Casey's Home

by Jessica Minier

  When I flew home from Florida, I missed him so badly I felt like I was walking around without my arms, or perhaps my head. It would certainly be a more appropriate analogy. Ben stayed on until October, when Jake arrived in a flurry of cameras and ESPN microphones, then he slipped quietly out the back door and no one even noticed.

  All I did was pass his name to the head of our Athletics department and the next thing I know our former coach, who taught Russian History far better than the infield fly rule, was out and Ben was in. There is something about the mere possibility of greatness that stirs the heart of the small, the lowly. The PNCC team hadn’t won a season in twenty years. We won’t win this year, either, but we’re closer. For a bunch of math whizzes and kids with glasses, they play like it matters, and I suppose it does, just not for the same reasons as Ben’s old team. What is more pure, then? To play because you hope to make a career, or to play because the game itself is so beautiful? I think I am finally figuring out the answer.

  To my great astonishment and horror, Ben sold his old farmhouse and most of the furnishings. Packed into a fifteen-foot U-haul, he drove his entire world across the country, just beating the snow on the Rockies to meet me at a little motel outside of town. No, he didn’t stay with me. He still doesn’t.

  Florida money won’t buy much here, but he managed a down payment on a house that was suspiciously bigger than he really needed. In the evenings we sit on his couch and watch the games on his giant TV, perched precariously on its own cardboard box. Ben is settled, but he is waiting for something, and I know what it is. Late one night, when my head had come to rest in his lap, he leaned down and said:

  “I’ve got the house; you’ve got the furniture. Maybe we ought to get together.”

  If that was a proposal, I missed the romantic part of it. But I know what he wants. What I want to know, what keeps me awake at night, is what I’m waiting for? Ben creates a life and I manufacture additional reasons to hold myself back. What if love doesn’t last and I end up worse off than I was before I knew it could be this devastating, this monumental? What if after all these years, we discover we really don’t like one another at all? What if, what if? What if I’m thirty-five years-old, without a clue how to invite someone into my life? What if that person won’t wait for me to ask? Is that a good thing?

  What if I stopped asking questions and tried to answer the ones I’ve already asked, what then?

  This morning I finished the eighth chapter of a new book and emailed it to my agent, who is probably doing some sort of mystical writing dance of joy on her desk right now. She keeps telling me the chapters are wonderful. I think she’s lying to me, but I appreciate the encouragement. I write about my father. I haven’t decided if it’s fiction or non-fiction yet, or if I even understand the distinction.

  The Mariners offer yet another run to the gods of baseball and are denied by the wide glove of the center fielder. The boys grouse and Ben slips an arm around my shoulders. He leans close and whispers to me, in a seductive voice I recognize from several nights ago, when he woke me at three in the morning.

  “Are you having fun?”

  There is much more inherent in that question than just this game.

  “Yes,” I answer. “Absolutely.” I squeeze his thigh for emphasis.

  He is looking at me as if he would like to tell me he loves me, but I know he won’t.

  “Good,” he says and turns back to the game before his students learn something he doesn’t want them to know.

  Ah, the ninth inning. How do we always end up in dire straits? Didn’t we come into this several games up? The Mariners slide out of the eighth inning with no further improvement. They can still turn this thing around, but it will have to be soon, or we’ll all have gone home without them.

  Ben finishes his ice cream and swipes a taste from mine, though I give him a glare calculated to freeze his hand. He just laughs me off. Ben has priorities. So do I, really. I would like to finish my novel and hey, maybe publish the damn thing. Then I’ll have two books to track over at those on-line bookstores. I can pit them against one another, weeping on the day when the first eclipses the second. Laying my father to rest is high on the list of things I’d like to do. He hangs around my thoughts like a commentating ghost, calling all the plays before I’ve even made them. It’s tremendously annoying and oddly reassuring at the same time, much more so than he was when he was alive. And while I’m at it, I’d like to make Ben happy, because I do love him, though I know he has to make his own happiness. I keep thinking... it’s just a theory really, but isn’t it possible that if I work at making us happy, I’ll get a bit happier at the same time?

  Yeah, I know, it’s just a theory, as I said.

  We drop and fumble our way through the top of the ninth, groaning in unison at each lost opportunity. Go team, go! We stomp and scream “Charge!” We drive the needle of the noise meter into the red with our desperate zeal. There is nothing anyone else can do now, it is up to the players themselves. They are representing us, but not above disappointing us.

  The bottom of the ninth, and we are out: one... two... three. That’s it, game over. The boys are chatty as we gather up our things, trying to figure out what went wrong.

  “It’s not the end of the season,” Ben points out. “We can still make it into the post-season, even if we’re the wild card.”

  Sometimes, I miss the Kingdome. We file out onto the clean, bright stairways of the new stadium, unable to catch more than a glimpse of the water beyond. It is totally unlike the old days, when the wide ramps filled with fellow fans herded toward the exit like cattle and just as grouchy, blinking together as we immerged into the night from our closed environment.

  We are disconnected from each other on the stairs, losing members of our little group as we descend. Relocating at the bottom, we step out into the night, marveling at the shimmering remains of the summer light in the ocean-blue sky. Can it really be 10:15, we ask one another, as if it wasn’t this bright and gauzy yesterday and the night before. Ben clasps my hand in his without embarrassment as we wait at the train tracks for the obligatory freight train to pass with its rattling dominance. The boys jostle each other and threaten to toss one another out onto the tracks.

  “I think it’s going to rain tonight,” Ben says and it seems impossible until I turn to see the dark band against the western edge of the horizon, blotting out the stars. As we hurry toward our car, the wind picks up and sends bits of paper whirling past us, down the tracks after the retreating train.

  “Goodnight, Coach,” the last boy calls as we leave them behind. Ben beams and waves and everything inside me shifts at his delighted expression. Who am I to make this so difficult when Ben is clearing the way with his joy? “Goodnight, Casey,” they call and I wave too.

  At the car, he can stand it no longer. I think he’s reaching around me to open the door, but he isn’t. Ben presses me up against the warm metal and kisses me deeply, without reservation. It has been nearly ten years since he first seduced me by his car. I respond as I did then, because the response is elemental and overpowering. My mind switches off and my body dismisses it with a kick.

  When he pulls away, his mouth is wet, his eyes are narrowed and he’s grinning. Behind him I can see the great girdered bulk of the stadium, lit up like a jellyfish in the night. The roof is closing, a slow progression of parts until the lights will be covered. How marvelous to live in an age when a building can be both open and closed, at a whim. Ben slides a finger down my nose and says, without preamble:

  “Maybe we should get married.”

  Well, at least this wasn’t as obtuse as: “I’ve got the house; you’ve got the furniture.”

  It will take another five minutes to completely close the roof. I am only peripherally aware of its movement, as Ben’s hopeful and nervous face holds my attention. Nothing like a marriage proposal to focus a girl, especially one that I suspect was unexpected, even to the proposer.

  Around us, people laugh
despite the loss.

  “Maybe we should,” I answer and he leans down to kiss me again, lavishly. I am picturing what it would be like to wake next to him each morning, to fall asleep with him beside me each night. I can think of worse bookends to my day, worse ways to keep track of the passing days of my life. I am picturing my entertainment center cradling that nice TV.

  Ben unlocks my door at last and I slide in, feeling like my knees are about to give way. When he settles beside me, we stare at each other for a moment as if confirming that it was, in fact, us out there.

  “This is crazy,” he whispers, and he means it in the best way, like planning a sudden two week vacation, or buying a beautiful new pair of shoes.

  “Completely,” I agree, aware that I’m grinning like a fool.

  His hand shakes as he reaches for the gear stick, so I slip mine over it, helping to steady him as he shifts.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  …And Somewhere Hearts are Light

  Student Stories

  Concrete Reality

  American Girl

  Now Arriving at the Terminal

  Best Wishes

  Deliverance

  Deposited

  Getting Lucky

  Hoop Skirts and Misery

  Orientation

  Choosing Your Stance

  Control and Velocity

  Unraveling

  Treading Water

  Mourning in Florida

  The All-American Girls Baseball League

  Hearing

  Shifting