Rooting for Rafael Rosales

by Kurtis Scaletta

“Hi!” Monica said when she reached their seats. “You have amazing kids,” she said to Mom and Dad.

  “We know it,” said Mom. Dad nodded.

  “So, do you want to come to the press box?” she asked Maya. “It’ll be easier to talk.”

  “Huh?” said Maya.

  “Just go,” said Grace.

  “Go,” said Mom. “Go.”

  Maya and Grace followed Monica to a covered area at the top of the bleachers directly behind home plate. There was a row of chairs behind a long desk facing the field. The view was excellent.

  A young guy looked up from his laptop. “Those must be the girls.”

  “These are the girls,” Monica confirmed. “Grace and Maya, this is Mike. And that’s—”

  Maya realized who else was in the press box and didn’t need to be told who it was. Rafael Rosales was at the far end of the room, filling a cone-shaped cup from a water cooler. He had already been out on the field and was damp with perspiration. She could smell his sweat and see it glistening on his lip.

  “Hello,” he said in practiced English. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  “Mucho gusto!” said Grace with zeal.

  Rafael downed the water, crumpled the cup in his hand, and dropped it in the wastebasket.

  “Mike, time to show us what you can do,” said Monica.

  “Spanish minor in college,” he explained. He spoke to Rafael, and Rafael answered.

  “He says he has to be back in the clubhouse in ten minutes,” said Mike.

  “Then let’s do the picture first.” Monica posed the three of them, Rafael’s sweaty arms tossed around their shoulders. He’s muscular, thought Maya. Of course he was. He was a professional athlete who could knock five-ounce rubber balls over fences four hundred feet away. After the photo was done, she wasn’t sure if she’d smiled.

  “Rafael, did you read the story Maya wrote about your first game here?” Monica asked. Mike repeated the question in Spanish, and Rafael answered.

  “He says a friend translated for him,” Mike translated, “and he liked it very much.”

  Maya swallowed hard. Somehow, even having reached a friend of Rafael’s, she hadn’t thought of her words reaching Rafael himself.

  Rafael talked some more. “He says he is sorry about your garden,” Mike translated. “He wants to know if you’ll plant it again next year.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Maya admitted. But she could start over, couldn’t she? Some of the flowers and forbs might come back on their own, and the chemicals would have worn off by then.

  Rafael spoke to Mike.

  “He says you better grow it, so he can see it when he gets called up to Minneapolis.”

  “That means he has to make it all the way up to the Twins,” said Maya.

  Mike had a short exchange with Rafael.

  “He says it’s a deal.”

  “Deal,” Maya agreed.

  Rafael spoke some more. “He has to go,” said Mike. “He says he’s sorry he doesn’t have more time.”

  “Claro,” said Maya. Rafael smiled at her one word of Spanish. He clasped her hand briefly, then Grace’s, and was out the door.

  “He seems like a decent guy,” said Mike. “I hope things turn out for him.”

  “Me too,” Monica agreed.

  “Thank you so much for setting that up,” Maya told Monica. “That was amazing.”

  “Happy to do it,” said Monica.

  But Maya started to have regrets the moment she and Grace left the press box. She felt like she’d blown the opportunity to really talk to Rafael. There were a million things she could have asked: What was his childhood like? What did his parents do? Did he ever get homesick? Did he have brothers or sisters? Instead, he’d asked about her garden, and she’d never gotten the chance. And now she had to plant it again, on the one-in-a-million chance that he made it to the major leagues and kept his promise.

  But he’d asked her about her garden, and that was sweet. He’d treated her like a friend, not like a fan.

  “Hey, there’s no crying in baseball,” Grace teased.

  “Shut up. I’m not crying.” But she was tearing up, and she knew it.

  Only after they sat down did Maya remember that she had not written about the garden in her blog entry. Rafael could only know about that from Bijou. Bijou must be the friend that had translated the story for him. Was it in a friendly email? An urgent phone call? Did Rafael know what she knew? Maya had so much to think about that it was the third or fourth inning before she noticed the action on the field. Grace was suddenly standing up and hooting and cheering. Everybody was. The scoreboard was showing a graphic of fireworks exploding, and flashed the word WOW! Maya stood up and cheered too, but it wasn’t until she sat down that she realized what had happened. Rafael had hit a home run.

  “I guess the slump is over,” said Grace.

  “It’s just one hit,” said Maya. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Ha.” Grace gave her a surprised look. “I think you’ve officially graduated from fledgling fan to seasoned cynic.”

  Maya shrugged. She knew better than to get her hopes too high.

  She looked down to the visitors’ bull pen and saw Juan-not-Juan getting his work in, as the Twins broadcaster would call it. He wasn’t pitching today but had to keep his arm loose for the next time he did.

  “I’ll be right back. Don’t let Rafael hit any more home runs until I return.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Grace said with a laugh.

  Maya strolled around the concourse, stopping for a metallic-tasting drink of water from a fountain and to get her nerve up. The visiting team’s bull pen was in front of some bleachers that seemed to have been added to the stadium as an afterthought. Right now, they were full of little kids in bright-yellow T-shirts. They must have been part of a day camp or youth group. A row of steps ran down the middle, and at the bottom, you could practically reach out and snatch the caps off the visiting team. She felt nervous going down, sure somebody would stop her, but aside from kids darting back and forth across the steps in front of her, she reached the fence with no problem.

  What would she say? Would he even know English?

  With every throw, she could hear the snap of the ball as it hit the catcher’s glove. The pitcher stopped, did some stretching exercises, saw her, and nodded.

  “Hola!” she said. She also knew Adiós, so she had the front and back end of the conversation covered. Everything in between was a problem.

  “Do you want an autograph?” he asked in accented English.

  “Sure,” she said. But she didn’t have a pen or anything to sign. She patted her pockets and shrugged, hoping that was a universally understood gesture. He stepped out of view for a moment, then appeared again and handed her a signed baseball. His hand was so large that he could hide the ball in one hand, if he had to.

  “I know who you are,” he said suddenly in faltering English.

  “Huh?”

  “The girl with the blog about Rafael.”

  “Yes. Yes, that was me,” she said. “I met him today actually,” she added excitedly. “Do you know him?”

  “Since we were small boys.” He smiled his familiar tight-lipped smile. “He wasn’t the best player, but he…tried the hardest. He never quit. He never will.” His voice was full of respect.

  “Nope,” Maya agreed. She could tell that Hugo cared about Rafael.

  “So, are you going to blog about me now?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think you want me to.” She walked back up the steps with her ball, leaving him to wonder what she meant.

  ***

  The hard part of keeping a secret was that you had to do it every day. Maya thought of the folktale where the boy had his finger in a dike, holding off a flood. But he only had to do it one night. She had to keep the hole plugged up all day, every day.

  She kept herself busy—bicycling, reading, chatting with Bijou, and listening to Kernels g
ames. She started to learn Spanish on a free website. El elefante es grande. She babysat for Claire a few times and volunteered at the community garden. She saw monarch chrysalises suspended from the leaves and, on one magical afternoon, watched a butterfly tap and tear its way out of one. She sat for two hours, cross-legged on the grass, as the tiny-winged insect ventured out and sucked the dew from a leaf.

  Every morning, she thought: I will not tell anyone today.

  Meanwhile, Dad had a few job interviews, but nothing panned out. He found out from Mom that the community college needed a statistics professor. It was temporary, part-time work, but he applied, was interviewed, and was assigned four classes. “It’ll keep body and soul together,” he said.

  “You’ll love it,” Mom said. “It’s really hard, but you’ll love it.”

  Maya read that bee populations were slowly regrouping. Their numbers were still dropping, but less rapidly than expected. “Never discount evolution,” her dad said. “All animals have a way of adapting to circumstance. Even humans.”

  Juan Santos Garcia (or rather, Hugo) was promoted to advanced-A and started pitching for the Brevard County Manatees in Florida. Rafael Rosales continued to play well for the Kernels, but it looked like he would stay there through the end of the season—partly because the Kernels were headed for the Midwestern League playoffs and wanted Rafael in the lineup. Maya studied the list of team affiliates for the Twins and Brewers. Rafael and Hugo might see each other in advanced-A and again in double A. The triple A teams did not play in the same league, but the Twins played the Brewers six or seven games every year. Maybe one day they would face each other in the World Series. She could only hope.

  Grace had given her the ball from spring training, signed by Rafael. Now it sat on Maya’s dresser next to the one signed by Hugo. The second signature was a scrawl, and she wasn’t sure if Hugo had written Juan’s name or forgotten himself and written his real name.

  She started to plan next year’s garden. She saved her babysitting money for seeds and supplies. She converted an old diaper pail of Claire’s into a compost bin and scraped her family’s plates into it every night. This year’s garbage could be next year’s soil.

  If Rafael Rosales made it to Minnesota, and if he remembered their deal, she would be ready.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is audacious to write outside one’s own cultural experience, but this story got hold of my imagination and did not let go. I sought information about the Dominican Republic from more sources than I can list here, but the most important are the documentary Pelotero made by Casey Beck and a series of articles she coauthored with Trevor Martin for the Global Post, the PBS Documentary The New Americans, the book The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky, and The Tropic of Baseball by Rob L. Ruck. To better understand the land, I made use of YouTube videos, especially an hour-long tour of the streets of San Pedro de Macorís made by Guillermo Garcia de la Cruz. For descriptions of dayto-day life, I relied on numerous blogs written by people who live or traveled there. I enjoyed a delicious plate of la bandera and stories of the DR at the home of Seth and Tiffany Lewis. I learned much of Dominican history and culture from the marvelous books of Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz. My playlist while writing the first draft was Proyecto Uno and Los Ilegales.

  For the details about Maya’s bee garden (and my own), I used resources at the University of Minnesota Extension. Dr. Jenkins is based on Dr. Marla Spivak and her work with the Minnesota Bee Lab. Anne Ursu’s wonderful (but defunct) Bat-Girl blog inspired Grace’s Thinking Girl blog. Sixth-graders at Olson Middle School helped me brainstorm Maya’s life inside and outside of school. My wife helped me imagine Maya’s room, and I borrowed the “see the rabbits” story from her family history.

  I am honored to have had the support of an Artist’s Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, which gave me both the time and the jolt of confidence I needed to see this through.

  I am especially grateful to my early readers with connections to the Dominican Republic who read for accuracy and sensitivity: Dennis Hidalgo, Lidia Valdez, Angela Padron, and Betsaida Alcantara. Other important early readers include Christina Diaz Gonzalez, Steve Brezenoff, Kelly Barnhill, Christopher Lincoln, Bryan Bliss, Jodi Chromey, Karlyn Coleman, and her son, Auggie.

  People I cannot thank enough include Tina Wexler for being my coach, critic, and champion for over ten years, and Wendy McClure for giving this book a chance. Thanks to Wendy, Alex Messina-Schultheis, Kristin Zelazko, Ellen Kokontis, and everyone else at Albert Whitman & Company for seeing this book through its many stages.

  Belated and eternal thanks to the many teachers, librarians, booksellers, and other book lovers who put my books—or any books—into the hands of young readers.

  To my wife, Angela, and my son, Byron—I am blessed to live in a home where love is expressed as freely and frequently as it is in ours. To the rest of my friends, family, colleagues, readers, and fellow writers—you are too many to list. If you are reading this page in the hopes of seeing your name, please know that I value your friendship and hope to see you soon.

  KURTIS SCALETTA is the author of eleven books for young readers. Many of them are about baseball, but he has also written about snakes, robots, and giant fungi. He grew up in five states and three foreign countries but now stays put in Minneapolis with his wife, son, and house cats. He is a Twins fan, an avid reader, a long-distance runner, and a world-class player of Angry Birds. Visit him at www.kurtisscaletta.com.