by Larry Brill
This teaching gig wasn’t bad. The kids were a riot, and he found it easy to deal with them on their level. If he didn’t have to run the classroom, he could have been one of them. And he liked the other teachers. They were becoming an extended family. Nate scored big with the principal when Julie told him he’d been captain of the high school baseball team, good enough to have snagged a college scholarship to a school in southern California. Festerhaven recruited him on the spot to join the softball team and jokingly threatened to make his life miserable at school if he refused.
Julie finished and closed her scorebook. “Not bad, Evans, for a rookie. Four for four, you’re batting a thousand. You scored three runs, with five runs batted in. Five ribbies including the winning run.”
“Ribbies? Ooh. I love it when you talk dirty to me.” Nate jabbed her with his elbow and watched the rosy sunburn on her cheeks turn a shade darker while she avoided his eyes. Still, she giggled. That made him five for five on the day even though he wasn’t going to score this time.
“Let’s not mention to the Russ-ter that my scholarship only lasted that first year.”
“I didn’t know that. Too bad.”
“That’s what the coach said. He said I was ‘too bad’ to keep on scholarship.” Ba-da-bump! He waited for her to laugh. “Actually, he asked me to stay on the team, but it was clear I wouldn’t be playing much, so that’s when I hung up my cleats and figured since I was already enrolled, maybe I should try my hand at studying for a change.”
He didn’t tell Julie that he intended to move back to San Jose and finish college close to home. The first thing he did at the start of summer break was go looking for her. It was Julie’s mother who told him she had gotten married a month earlier. How crazy was that? Barely a year out of high school, nobody got married that young. If Nate had known she was that serious about a guy, he would have gone back to San Jose sooner, and he would have… he would have… What would he have done? Probably exactly what he was doing now, he lamented, letting the guy who stole her heart buy him a beer.
“Here you go,” Festerhaven said. Nate took the bottle, raised it and sipped along with Festerhaven. He set it aside as soon as the captain of the Master Batters moved on to a group of players, wives and girlfriends who were standing closer to the bar.
“I’m glad they let me fill in today. Looks like your fiancé is having himself a righteous good time.” Odd. Festerhaven seemed to be paying a tad more attention to a leggy blond in tight jeans standing next to him than the others. He touched her elbow for the third time in the last two minutes. Nate watched his hand linger a bit too long. No, he must be seeing things he only wanted to see. Still, who was her player? She didn’t seem to be attached to anyone in particular though she had a wedding ring with a rock so big it must have been a strain to lift her left hand.
“Dream faster, Nate. She’s taken,” Julie interrupted.
“Huh?”
“Loretta. She’s married to Aaron, the guy you replaced today. Aaron’s out of town again. He’s probably the best player on the team, but you are way better. At least you were today.”
“It’s nice that she came to watch the team anyway, even with her old man away. Now that is a fan.”
“She always shows up even when her husband is traveling. And Loretta keeps score for me when I can’t be here. Though I don’t think she pays attention; the scorebook is always a mess and useless.” Her brow narrowed as she watched them at the bar. Chink. Was that the faint sign of discord?
“Shouldn’t you be over there having fun with the Russ-ster?”
“I don’t think so. Russell is in his element and I like it just fine here.”
So did he. Just friends, of course. Those were the ground rules. Besides, the principal didn’t deserve to be stabbed in the back by a romance-killing interloper. Nate knew too well what it felt like to be on the wrong side of that blade. Oh, but how he’d love to hear Julie say, “Interlope me.”
“I’m running late. I’ve got to go.” Julie tucked the scorebook into her purse, and Nate snapped out of his dream. “Mom’s birthday is tomorrow and we’re going to have dinner and a cake at Tiffany’s house tonight. I have to pick up the cake on the way home.”
Nate stood up as Julie checked in with Festerhaven at the bar before she pulled him aside, just enough space for a private exchange. They were disagreeing about something before she surrendered and gave him a cute little peck on the cheek. Nate met her halfway to the door.
“I’m glad you came out to play today,” she said. “Do me a favor? Make sure he gets home safely. He swears he’s okay to drive, but promise me you’ll take a bat to him and take his keys if he stays for one more round.”
“Absolutely.” He saluted her.
For someone in a hurry, Julie dawdled outside clubhouse, pausing at the top of the steps down to the parking lot. She looked back at the door like someone with misgivings about her decision to leave. Or, in Nate’s mind, like someone who was jealous and worried about leaving Russell with the blond. She shook her head. It was subtle, but his antennae were up and running. She turned and he followed her to the bottom of the steps and toward her car.
“Carla and I were talking about you the other day. She thinks, she thinks you’re just a big kid. In a good sort of way, and I told her you’ve always been like that. She has this theory that you rub off on people. Carla says you’re contagious.”
“Of course. You know, I never told you my middle name is Peter. As in Pan, right?”
“I did not know that,” she said, playing along with him as if awed by the revelation.
“And how about you? Are you feeling young, youngish, younger, or whatever? Have you caught this bug I seem to be spreading?”
“No. I built up an immune system to you back in high school.”
Nate stopped. It was a goofy little thing, but the whole day put him in a goofy mood.
“What?”
He stood there, listening to the music coming from the speakers bolted along the eaves of the clubhouse along the deck. “I thought for a moment they were playing our song. I was wrong. Come on.”
“Wait. What song? We didn’t have a song. We never had a song.”
Gotcha. “Oh, Jules. It hurts to think you don’t remember. You know our song. The one you said would always remind you of me.”
He could tell there was a hint of doubt in her mind. “We didn’t have a song. You’re making that up.”
“Of course I’m making it up. But trust me, if we did have a song, I would definitely remember it. Would you? I remember most everything about those days.”
“Of course I’d remember a song. If we had one. Which we didn’t. You don’t forget things like that. Not if they’re important. Which they aren’t.”
“Jules, you’re full of it. Every memory is important in its own way.”
“For you, maybe, but I’m not stuck in the past.”
They reached Julie’s car, and she opened the door so that it became a barrier between them. She glanced at the clubhouse as if distracted by a vexing thought. He turned his head but saw nothing unusual. When he turned back, she was leaning against the door, grinning, eyes dancing, and Nate knew she was about to waylay him.
“All right, smarty pants. If every memory is so important to you, how about this? I’ll bet you can’t tell me the first time you kissed me.”
Julie’s eyes darted down immediately. “Forget I said that. I shouldn’t have.” She was embarrassed. She ought to be, after a sophomoric flirtation like that. It was, Nate thought, right in his wheelhouse. Ironically the answer was sophomore year and Nate could knock this one out of the park.
“Summer before sophomore year started. Susan Ross threw a party and we were slow dancing in the garage. We were dancing to…. Well, I’m sure it was our song, whatever song it was, and I kissed you right then. Right on the lips for the first time.”
He watched her jaw actually drop in amazement, stunned that he not only pulled that one out b
ut that he could do it with zero hesitation.
“I don’t believe it.”
“See?”
“I can’t believe you don’t remember. You are so wrong. Not even close, Nate. That was not the first time. You are so wrong,” she repeated.
Nate searched her face; Julie was seriously smug and enjoying it. What had he missed? No, he had to be right. “Okay, if it wasn’t that dance, and I distinctly remember a kiss there in the dark, what was it?”
But Julie just laughed at him and climbed into her car. She rolled down the window. “This was strike one. Two more and you’re out.” She left it at that.
His bladder was straining to hold all that soda on his way back to the clubhouse, so he headed straight for the men’s room before he returned to collect FesterFace and head for home. The Master Batters crowd was woefully thin at that point, leaving the principal with the stragglers, Jim, the catcher, and his wife, and Loretta, the stunning blond in tight jeans—sans husband. Festerhaven was settling up with the bartender. It was time to go.
When Nate finished and went back into the bar, Festerhaven was helping Loretta out the door with his palm on her butt. He gave the room one last furtive look but didn’t see Nate in the far corner behind the pool table. Nate waited three beats and then rushed to the door, poking his head out before walking the deck down to the corner of the clubhouse. They were in the parking lot now. He watched FesterStud lean his body, starting with his groin, against an obviously willing Loretta, pressing her back against the side of an ocean-blue BMW. It was a made-for-movie scene Nate could write in his sleep, the kind that had caused him more than one stiff night alone in bed. The couple shared a little sugar that involved hands, hips and, Nate assumed, tongues. Festerhaven stroked her throat down to and inside her blouse where it buttoned at her cleavage. Checking to see her bra was fit properly, no doubt. Then she danced around the car to the driver’s side while he climbed into the passenger seat of the BMW. The tires kicked up gravel as they took off, leaving Festerhaven’s SUV behind, abandoned one parking space over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A Family Affair
From the ball field to the tub. Julie spent that Saturday giving her youngest grandchild a bath. Morgan was five, small but hardly frail. She almost got lost amid the floating boats and critters and soap bubbles. Julie scooped up a handful of suds and toyed with her, threatening to dab them on her nose, to the mixed horror and delight of the girl.
“Gramma, you’re silly,” Morgan said as she took soap bubbles that rose over the sea of bathwater like a thunderhead. She turned her palms out and pushed them toward Julie’s face.
“No, Morgan is silly.” Julie leaned closer and blew them back. Giggles all around. Julie stroked her cheek. Morgan had her mother’s high, full cheeks and dark eyes, the same ones that Tiffany had inherited from Julie. The two older children, Tiffany’s twin boys, were good kids and all, but this one was the light of Julie’s life.
Tiffany had a cup of tea waiting for her when they wandered into the kitchen after bath time. Julie took it through the sliding glass door to the deck off the kitchen, where Tiffany’s husband, Joe, was poking at the charcoal in a kettle grill. She squeezed his arm as she passed, but he was too intent on getting the coals in a perfect bed of heat to notice. Thin clouds provided a veil through which a nearly full moon watched over them.
She joined her mother, who was leaning back in a cushioned patio chair with a blanket across her lap, warming her toes at a metal fire pit on the far corner of the deck. Mother was nursing a glass of rosé that Julie knew was seventy percent water with only a dab of wine. Though with one more of those, Mom would tell everyone how tipsy she was getting.
After talking about this and talking about that and talking about nothing at all, Mother finally asked, “How are things with your young man, the principal?”
“They’re going well, Mom.” It was the same discussion they had had only an hour earlier. And the day before yesterday. And the week before that. It wasn’t that her mother was nagging Julie; age was stealing Mom’s memory. Some conversations simply vanished as soon as they ended, as if they never existed at all. This was one of them.
“When are you going to bring him around so we can all meet him? He sounds nice enough.”
“Mom, he was at my house. We had dinner together last week. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, so he was. I did forget,” she said with some amusement. “These days are all running together, these days.” Julie wasn’t convinced. Mother refused to concede she was slipping.
“He wanted to be here this evening,” she told her mother. No need to mention that softball and beer got in the way. It was probably better this way.
“I think he’s good for you, Julie. I hope we get to meet him before the wedding.”
“Oh, Mom.”
She now had Russell agreeing to a wedding in early summer, after the school year, with the actual date still to be determined, though she would have preferred one over Christmas break. It seemed like a long time to wait but, for Russell, it hinged on when, not whether, he got hired as the new school district assistant superintendent. He was consumed with that, and while he was annoyed the school board was dragging its feet to fill the position, he believed the trip to Hawaii had helped cement his relationship with Superintendent Fox. She smiled. The two days she spent with Russell after the conference had done wonders for their relationship, too.
Tiffany came up behind them, handed her grandmother a new glass with ice cubes and a spritz of pink wine as light as the last minutes before sunrise, and plopped heavily into a third chair at the fire. “Joe’s putting the burgers on; dinner’s in a few. Are we talking about The Boyfriend?”
“I think this Mr. Russell fellow is good for her,” her mother said. Then to Julie, “He seems to make you happy, and that’s nice.”
“He does. And it is,” Julie said with a sigh.
Tiffany said Julie’s mood had been even better lately. Julie asked, “When was I ever in a bad mood?”
“You know what I mean, Mom. You’re, like, a bit more…” Tiffany searched for words. “Perkier. Peppier these days.”
“Happier,” Julie’s mother offered.
Any other time, Julie might have been tempted to simply dismiss the idea, but given how that Saturday had gone, with its sunny skies, winning the softball game and giving Russell a jolt of joy that spilled over into camaraderie in the clubhouse that was a rare site for the Master Batters, and especially getting the better of Nate Evans before she left, Julie was in too good of a mood to argue.
Tiffany called out to her husband standing over the hamburgers to check on the children. The sound of mischief was floating from the living room. Then she continued, “Let me give you an example.”
“Okay.”
“Last week when we came over and Joe spent most of the day fixing that rattle in your car? And you put your arm around him and told him what a good husband he is, and how much you appreciated that?”
“He fixed my car. Of course I was going to tell him I appreciated it.”
Tiffany shook her head. “No, you said how much you appreciate what a good husband he is. When have you ever said anything like that?”
“I’ve never heard it,” Julie’s mother said. She was staring at the weak wine in her hand. “Goodness. I think I’m getting tipsy.”
“Come now, Tiffany. You know I love Joe,” Julie said. Though if pressed, she might admit love was a bit of a stretch. When the kids first got married, it felt as if Joe was stealing away her daughter, forcing Tiffany to choose between mother and husband. The daughter chose the husband.
Duh.
Once upon a time, Julie imagined Tiffany would have done better if she had waited. Joe was quiet and kind, a simple man and decent provider, content with his job in a motorcycle repair shop. In a word, he was everything Julie’s husband had been. Competent. Boring. Safe. When she couldn’t cry at James’ funeral, Julie realized that instead of findin
g a soul mate, she had too quickly settled for a safe mate. She thought Tiffany had done the same. She was wrong.
The kids were madly in love and didn’t hesitate to show it. It was embarrassingly cute at times. Joe adored her daughter. Julie wished she knew how that felt.
“Mine was a stinker,” Julie’s mother said to no one in particular. “But I loved him, too.”
Julie raised her cup of tea and the three women toasted to all the good husbands everywhere. They might be few and far between, but these girls had snagged their share. The sliding glass door scraped open, and little Morgan ran ahead of her father onto the deck. He turned to the barbeque grill; she ran to Julie’s side. Morgan wore her jammies and a plush panda hat that draped over her ears. “Daddy says dinner is weddy.” She tugged on Julie’s hand.
“I’m ready, too,” Julie’s mother said as she stood. Then, after two cautious steps, “Oh. I don’t think I can make it to the dining room. I’m sure I’m half-snockered now.”
“Mother, there isn’t enough wine in that glass to get a hummingbird high,” Julie told her.
“Really? Well. Then maybe I should have another. Tiffany, fix me another one, please. Just don’t make it so strong this time.”
Julie patted her granddaughter on the behind to scoot her into the kitchen, and then she looped her arm through Joe’s as he heaped the burgers onto a serving plate. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Joe, in case I haven’t said it enough, I’m glad to have you in the family. You make Tiff happy and that makes me happy.”
“I try.” He lowered the lid on the grill. Then he asked, “So what do you think?”
