and she felt it there, too, and she laughed. “Holy shit.” There were sounds that felt thick and round under her palm and ones that felt sharp and thin. She walked over to the window and leaned close to it, and where the lights were reflected, she could see the glass shaking just a little. She laid her flat hand against the cool pane and when the bass pounded, it tickled her skin. When she moved away, she could see her greasy handprint, like a high five from a ghost. It was, she suddenly knew, her window to smudge.
She started to bounce on the balls of her feet with what now seemed to be the pulse of the whole house. Webster was beginning to gather that this was playtime, so he came over next to her and crouched down with his butt in the air. “Puppy dance!” Evvie said to him, and she did the twist for her little brown dog as he beat his tail against the ground and then offered a yip. She shimmied and ponied over to the kitchen, where she soloed on an imaginary piano, skimming her fingers across her beat-up laminate countertop.
She spun down the hallway from the kitchen to the bedroom, and she dropped onto her back on the bed, feet wiggling, hands waving, screaming out the last chorus. As she finished holding the final note with her eyes shut, she felt a damp nose nuzzle her forehead. She emerged from her reverie to find Webster trying to climb onto her chest.
Evvie sat up and scratched the dog’s ears. Her face was hot and sticky, she was entirely out of breath, and she owed nothing to anyone.
DEAN STOOD IN HIS PARENTS’ study and stared at his Little League trophies, some framed articles about his career—the good parts—and a variety of Marlins and Yankees swag. It was March, and he wasn’t getting ready for a season, and it still made his shoulder itch. He’d figured the visit would do him good.
“I’m about to put dinner on the table,” his mom said, putting her arm around his waist.
He draped his around her shoulders. “You guys don’t have to keep all this stuff, you know.”
“You don’t think we should at least hang on to your bobblehead?” She reached out and touched it, and it nodded enthusiastically.
“Man, I thought that was cool when they made that,” he said, smiling. “My own bobblehead. Might have been the pinnacle of my career.”
“Not the SVU cameo?” she asked. “You did meet Ice-T.”
“I did,” he said, and then he put his fingers on his own little image to still it. “Okay, you can keep that. But you could probably lose a lot of the rest of this stuff.”
“Are you kidding? I still come in here to try on the big foam hand with the ‘we’re number one’ finger. I wear it during fights with your dad.”
“You do not.”
“I could.”
“You know, there’s not a lot to be proud of anymore, Mom.”
She knocked his hip with hers. “Of course we’re proud. You were always going to stop playing at some point. You were always going to get old, if nothing else. You’ve got some gray in your hair, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Your dad put on your jersey every time you pitched. We were in the car one time when you struck out the side and he honked the horn until I thought he was going to get a ticket.”
Dean looked at the Daily News headline that called him a hero. “I was a pretty good pitcher,” he said to his mother.
“You were a great pitcher. You remember that?” She pointed to a picture cut out of The New York Times where they’d caught him in midair after a World Series win. He had leapt a couple of feet with his legs splayed like a hurdler’s, his mouth open in a holler, his fists over his head. The photo had been on T-shirts and magazine covers, and he’d seen two different pictures of people who’d had it tattooed on their arms. “You still did that,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. It’s just…I’m the only one, you know? I’m the only one who knows I did every…everything I could think of, everything they told me to do. I’m going to spend the rest of my life hearing from people who think I didn’t care enough.”
Angie slowly rubbed his back. “Dean, people don’t like…fragility. It makes them nervous. They’re scared thinking things just