parking lot, and at first, she thought she might be wrong. The field lights weren’t on; it looked dark, just as it should. But then she saw his truck, tucked up against one of the outbuildings. Evvie was relieved to know where he was, and worried that he was here, and a little impressed with herself for figuring it out.
She got out of her car and walked toward the field, and as she approached the entry gate, she heard the first metal clang that she knew was the ball hitting the fence behind the catcher who, of course, wasn’t there. She took a few more steps, and there was another clang, and then she heard him say, almost matter-of-factly, “Fuck.”
She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat and passed through the gate that stood open, where someone would normally take a ticket. She got closer to the field, and another ball hit the fence, and then she was there, along the first-base line, and she saw what he’d done. He had several big, boxy flashlights, practically floodlights, that he’d set in a line between the pitcher’s mound and the plate.
He was looking the other way. She watched as he reached into a bucket for a ball. His leg kicked, and his body rotated, and the ball flew in the dark, and then clang. She took a gulp of cold air and watched as it transformed into a white puff of her breath when she said, “Hey.”
He flinched, then he turned around to face her. He was breathing hard. “What are you doing here?” His voice sharpened when he asked, “What, did you follow me?”
“I heard your truck,” she said. “Then I…guessed.” She walked down to the break in the fence and made her way out onto the field, onto the winter-nipped grass where she’d only stepped twice: once when her school band performed before a game, and once when her Girl Scout troop was part of the presentation of the national anthem. She stood close to him.
“You guessed that I was at the closed minor-league baseball park at two thirty in the morning.”
“I figured you wanted to see for yourself where they ran the cereal-box races.” She pointed toward home. “Bree fell right about…there.” He smiled, but only a little. She looked around, as if there was something to see in the dark. “I didn’t know they didn’t even lock this place in December.”
“They do. But if you ask around and you promise not to break anything, you can find the guy with the key.”
Evvie nodded slowly. “I thought you were done with all this. I thought you were moving on and everything.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. If I did, I’d have told you myself.”
“You said ‘friends.’ You said you wanted to throw out our deal. You asked me about Tim, and the money, and my dad. I’m asking why you got out of bed in the middle of the night to throw baseballs at a fence and swear.”
“Jesus,” he breathed. “Friends? That’s what you think this is? This is private, Evvie. I haven’t been able to do anything without people breathing down my neck for a year and a half. Do I look like I want to talk about this right now?”
“Did I look like I wanted to talk about my dad?”
“I came all the way up here so people wouldn’t stalk me. If I wanted to talk about pitching, I could have stayed in Manhattan. I came here so I could not explain myself, so don’t ask me to, okay? I am fine. I truly don’t want to talk about this.”
She didn’t even know that she’d expected him to be happy to see her until he wasn’t. Now, realizing that she had followed him and it was the middle of the night, the awkwardness of it crept down her spine. It felt like a kind of involuntary cloning, where a copy of herself stepped away and stared. It saw this man trying to enjoy some solitude in the middle of the night and this crazy lady who showed up in her pajamas without being invited. She could think of nothing to say except “Okay, bye,” which she suspected would result in death by human combustion, attributable to humiliation. She felt frozen in place, unable to imagine even a graceful retreat. But then she noticed he was in only a long-sleeved shirt. “Hey, shouldn’t you have a coat or