Gloria Rubia, the principal of Calcasset High, came out and read a list of Top Ten Cafeteria Improvements We’d Like to See, written by the senior class. (“6. Skee-Ball.”)
Evvie shifted in her seat, adjusted her cap. Andy looked over at her. “Are you gonna be okay whatever happens here?” She nodded, and he smiled. “Okay.”
Over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, with a very special announcement, please welcome the owner of the Calcasset Claws, Ginger Buckley!”
A roar. Ginger was a straight-up eccentric dowager in the best sense, the heir to her late husband’s Kentucky-based whiskey empire. In the mid-1990s, after he died in his early fifties in a small plane crash, she’d packed up and left the South because she’d grown up out East and missed the ocean. Now she lived in a decommissioned and renovated lighthouse all the way at the end of a jetty, with three rescue greyhounds and a constant stream of freeloading grandchildren she adored. In 2009, she’d bought the Claws, as she put it, “for my adopted hometown to enjoy forever and ever.” She came to every game, often putting a papery silver space blanket over her bright red hair when it rained, and now and then, she took to the field to deliver important news.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Spring Dance!” she said into a microphone with pink baubles around the handle that was reserved for her alone. A roar. “How’s everyone enjoying it so far?” Another roar. “Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Another. “Sometimes we like to invite very special friends to play in this game, and we bend a few rules”—she leaned teasingly to one side—“to make it possible.” She glanced over at the Claws’ dugout. “We are very pleased that this year, we can welcome one of our recent arrivals in town”—the first gasps were here—“to take a turn pitching. Calcasset, give your warmest welcome to the assistant coach of the Calcasset High Hawks and our good friend, Dean Tenney.”
Eveleth saw him jog out of the dugout, and she heard the cheer that got so loud it was almost a buzz in her ear. At the pitcher’s mound, he shook Ginger’s hand, and she walked off the field, waving her pink microphone in the air and pumping her other fist. The catcher, Marco Galvez, who also worked at the Honda dealership in Thomaston, set up behind the plate, and Dean looked down at the ball in his hand. “It’s warm-ups, it’s fine,” she muttered to herself. “Just breathe.” All she heard was hollering, but her mind was still enthusiastically replaying the memory of his fingers finding the skin on her back.
He wound up. He rotated, and the ball left his hand, and 2,500 people knew that whatever this was, they could say they were there for it later.
It went thump into Marco’s mitt, and a cheer went up. Marco lobbed it back. And by the time Evvie looked up again, she saw a sea of phones in the crowd, held up, some briefly to catch a photo and then back into pockets with something like shame, some documenting with video. And some, she assumed, would soon be streaming it live, and one of those streams would be spotted and shared by someone famous, and people would stand at bus stops and sit in restaurants and pause games on their computers and mute the television because there was live streaming video of Dean Tenney, who might be about to embarrass himself by being unable to put the ball over the plate at a game where the national anthem had been sung by the seven-woman, two-man glee club from a local senior center.
She looked at Andy next to her and took a deep breath in. He reached over and squeezed her arm. Monica mouthed, “Good luck.” Evvie watched Dean successfully take a few more warm-up pitches, and then she was almost sure she saw him look into the stands. Should I wave? I definitely should not wave. Should I stand up? Should I have worn brighter colors? She rubbed her hands on her thighs and leaned forward as if to whisper in his ear. You can do it, you can do it, you’re fine.
The batter was Brian Staggs, a compact Freeport outfielder with a squatty stance and a caffeinated or otherwise sloshed cheering section. The program said he was nineteen. That meant that as a fifteen-year-old high school freshman, he had probably been watching Dean pitch for the Yankees. If he