his feet. “It was a photographer. It was his idea. It was that or the Natural Booty.”
She shook her head. “Don’t do that. You know what I’m talking about. You know what you said in that interview, you know that you go out in the middle of the night—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he told her firmly. “If I’d wanted to talk about it, I’d have told you about it, like I said the last time you asked me about it.”
“I don’t think you’re ready to give up. I think that’s why you sneak around.”
“Evvie…do you ever quit?”
She was right in front of him again, and she rested her hand on his pitching arm. “There’s a game every year, an exhibition game, between the Claws and this team from Freeport. They play, they raise money, the money gets split between their PTA and ours, with a bonus for the winner. Sometimes there are guests who play on one of the—”
“Are you kidding me? Fuck, no,” he said. “You want to bring a hundred reporters here to write about how sad it is that I’m pitching in a charity game? These people are just now getting bored with me; I’m not giving them anything.”
“We’re not going to announce it,” she said, moving fluidly into the future tense. “We’ll tell the team. It’ll be a surprise for everybody else. The kids you coach are going to love it. And you can see how it goes. You’ll pitch an inning.”
He still had a ball in his hand, and he kept running his fingers over the stitching. “You’re not listening,” he said.
“I know.”
THE CALCASSET CLAWS AND THE Freeport Explorers played an exhibition game they called the Spring Dance every year on the last Sunday in May. They alternated between the two ballparks, had a carnival beforehand in the parking lot, and, every year, the host team tried to top the year before. There was laser tag in Freeport one year; there was a virtual reality room in Calcasset the next year. There was a dog show in Calcasset one year; there was a bull rider in Freeport the next year.
This was Calcasset’s year, and the organizers were understandably enthusiastic when Dean Tenney sidled into their temporary office at Dacey Park a couple of weeks ahead of the game to tell them that if it was okay with the team, he wanted to show his gratitude for how he’d been welcomed by pitching an inning. Freeport might have had a vertical wind tunnel last year, but Calcasset was going to have a news story. It would remain a secret until he walked onto the field; that was his only condition.
When Dean had closed the deal with Liza, who ran the whole thing, he exited the office and stepped into a cinderblock hallway. The way he’d come, to the right, led back out to the lot where he’d parked his truck. The other way led to the field where he’d only ever been at night. He went left. As he walked, he took out his phone and texted Eveleth. They went for it, he wrote. Now I have to do it.
She sent back a blue heart.
* * *
—
He opened a gate with a squeaky latch and stepped onto the field. The first baseball field he’d ever been on was in Lansing, Michigan, where he was born.
He used to lie under the bleachers when his brothers were playing and listen to the ball instead of watching. It was the sound of it hitting the catcher’s mitt that had hooked him. Thump. For so many guys he knew, it was the sound of the bat. They’d loved to hit, growing up craving first the clang of the Little League aluminum bat and then, if they made it that far, the gunshot sound of the major league wooden bat. But for him, it had always been the ball hitting the mitt. He firmly believed that good pitches sounded different from bad ones, and when he had started to fail, he had craved that good sound, that satisfying sound of the pitch that was where the catcher wanted it.
The last time he’d walked off the field at Yankee Stadium, the crowd had been happy to see him go and unhappy not to be given the opportunity to drop an active beehive right on his head. He’d known—he’d known—that he might never pitch again. Walking onto the field in Calcasset was going to be his first pitching