Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,106

age of 38. She was the mother of Arthur “Kel” Turner Keller and the daughter of Paul and Barbara Turner (both deceased). She worked for five and a half years at Pells Landing High School. She was a good person and she loved to have a good time. She had a long struggle with a lot of different illnesses.

May she rest in peace.

I thought you just sent the obituary to the paper and they put it in, but Pottsy said no, you have to pay. I panicked a little but Pottsy said he wanted to pay for it. That he’d be in charge of it.

No, you don’t have to, I said. I don’t have to put one in for her.

But in my heart I felt she had spent her life not being noticed. So I wanted to tell someone—I wanted strangers to read it and to think, She was too young—and to shake their heads. And to say her name in their heads.

So I was relieved when Pottsy put a hand on my shoulder and said Keller. I want to.

• • •

“So many of them are young,” said Yolanda. It was her turn to read the obituaries. She was leaning forward in her chair, her ankles hooked around its legs.

Just as I realized who it was Yolanda reminded me of, she read a name aloud: “Charlene Turner Keller.”

I said, “What did you say?”

“This woman,” said Yolanda. “She was young. She had a kid too.” She touched her own stomach.

• • •

Before a game, when I was young, my mother would say, Don’t be nervous! and I would say, I’m not, and she would say, Me neither. Then she would say, You look nervous, and I would say, I’m not.

The thing is that she was right. I was nervous. I was always nervous and only she could see that. I was shaking in my cleats, I was fucking terrified. A little kid. But I’d walk onto the field like a pro, tossing the ball in the air, grinning at the other team if I wanted, chucking the ball hard back and forth with someone to warm up. A little sound like hup, hup would come out of me when I was really throwing well.

She took my hand in the car. When I let her. And I did let her, because I was nervous, and she was the only one who knew it.

I wake up dreaming of her and this. It’s the first nice dream I’ve had about her, and I take it as a good sign. I have slept in my lucky socks, the ones I’ve been wearing the night before games since I was about ten. I hit my first grand slam wearing them. No one is up in the house yet. It is my job to wake Dee up, and I shuffle down the hall and knock lightly on his door. No response.

Yo, I whisper. I do not want to wake Rhonda up.

I knock again, louder, and then crack open the door to Dee’s room. He has heavy dark blinds that make the room black even though the sun is up. I see him in the light of the hallway, asleep in the same twin bed he’s always had, his feet hanging a foot off of it. When I used to sleep over when we were kids we had a rule: whoever woke up first would wake the other one up. I usually slept later than he did. I’d be in my sleeping bag on the floor and a basketball or a pillow or a sock would hit me in the face, and Dee would say, Get up.

Now I walk over to him and give the bed a shove with my foot.

He opens his eyes.

You up? I ask him.

I am now, he says.

He’s driving me to my workout with Gerard Kane. Just before we walk out the door, Rhonda comes flying down the hall. Good luck, she says, I prayed for you!

Thank you, I say, and we close the door.

Behind us, through the closed door, we can hear her talking. I’m still praying! I’m praying now, she is saying.

I could drive myself but Dee offered and I let him. It’s at a giant practice facility in Eastchester, and we take the parkway to get there, and on the way Dee puts on the radio. He doesn’t ask me if I’m nervous and I’m grateful.

Instead he tells me things about the girls we grew up with. Who is pregnant and