came from around here, there was a good chance he was a Red Sox kid. He might be batting against his adolescent mortal enemy. A lot of them might.
Staggs twitched the end of his bat. Dean held the ball at his chest. Evvie sucked her breath in and held it. There went the leg, the body, the arm, the ball. And there went Staggs rotating his shoulders to swing, and there went the bat in an impotent swat, and there went the ball smacking into Marco’s mitt. A fat, deep, punishing punch of a sound that would have sounded great from under the bleachers. Andy bellowed beside her, Rose and Lilly clapped their hands, and Evvie exhaled.
It was one pitch. Just one. Even at his worst, he’d sometimes been able to get off one decent pitch—he’d told her so. He’d even had a couple of passable games. But he’d also told her that very often, right away, even before his problems started, he’d known whether he had his stuff or not. He talked about it as this feeling, like the way you know someone is watching you or the way you know you’re getting a cold when you feel the first dry tickle in the back of your throat. She wondered whether he knew now.
The crowd had gone from revelers at a local charity event to aspiring witnesses to some flavor of history. They’d have been even louder if half of them weren’t texting or tweeting or using one finger to write Dean Tenney in bright blue chicken scratches and draw an arrow on a grainy eight-second video of Dean getting the ball back from Marco.
And it was not just one pitch. A crowd that regularly watches good minor-league pitchers can tell when it’s suddenly visited by very good major-league pitchers. Dean threw hard. Like, hard. His fastball was rude, thrown at guys who could only either watch it as it passed or swing at it when it already had. Staggs, Carlos Stanfield, and Mickey Cudahy all struck out. Four pitches, three pitches, and four pitches. Cudahy had been kicking around for years, and he’d even batted against Dean once years before. When the last of the four pitches to him was called a strike, Evvie saw him smile at Dean and point at him with the bat.
Dean Tenney, who had walked off the field in New York being called a fuckin’ head case, walked off the field in Calcasset, Maine, being figuratively lifted onto the shoulders of 2,500 people cheering and who knew how many glued to their phones. Marco ran out and leapt at him for a righteous chest-bump that was perfectly captured by Charlotte Penney, a ninth-grader in the front row on the first-base side. Charlotte tweeted the video, which was passed on by her cousin Brenda, then by Brenda’s boyfriend Steve, then by Steve’s dad Rick, then by Rick’s college roommate Michael McCasey, a sports journalist at a very small news site, and then by Walt Willette, a sports journalist at a very big news site. This all took four minutes.
The team surrounded him as they left the field. They patted his back, they shook his hand, and Evvie could see that they were chattering and thanking and marveling. They’d been afraid they were going to get whatever he had turned into that hadn’t been Dean Tenney, but they’d gotten Dean Tenney, at least in the fourth. Brett Bradley, who played first base, leaned over as they walked toward the dugout and said something that made Dean laugh—and laugh hard, clapping Brett on the shoulder. Just as he was about to leave the field, Dean turned and looked right toward where she was, like he could see her, even though it seemed like he couldn’t have. Monica leaned in front of Andy and put her hand on top of Evvie’s. “Well, we couldn’t have hoped for much better than that.” She raised her eyebrows. “He looked amazing out there.”
“Yeah, he sure did,” Evvie said.
The most-shared tweet labeled #DeanTenney carried the video and said, “A very nice moment for a nice guy who’s had a very bad couple of years.” The second most-shared tweet carried a photo of the team around Dean, congratulating him. It said, “Congratulations, fuckwit u have 4 world series wins. u struck out 3 scrubs in an exibition [sic] in bumblefuck MAINE.”
Dean spent the rest of the game in the dugout with the Claws where Evvie couldn’t see him. She