Catching Tatum (11 page)

Mom made us promise to come to dinner every Sunday the way she made Theo and Kennedy come. I loved her more that day than ever before. I saw how hard it was for her to let her babies go. If she hadn't already seen Thomas and Theo go, or if Dad was anything less than the amazing guy he was, I don't think she would have handled it that well, but the boys did leave and my dad was the best kind of husband and she couldn't keep us young forever. All she could do was demand Sunday dinners and there was something comforting in knowing we could always go home, even if it was only for dinner, until Dad retired.

This time when we packed up, it was just Brett and me. When the older boys left, neither needed much but Brett and I had an apartment to fill. Dad, Mom, Travis, Theo and Kennedy helped us move on Sunday after an early dinner. The best part was that Mom and Dad paid our deposit. I didn't see that coming but after we put down the deposit and first and last month's rent they gave us each cash that equaled half of the deposit. They went over a budget with us and filled up the fridge and pantry with our favorite foods, which Trav helped himself to as they all moved us in.

Then they said goodbye and Brett and I were on our own for the first time in our lives. It was exhilarating. The first night all by ourselves in our own apartment is one of the best memories on my good shelf. We did like Mom made us do when we were kids—we sucked in the memory for all time and eternity. Both of us laid on our backs on the living room floor and memorized the way the room looked: the sounds inside and outside, water heater warming in the utility closet next to our tiny bathroom, people running up the stairs, making reverberations that echoed and vibrated our little home, the smells: carpet cleaner and fresh paint, “and your stinky feet,” I said as we inhaled, making the memory stick. To this day the smell of fresh paint sends me back to that little apartment.

Our apartment was on the third floor of a complex in the middle of the city. It worked perfectly for both of us because it was close to everything. It was tiny. The whole thing couldn't have been more than seven hundred square feet and that's a generous guess. We didn’t have to fight over who got the master bedroom because neither had a bathroom, but I demanded the one that was slightly bigger. We set up our living room with surround sound so the games would play loud and clear. Neither of us were what I'd call master electricians but we were both determined to figure it out and hot-headed enough to think our way was right. Between the fighting, switching of wires, and stringing of cords all around the little room, it took like five hours one Tuesday before we finally figured it out. But we got it.

The thing that took me the most time to get used to was the absence of jet noise. The city was noisy in its own way but it felt like something was missing. It took me a week to realize what it was. My whole life, no matter where we lived, had always been on base, always gates to wait to open, security to clear us, and always jets and planes and helicopters coming and going.

Christmas was hard. It was an exceptionally cold morning in Washington and we were alone on Christmas morning for the first time ever. Alone, but not alone; we went to see them later but it was the first Christmas without my Mom's monkey bread to wake up to. There was no hot cocoa on the stove waiting for us, no soft carols streaming down the hall either. I missed my mommy, and for a moment, even though I loved being a grown-up, I wanted to go back to being younger. I wanted to come out of my room to find her sitting quietly on the couch with a book and her amaretto-flavored coffee, waiting for us to come to her.

There were exactly nine Christmas morning memories on my shelf without my dad at home. As technology got better we could Skype him so he was with us in some way, but there had never been one morning I hadn't woken up with Mom. She was Christmas. I ran into Brett’s room, jumped on his bed singing
“Hark the herald angels,”
and told him to get up so we could get where we belonged.

We stayed with them all day. It felt good to be home—home with Mom and Dad and Trav, too, and home on the base where the planes landed and took off even on Christmas morning. It was the first night since we moved that I wanted to take it all back. Our gifts were lame grown-up ones like dish towels and Tupperware. The only frivolous gift Brett and I got were our usual season tickets for our local Double A baseball team, the Patriots.

Our parents bought season tickets every year. They swore that minor league was always where the best action was. I agreed. Every player's dream was to move up and on to the big contracts and major league but they had to start somewhere. The players’ dreams were tangible in the minors. The majors were about glory and fame, baseball cards and limelight, but the joy of game was best felt on the high school and minor league fields before contracts got out of hand. Season tickets had become a tradition, one I could keep even if I was a big girl living on my own for the first time.

The summer after we moved out, I met Mom and Trav at the Patriots’ home field for every game. Dad, Theo, Kennedy, and Brett came when their schedules allowed. Somehow, by sheer luck, I managed to weasel my way into a job with the team before the season was over. It was a win-win for everyone. It meant for the next season, and as many as they'd keep me, I got to be part of the team, and not only did my parents not have to pay for it ... I got paid to be there! I greeted the fans when they came in, emceed events during inning breaks and helped set up and close down the field and stands for home games. The gym was totally cool about me getting a second job, too, since my shifts there were early morning and since we were the official gym of the Patriots anyway.

Brett was obsessed with getting drafted and saw my new job as an opportunity to get on the team. I saw a letter come in from A&M offering him his second best option, and I saw him ignore it; he was holding out for the league scouts. He wanted the majors—he ate, slept and dreamed them. It was a long shot; we all knew it, but who wanted to pop his bubble, and who was I to tell him he was ruining his future by passing up their offer? Instead I asked the players I knew from the gym if he could come down to warm up with them before games, and I introduced him to the coaches, too. He joined the gym to get in better with them and he waited for his moment to come, never doubting that it would.

Every morning, every ... single ... morning except for Tuesdays and Sundays, my only days off, I had to be at the gym at four-thirty sharp, and after I got my job with the Patriots, Brett was right there with me. Lucky for us we only lived five minutes away, a huge difference from the twenty minute commute from base. Brett had his alarm wired to a motivational soundtrack and he forced himself up. I was a morning person so it wasn't as hard for me to get up; it was torture for him, but he did it. Always, always he had the end in sight, a contract with the bigs. Talent would only get him so far; he had to train harder and be better than everyone else who wanted it and had talent.

When weather permitted, we left the house at four o'clock and ran a three-mile course to the gym. He was faster than me and ran ahead in the summer when it was light, but when the seasons called for darker mornings, he stayed with me. He was a good big-little brother like that, but he pushed me to run faster and it worked. My average mile went from nine minutes, fifteen seconds before we started training together to an easy eight and a half minutes after. I probably could have gone faster but that's where I stayed.

We were usually a few minutes early and did our regular Work Out of the Day, or WOD as it was known, with the other early morning regulars before the first class started at five. Duke, the owner, allowed me to design one WOD a week and I did my best to make it as grueling as possible, but my main job was keeping time for the classes. I started classes at five, five-thirty, and six each morning for the corporate and construction types who had to be in and out first thing. The eight and ten o'clock classes were the mom crowd—ladies with babies keeping their figures in shape or trying to get them back after the children they loved ruined them. I did one last set of lunch classes at eleven-thirty and noon before I was off. Between classes I cleaned the gym, greeted guests. For a fit girl on her own for her first time ever, I couldn't have asked for a better life. I got paid to work out and watch baseball

Brett and I settled comfortably into adult life, which included frequent visits back to the base to check in. We had decent jobs; he had his dream, I had freedom to be me; neither of us had intentions of changing, unless a deal threw itself in Brett's face. Life was good—better than good, it was perfect.

Then it happened, not one but two boys made me question everything I had come to believe about life and my game of love. One was like a dream, too good to be true, and the other, a nightmare I couldn't escape.

Justin Parker and Cole Jackson put my rules to the test the summer after I turned twenty-two.

That summer, Thomas came to visit for a couple weeks, with his only child, my nephew, Kyle, a three- year-old heartbreaker. Thomas had just finished with his eighth year of service and his girl, now his wife, was on a ship in the Mediterranean so home was his parents’ base, McChord. It was like old times, only we were all older. He fit in with Theo and Brett and their buddies as much as he did the airmen on base. I even noticed him running once with my old friend, Tech Sergeant Warbiany.

Mom and I were on one of the local co-ed softball teams and the other players let Thomas jump in and play with us while he was visiting. The whole family, all seven of us, and Kyle and Kennedy, came out to watch us play one Friday night. It was one of those memories Mom forced us all to stop and remember forever. She huddled us up, arms over shoulders, heads in, family together, and had us call out what we would remember. I said I would remember the dandelions Kyle picked for me, mom, and Kennedy, but what I really remember was my mom's hair. It was auburn, like it always had been, but peppered with gray. I wondered when that happened. My mom was timeless—how could she have gray in her hair and wrinkles? I saw Thomas grown, and a father, the spitting image of our own, down to his earth-colored skin, and sculpted mustache. Theo was white like mom, as if it took the first two tries for their genes to mix to the perfect color scheme that the last three of us inherited. Brett, Trav, and I were a cool blend of our parents’ white and brown coloring. We were lucky, always tan, never pale in the bland, sunless, Western Washington winter or red like Mom and Theo were that day. The evening smelled like summer itself, no fresh-cut grass, or hotdogs on the grill, because there were no concessions. It was robust and airy, the way only a warm summer night can be. I can't describe it, but sometimes when the wind blows just right, I remember that huddle, that game, and what would come later that night.

The game wrapped up and a bunch of us decided to get together after for a bonfire out in the woods. It didn't take too much convincing for my mom to agree to watch Kyle so Thomas could go. Trav asked if he could go, too. Mom and Dad wouldn't have it; he was sixteen and had a messy room at home that he had been told to clean up before they left. To prove he was old enough to hang with his older sibs for the night, he threw a fit like a twelve-year-old. It was classic. We all still laugh about that.

I hugged my parents goodbye and took off with Brett and Thomas in my car. Theo and Kennedy rode up in his Jeep separately. After we gassed up and made our beer run, we followed a caravan of cars and trucks up some mountain road to the middle of nowhere, far away from the noise of the city. There were trucks and tailgates and firewood, a different kind of summer memory. Loud music of all kinds blasted from the cars with the best sound systems, and beer flowed freely.

Theo, remembering the time he took me to a party when I was in high-school, told me not to embarrass him again. I punched him and told him the feeling was mutual and told Kennedy to keep him in check. They were hot and heavy; making out, and making the best of star-filled night in the woods. Plenty of couples were. Suddenly I felt alone, just like that; one second I was fine and the next I wanted what my brothers had with their girls. I wanted someone to love me for me.

I could have let it get me down but instead I decided to be happy because I was happy: I had a good life, my brothers were there; it didn't matter that I didn't have a guy to share the night with. I cracked open a beer and went down to the fire. By nightfall I was buzzed and I was in my element; there were people to talk to, boys to flirt and laugh with, music to get lost in, and stories we had to share that couldn't be told around the parental units. Who needed to be with a guy for the night anyway?

I embraced my singleness. It was hot, and so was I, and I danced the night away around the bonfire in my tight little tank top, flirting, but not particularly interested in anyone. It wasn't like I was the only single girl; there were a few of us dancing and making eyes at the cute guys that didn't have a girl in their arms. I might have been the only one who wasn't looking for a hookup though. I was glad I had my rules. Some of the girls were too easy. I felt sorry for them. I couldn't believe I had been like that once.

I imagined how I looked in the dark, silhouetted by the firelight. I felt their eyes on us, hungry men filling up on our shapes and sizes and sexiness. I lifted my arms, twirling my hands in the air and rolled my body to the beat of the music, occasionally winking or tipping my bottle in the direction of an approving whistle. I reveled in my youth, somehow knowing like never before that like my mom, I'd have a family and grandkids and gray hair someday. I wanted this night to be mine forever and always. I knew that guys were watching and I danced for them as much as for myself, but I didn't want them.

Maybe, for my brothers and I, this would be our last night together. I kind of wished Trav could have been there but if he had been, we would have had to babysit him. As it was, Thomas, Theo, and Brett let me do my thing and they were all doing theirs, but even so, we were together; we were grown versions of the kids we had once been, and younger versions of the adults we were becoming. It was a night to make memories, a night to remember, and I always have.