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  “You know, Franklin, I got a question for you,” she said one day after inhaling two beef tacos and an entire can of pears in heavy syrup. “You’re always trying to eat so healthy and not get hurt. How come?”

  “You’re asking me why I try to avoid risky behaviors? Why I try to eat a healthy balance of foods?”

  “Sure,” she said, pouring juice from the can onto her spoon and slurping it. “How come?”

  “Well, I think it would be obvious to even the most casual observer that my health is not robust,” I responded.

  “You know a lotta big words, Franklin, but I still don’t get it. I mean … I know why I do what I do. I do the baseball thing ‘cause I get clothes and that makes me look regular. And I read these stupid books about frogs losin’ buttons and a bunch of stupid crap that would bore a two-year-old so that someday I can read the stuff in those skating books.

  “But as far as I can tell, the only thing that gets you goin’ is how sick you are and how deformed you are and all that, so I figure you oughta stick your head in the path of a speeding pitch and get beaned. Then you could spend a coupla weeks in the hospital hooked up to those machines and talk all day to the doctors and nurses about how sick you are.”

  “Well,” I said, re-capping my yogurt. “Well.”

  The truth was, I’d never heard Sarah Kervick talk so much. It never occurred to me that she even thought about me, let alone thought about ways to occupy my time.

  I liked it and I didn’t like it. I mean, I liked the attention, but I didn’t like what it all added up to. As she sat there slurping her syrup, I realized that Sarah Kervick had decided I was in this for reasons other than a sterling bill of health. That I had needs, emotional needs, that caused me to act in certain ways. I was about to correct her on several points when I decided I just didn’t want to be in the same room with Sarah Kervick right then. What I decided was that two of us could play at this case-study business. How would she feel, I wondered, to be the object of such unflattering scrutiny?

  “I need to make a phone call,” I said. “Then we’ll get started.

  ” Gloria wasn’t in. She was testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Food and Drug Packaging, according to her assistant, Miss Tweedell.

  “Problem is, kids can’t get into those childproof pill bottles, but neither can old people, now can they?” she asked, apparently without expecting an answer. “Want her voice mail?”

  “Sure,” I said, walking over to the front door and picking up one of Sarah’s sandy tennis shoes. I’d never left a message for Gloria before. I cleared my throat and got ready to enunciate.

  “Gloria, I got that information you wanted. Sarah Kervick wears a size six shoe. She’s around four feet, ten inches tall, and she can’t weigh more than seventy pounds. A couple of her teeth are brown, and her father smokes.” I paused, wondering if there was anything more I could add to get into Gloria’s good graces, and to show that I was thinking of someone other than myself. “She lives in a trailer off a dirt road,” I ended. Then I hung up the phone, went to my room, and shut the door.

  Sarah could practice Frog and Toad Are Friends on her own today.

  The Pelican View Baseball Team had its first meeting April 30. All the kids who wanted to be on the team were there, along with their parents. My mother was doing double duty, bringing me and Sarah to the practice.

  “Franklin,” Coach Jablonski said, all jovial, slapping me on the back and bruising my deltoid muscle. “This is a surprise. And you brought your lady friend.” At this he winked.

  “You know, dear, the cheerleaders are with Miss Debby in the multipurpose room.”

  “She’s here for the baseball meeting,” my mother said, stepping forward. “Hello, Hank.”

  “Well, hey, Julia. The baseball team. Well …” He looked skinny old Sarah Kervick up and down. “It’s just …” Squinting his eyes, Coach Jablonski peered around the bleachers. “She might get lonely, is all. Girls’ softball, that’s in the fall.”

  “No trouble about that,” Sarah said, bruising my other deltoid with a solid slap. “I got Franklin here.”

  Marvin Howerton opened his mouth, but then thought better of it.

  When it was time to start, Coach Jablonski blew a couple of short bleeps on his whistle and slapped his clipboard against his thigh.

  “Good news, sports fans. The Pelican View Ice and Fitness Center is having its grand opening next month. Now, as many of you know, I played wing for Loggertown State, and I look forward to being the coach of the first ever Pelican View Hockey Team. So I want all of you to think about taking my basic skills class this summer.”

  He looked around, as if expecting us to say something, but nobody did.

  “Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “Just thought I’d give you a preview of coming attractions. Now let’s play ball. Can I have a parent volunteer to pitch for batting practice?”

  Marvin Howerton’s father, who looked just like Marvin only super-sized, stepped forward. So did my mother.

  “Thanks, Jim,” Coach Jablonski said. “That’ll be all. The rest of you can take a seat in the bleachers. I’ve got the health forms all ready on clipboards for you to sign.”

  Another few bleeps on the whistle, even though no one was talking. I was tempted to ask if Coach knew the decibel level of his whistle blasts, but I changed my mind. It was better not to draw attention to myself.

  “Count off,” he roared.

  There were only seventeen kids total who signed up for the privilege of playing on the Pelican View Baseball Team. All the really good athletes joined Little League, I guess. I felt a brief and intense sense of gratitude that this thought had not yet occurred to my mother.

  Luckily, I turned out to be a two. We were to take the field. I ambled toward right, glancing back at my mother, who was installed in the bleachers, looking disgusted.

  Marvin Howerton was first up to bat. From his stance, I could tell the ball wouldn’t come anywhere near me, so I could relax. Mr. Howerton pitched his son an easy lob, slow and level. If he hit the ball with proper force, I predicted it would crest the third base line, just over Graham Dewar’s head.

  But I underestimated Graham, who leapt into the air like a frog as soon as Marvin hit the ball and caught the drive squarely in his glove. Marvin pounded home plate with the bat, muttering.

  “All right, boy,” Mr. Howerton shouted. “It was a good hit.”

  Denny Price was up next. Mr. Howerton lobbed an easy one to Denny, who popped up to center field. We didn’t have enough players to cover center, so Leonard Morris came flying in from left field to miss the catch and sprawl on the ground. Personally, I could have told him that he didn’t have enough acceleration to make the catch. I did, if I’d started with the pitch, but why place myself in a dangerous spot for a practice session?

  I began to limp painfully toward the ball, just to show I had a grasp on the rules of the game. Secretly, I was giving Leonard the opportunity to jump up, remember the direction of home plate, scoop up the ball, and fling it crazily toward Mr. Howerton, who had run in to cover.

  After that, Mack Simmons grounded to short, sending Leonard flying forward. His heart rate must have been off the charts.

  Now Sarah was up to bat, and I could see Mr. Howerton change his pitching strategy. The ball came in fast and low on the inside, nearly clipping off Sarah’s knees in the process. The second one sailed right past her nose. My mother practically climbed the backstop.

  “Throw her a decent pitch, Jim. Or I’ll relieve you,” she shouted.

  “Now, Julia. That’ll be my decision,” Coach Jablonski called out from the first base line.

  “Like hell it will,” she replied.

  Sarah walked away from home plate and whispered something to my mother at the fence. For some reason it made me feel awfully lonely out there in right field, getting all these twinges in my legs from the uneven ground and watching, from a distance, my mother and Sarah Kervick with their heads to
gether.

  Before she returned to her stance, Sarah waved her bat at me.

  That’s when I knew she was headed in my direction. Instead of banging a hit to the ghost man in center field and streaming around the bases all triumphant, she was going to lob me an easy one. She didn’t care how Mr. Howerton pitched. That was what she was going to do.

  I could see her change her footing and lower her bat. All I needed to do was keep a cool head and place myself under the ball. So what if I got hit, I said to myself. The doctors in the hospital might finally confirm what I’d been telling my mother all along. Baseball was no kind of game for a sensitive, asymmetrical guy like me.

  I predicted Mr. Howerton would pitch a strike. He did. But it was low and fast. I had to move back quickly to reach the right spot. I began to backpedal, hoping that my mother was paying attention. Could she see the effort I was putting into this?

  Breathing in little gasps, I was almost to the spot when I heard the thundering crack of the bat. It was at that exact moment that my short heel hit a rock. I lost my balance and careened toward the ground, stretching out my arms to cushion the blow. As I fell in a long, slow-motion arc that ended on hard-packed earth, I spied, out of the corner of my eye, crazy Leonard Morris. He’d been streaking over to back me up, but when I fell, he froze, his eyes following the trajectory of the ball like it was a meteor streaking toward earth.

  I wish I could say it was a heroic dive to catch the ball, but I’m an honest guy. I bounced on the ground a couple of times before realizing it was coming straight at me. I threw my hands up to protect myself. There was nothing between me and that speeding bullet but a thin layer of cow skin. By some miracle it worked. The material held, and I took the fly on the ground.

  I could hear my mother cheering and rattling the backstop.

  “Way to go, Franklin,” called out Leonard Morris.

  Despite the fact that the tendons in my hand were sure to need months of physical therapy to recover, I have to admit, at that moment I felt pretty good.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sarah Kervick Finds a Home

  In addition to team practice twice a week and drills once a week, my mother drove me and Sarah Kervick all over the county scouting out the competition. We’d rattle up to some dusty field in her Cable Country van, get out, and take to the bleachers. Sarah didn’t have much use for sitting. Mostly, she paced the baselines with my mother. But every once in a while, she’d sit up high in the bleachers with me.

  I found watching to be the best part of joining the Pelican View Baseball Team. Every player I saw gave me greater opportunities to practice my newly discovered skill of knowing just exactly where the ball would be hit. Yes, I had to take into account several factors: speed of pitch, player’s stance, level of swing. Then I’d process it all with the speed of nanotechnology. I’ve always preferred exercising my brain to my body anyway.

  Honestly, I could get into quite a trance while I was watching those players. Sometimes I would forget all about Sarah and my mother and just enter this zone of processing impact, force, acceleration. That’s why I was completely unprepared one afternoon for Sarah to turn to me and say, “So, where is your dad, anyway?”

  “Haven’t got one,” I answered after a long pause.

  “Everybody’s got one.” She snorted.

  “Midcenter, pop fly. If the shortstop were back ten feet, he’d catch it,” I said, thinking out loud so Sarah would know where my mind was. On the game, not on the elements of human reproduction.

  “I said, ‘Everybody’s got one,’ Franklin. Even you.”

  Taking a hint was not her specialty.

  “Technically, that is correct. Grounding out down the first base line …”

  “So where is he?”

  “I don’t know. We never met him.”

  “You’re sayin’ your mom never met your dad?”

  “That is correct. Look at his shoulders. That kid’s going to foul over the third base line.” We both sat still, watching to see if my prediction came true. It did.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “No, I’m not. Look, there’s something called artificial insemination. When a woman wants a baby, but she doesn’t have a partner, she can pay to get a man’s sperm—”

  “That’s pure crazy to pay for that,” she said. “All you have to do is go down to a bar and start buyin’ drinks.”

  “That’s how you came about? I think there’s a little issue called quality control here.”

  Sarah Kervick grabbed hold of my lapels in a way she hadn’t in a long time. “What are you saying about my mother? She married my dad good and proper. Only, it’s just—” She broke her hold and sat back, sitting on her hands to keep them from tearing my neck off my shoulders.

  “She was just too young,” she said quietly.

  “Well, at least you knew her,” I responded, my feelings hurt as much as my collarbone.

  “He didn’t get like that till after,” she said. “We even had a place over in Wing Rock, a little house. It was just one story, but it had a dormer upstairs and I slept there. I remember that house … when I was real little we lived there.”

  I kept my eyes on the field, but I had stopped seeing the action. I couldn’t have called the next play if it was in slow motion.

  “She took me to one of those shows at the arena. You know, where they tell a story on the ice. She loved to watch the skaters on TV.

  “ ‘Look at her!’ she used to say to my dad. ‘That’s as close as we humans are ever gonna get to flying.’ ”

  Practice was over. My mother started climbing the bleachers toward us.

  “My mom was all right,” Sarah said, squinting fiercely at home plate, even though no one was up to bat. “She was just too young.”

  “So where is she now?” I asked. “You ever see her?”

  “Hmmph.” Sarah hunched up her shoulders. “I guess she lives in your dad’s neighborhood now.”

  “Hey.” My mother had reached us, slightly out of breath. She sat down next to Sarah and patted her knee. “I keep meaning to say thanks for the Twinkies. Vanilla’s my favorite.”

  Sarah searched the empty space beneath the bleachers like she had dropped something. She was smiling.

  “And everybody at work’s been fighting over that People with the interviews of death row inmates who get married. That’s just hard to figure.”

  “Yeah.” Sarah swallowed and looked up at my mother like she was the one thing that made sense in this crazy world. Like if she were a death row inmate, Sarah Kervick would marry her.

  “Franklin, I’ll just be a minute, okay? I want to find out what that coach has done to his pitcher. Did you see those strikes?”

  The wind had picked up again. She zipped her warm-up suit right up to her chin, then put her hand back on Sarah’s knee. “A month ago, at the beginning of the season, that kid couldn’t even find the strike zone. Okay, then. See you two back at the car.”

  “I know what you’re thinkin’,” Sarah said after she’d left. “But I didn’t steal anything. Your mom wouldn’t like that.”

  “Well, where’s it all come from?” “Grace gives me the magazines when the library in Wing Rock’s through with ‘em,” she said simply.

  “And the perfume?”

  “Found it in the bathroom at Megamart.”

  I started to feel faint. “And the food?”

  “Get that from the garbage at school. Kids throw that stuff away. Perfectly good Twinkies and stuff. They just throw the whole thing away, right in the package. I got four of those little cans of peaches to give her next week.”

  And then she laughed and gave me a little punch on the arm. “Don’t look like you’re gonna die, Franklin. I never take stuff that’s been opened. Same as gettin’ it right from the grocery store.” She patted my knee as if that would make me feel better. “Only it’s not stealin’ and I don’t have to pay for it.”

  I just stared at her, speechless. All this touching was
getting contagious.

  These new developments, the touching and the gifts, were going to need a lot of processing. But I have to admit, the first question that popped into my mind was a very uncharacteristic one:

  What was so wrong with it?

  Giving things to people who made you feel happy. It was like one big circle with Sarah Kervick and my mother. One big circle filled with Twinkies and cream rinse and low-rise jeans and wrinkled-up copies of People magazine.

  It made everybody even happier, didn’t it?

  Why wasn’t I happy, then? Why was I so sick with jealousy at the way Sarah looked at my mother? Maybe I should get in the circle and start doling out Baby Ruth candy bars and sparkly barrettes and Jean Naté perfume and jawbreakers I might find rolling under the candy dispenser.

  Maybe … Was that really all it took?

  On the way home, my mother swung into the parking lot of an immense new building. Workers out front were lowering trees into the ground. On an artificial hill topped with wood chips, a sign read: PELICAN VIEW ICE AND FITNESS CENTER.

  “So, what’s this?” Sarah asked, squinting at the sign.

  “You can read that,” I told her.

  “The new ice rink,” my mother said, craning her head around to see the reaction. “Thought you’d like to take a look.”

  Sarah gripped the door handle and her seat belt simultaneously. The next moment, she was tearing for the entrance.

  “Whoa, missy. Hold up. It’s not open yet.” A man in a hard hat stood just outside the glass front doors, smoking a cigarette.

  “She’s with me,” my mother said.

  “Oh.” He took in her uniform. “You here to hook up the office?”