to be walked. Francine Dwyer has her video camera out. She films all Andy’s games so that his father can watch when he gets home, so that he can “help” Andy with all the things he’s done wrong. Nancy once asked to borrow a video of one of the games after Jim had struck out fifteen batters, eleven in a row in fact. Francine demurred and deferred and then eventually had to admit that she doesn’t so much tape the game as she’s zoomed in on Andy the whole time. Poor Andy, she thinks, and, in fact, that’s exactly how she introduces herself to the scout. “Poor Andy,” she says, shaking her head, “couldn’t hit a breaking ball if you sent him up there with a cricket bat.” She doesn’t know where this turn of the phrase has come to her from, but it distracts the scout’s attention enough to make him miss the first pitch. “You from the Orioles?” she asks then, and the scout nods, his jaw disappearing into the chub of his chin, “Yes ma’am.”
“You ever sign a kid from Connecticut? We’re not much of a baseball state.”
“Near Hartford,” he says, “the Southington teams tend to be pretty good. We signed a kid from Essex who’s now playing Double-A, though I doubt he’ll make the show. Too small.”
“I’m Jim’s mom,” she says then, extending a hand, and he wipes his hand on the seat of his pants before shaking and introducing himself simply as ‘Ted.’ “Don’t mind that first inning. He was just settling in.” And when he doesn’t respond, she plows forward regardless. “It’s my fault. I got him all worked up. His Daddy died,” she says, glad that they’re in the visitor’s section, glad no one she knows can hear her let him misunderstand. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand as if to answer his question before he can ask it, as if to say, ‘Yes. Just.’ But fortunately, she doesn’t have to lie. Fortunately, he just says softly, “Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay,” she sighs, adjusting her skirt. “We’re getting on just fine. It’s just Jim... Well, a chance to play professional ball would have meant the world to his father. So, you can understand why he’d get himself worked up. My son’s got talent,” she says, and then can’t help herself but to add, “Don’t you think so?”
“He’s got a heck of an arm.”
“A major league heck of an arm?”
“Ma’am...” he begins.
“Please; Nancy.”
“Nancy, I’m sorry. I can’t comment on that.”
“He’s got the build. He’s almost six feet now, you know. Just last year he was only five nine. His Dad was six four, so I figure he’s got another few inches in him. He’s not going to be Randy Johnson-size, but he’s broad, you know, like Roger Clemens. And he’s got a work ethic you wouldn’t believe. Jogs five miles every day before school.”
“That’s good,” he says as Derek Stephens strikes out looking, and the teams switch sides, Jim Junior taking his rightful place back on the mound. She catches his eye staring over at her, he’s gesturing as furtively as he can for her to get out of there, but she decides to ignore it. She hopes that if he’s thinking about her, he won’t think about pitching. And if he’s not thinking about pitching, she knows he can do anything. His fastball was popping when he was warming up. She can feel the electricity in the air. This is his chance. She had hers, frankly, and she decided other things were more important. But he’s too young to lose hope that anything is impossible. He’s only seventeen for Pete’s sake; all he’s ever wanted was to play baseball. His room is a shrine to the game -- the Ron Guidry posters, the Bucky Dent signed bat, the ticket stubs set in frames, the scorecard kept in the bottom desk drawer from the only game he ever went to with Big Jim... It all was in service of this, of this moment, of this place, of these next few pitches, because if he blows it now, he’ll never have another shot. This is the last game of the season; this is the only scout to come see him. He doesn’t pull it together and he’s going to go to Yale. Maybe he’ll play ball on their team. Maybe. But even so, it’s not a baseball school. Ron Darling came out of Yale to pitch for the Mets, but he’s pretty much the last player to make the jump to the bigs. And even then, Darling had to toil in the Cape Cod leagues, in the independent leagues, a year in the Mexico, if memory serves, before he made it. She doubts her boy has that kind of determination. No, if not now, then never. If not now, he’ll put away his dreams for a more sensible life just like his Daddy did, just like she did, just like he was raised to do. And so when Jim’s first pitch sails again to the backstop and the scout drops his pencil down and picks up his bag from the seat-riser floor, she grabs his knees and tells him, “Wait. One more.” And he stays put and they watch together, silent, her breath-held, as Jim overcompensates and throws his next one two feet short in the dirt. Even his coach realizes what’s going on and jogs out to the mound to calm down his star.
And the scout says, “Sorry, ma’am, gotta go,” and he slips his notepad into his leather satchel and slips out sideways, apologizing as he pushes past the mothers and girlfriends of the visiting boys. Jim Junior looks up then to his mother in the bleachers. She can see that he’s struggling not to cry. Eddie comes out from his crouch to tell the coach, either you go back to the dugout that isn’t really a dugout, or you bring in a new pitcher. And Coach leaves Jim in. He’s looking up at the sky and kicking at the ground. And she remembers then, a few years after his father died, one Saturday afternoon, he couldn’t have been more than eight at the time, when she heard the thump-thump-thump of him throwing a baseball against the brick side of the house. She went outside, glove in hand, and offered to play catch, even squatted to let him pitch to her and give back whatever common-sense comments she could think of. Keep your shoulders in, aim for the mitt, you don’t need to throw it as hard as you can every time. And when they were done, he thanked her, said, “That was great, Mom. Just like Dad would’ve done.” It was that “would’ve” that caught in her throat then and brings her near-tears now, because Dad never did. Jim Junior could only imagine it, must have been imagining it, in fact, before she came outside. And she waits, hand to mouth, as Coach returns to the dugout and the next batter stands in the box. She can see from the way his chest rises that he’s doing his breathing exercises to calm himself down, and the first pitch, a backdoor slider he’s only just begun experimenting with, buckles the knees of the batter and lands in for a first called strike.
The scout has made it to his car by the time Nancy catches up to him. He’s got the trunk opened and a map out and his jacket off. His shirt is stained, stuck to him by his gray-pond pit sweat. He’s looking out at the road, up the sun, presumably trying to figure a way to the next game, a town or two over. She knows that Newton’s playing Somersville. They’re on the cusp of making the state tournament and their game has implication for whether North Harrington will sneak in to the tournament to play first- seed Storrs, who haven’t lost a game, playoff or regular season, in two years. “Wait,” she says, waving her arms. “He’s got his rhythm.” She can hear the faint roar of the sparse crowd as, she presumes, he’s just struck someone out. “He was just nervous.”
“He did fine.”
“Don’t patronize me. He’s a better pitcher than what you saw. He just got nervous. Come. We can watch from behind the concession stand. You can see what he can do.”
“I’m sorry...”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m doing this for you as much as for him. My boy’s got talent. He can do this.”
“Maybe.”
“He just got nervous.”
“That maybe, too, but, no offense, if he gets nervous in front of me, how’s he going to pitch in front of a thousand fans at a minor league game, much less fifty-five thousand at Camden Yards.”
“He can work on it. It just takes getting used to.”
“Look, he’s a lucky kid having a mom like you. He’s also got a lot of other options, which, trust me, most of the kids I see don’t have. I hear the boy’s got into Yale. Feel lucky. I can teach him a curve ball. I can teach him how to pace himself. But I can’t give him guts, you know. Don’t take it wrong, Nancy. It’s no fault of anyone’s. Takes a certain personality to pitch in front of crowd when it’s all on the line. It’s a thing you can’t teach. Either you have it or not. And your boy just doesn’t. I’m sorry. But it’s true.”
“So, fine, what’ll it take then,” she says, hands on her hips.
“I’m not sure I follow you,” he tells her, slamming closed the trunk.
“Look,” she says, moving awkwardly toward him, looking over her shoulder to make sure they were out of eyesight. “Whatever I have to do...” she adds, putting her hand on his chest, swallowing down the thought of what she’s offering. “Anything,” she whispers, sultry as she can manage.
“Look, I’ve really gotta get going….”
“You are a handsome man, Ted. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Nancy, please, I’ve got to get up to Somersville. I appreciate what you’re trying to do...” he mumbles, slipping around the bumper, headed for driver’s side door, and she unbuttons her top button as he opens the side door and slips himself inside. He’s fumbling with the keys as she’s struggling with the second button, which seems to have tangled itself in a loose thread. He starts the car and closes his door, and she gives up on the button and throws her hands down, frustrated. She can feel the tears well up and she stomps her feet. She can’t believe that she’s gotten herself so tangled up. And she can hear the crowd’s clapping rising to crescendo as they do when there’s two outs and two strikes on a batter. If only he’d just come back just for one more inning, for one more out, she knows he’d see what she sees. This boy raw with potential, able to do anything, to get out boys bigger, faster, stronger than he is, boys who didn’t learn to throw strikes because they were worried that if they missed their mark their mother might get hurt by a pitch. And Ted throws the car into reverse then and peels out of his dirt-and-gravel parking space before throwing the car into drive and speeding out past her. And she picks up a rock big as a fist and wheels without thinking, throws it hard at him as he slows for a stop sign where the parking lot intersects the single-lane road that runs around to the front of City Hall. The crowd behind her erupts -- she can hear old Eddie yell ‘Strike Three’ – which drowns out the sound of his rear window spider-cracking on impact. He slams on the brakes briefly, and she harbors thoughts of him chasing her back towards the field just in time to see Jim Junior step to the plate and hit a home run. His anger will be quelled by the sheer amazement at her son’s power. The ball will seem to disappear into the blue- blue sky, forever gone, and he will watch in awe, forget why he’s there, who he’s chasing, and jaw-dropped open sigh simply, “Wow.” But then he doesn’t take the challenge, just drives away turn-blinker still on, and she’s left with nothing to do but button-up the single button she’d undone and head back, chin held high, to tell Jim Junior when he inevitably asks if she thinks he’ll call, that you never know what’s going to happen.
Dave Linker earned his M.A. in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars. He has written for magazines such as The Washington Monthly, MusicMonthly, The Morpo Review, Publishers Weekly, Spin, and Glamour, published a children’s book through Random House, and served on the Editorial Board of Zoetrope: All-Story. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Jen, a novel in the works, and a baby on the way.