Hardball (2 page)

I hustled the third graders onto the field where tables and lines waited. It was a zoo but a contained one. My kids lined up in front of Jack Youder, the veteran second-baseman. Of the twenty-five-man roster, seven players had shown up, including the mysterious Dash Wallace, who never showed up to anything. He was the one of the five I needed. The rest were easy-peasy.

I let the kids go first, staying at the back of the line while Jim guided the kids with autographs to the back of Charlie Finnegan’s line. If the kids had nothing to sign, the player gave them a glossy stadium program. Three of my kids had brought hats. Iris had brought an old ball.

“And how old are you?” Youder asked when I got to him.

“Twenty-four.” I didn’t get the joke because I was pulling Diego from under the table.

“And what grade are you in?”

I smiled at Youder once Jim had control of the rambunctious child, and I handed Youder my dad’s birthday ball. He rolled it around, looking for a space.

“Just finished grad school, sir. Hoping to be a grown-up someday.”

He smiled at me. At forty, he was in his last years of play, and they’d been good to him.

“Me too.” He found a space and signed with a Dodger-blue Sharpie. “I hear it’s a drag though.” He blew on the signature so it wouldn’t smudge.

“You’re a free agent after this year,” I said. “Are you staying or going?”

“You’re really up to the minute, aren’t you?”

“Sorta.”

“Well, we’ll see. I don’t think anyone’s looking for maturity on the field right now.”

Youder was always a charming presence at press conferences, with a warm smile and ready wit, but he took half a beat before the word maturity, and he looked suddenly rueful. I felt stupid for asking. It was like asking a woman how much weight she’d lost.

“We love you,” I said. “You should stay.”

He handed me the ball with dry ink. “I’ll think about it.”

“Thanks!”

I had Finnegan, Flores, and Jackson already. I got Trudeau and Bonneface while constantly counting kids in yellow Hobart Elementary hoodies. As I was about to get in Wallace’s line, a whistle sounded.

A voice from a bullhorn followed. “Everybody to the tables for lunch!”

Suddenly the space in front of Dash Wallace’s table was a ghost town, and I stood there with my ball in my hands and my heart in my throat.

Here’s the thing about Dashiell Wallace: he was physically perfect. Six two and a half. Proportioned by DaVinci and sculpted by Michelangelo. In the middle of summer, he rolled up his sleeves, and the roped muscles of his tanned forearms twisted and tightened when he handled the ball. This perfection was apparent on the TV whether he was standing still or flying through the air. Nothing got past him. The space between second and third was his domain, and three Golden Gloves into his career, Dodger pitchers made it their business to make sure the batter pulled left, and the opposing batters tried to thread the first base line for all it was worth just to avoid him.

He was magical. And there he was. Right there. In uniform. Three feet from me, looking at me face to shoulders and breasts to hips with sky-blue eyes and black hair even more perfect than the TV could contain.

“
¡Señora Foster!
” a child cried from behind me. “
¡Necesitamos su firma para que nos puedan dar el lunch”

Dammit. She wanted my signature. I was the sponsoring faculty, and I’d been the one to do the paperwork, so I was the one who had to release their hot lunches.

I held the ball out to Wallace. “Hi, this is for my dad, but I’m a huge fan.”

“You’re a teacher?” He looked me up and down again.

“School librarian. You’re the second-to-last one I have to get.”

He took the ball, turned it around, then locked his eyes on mine. “You have the whole roster on this thing?”

Another voice. “
¡La necesitamos!
”

“
¡Ya Voy!
” I snapped. They needed me, but I couldn’t move. Dash Wallace had asked me something. What was it? I tried to remember as he rolled the ball in his perfect, strong hands. I tried not to think about how they’d feel on my body or anything at all except for making a sentence.

“It’s for my dad. He’s the most loyal living Dodger fan.”

He found a spot and signed while he spoke. “You brought all these kids out here to get this signed for your dad?”

He handed the ball back without blowing on it. I’d wanted to see that. I’d wanted the little second of delay it would cause and the warmth of his breath on something I was going to touch.

But even in the time it took for him to hand me a ball with wet Sharpie ink, I absorbed what he’d said. Was he accusing me of arranging a field trip for my own ends? It wasn’t that simple. Jim had the budget for a PE field trip, and I was a fan, so I’d agreed to chaperone, but who the hell was he to assume I’d dragged forty kids ten blocks in a broken-down school bus to get his damn signature?

I didn’t say any of that. Somewhere, I had a really snappy joke about something, and he’d smile with those teeth—which were perfect except for the left front overlapping the right just a tiny bit—but the joke got swallowed before I could process it.

“Thank you. If it was too much trouble to sign without an insult, you shouldn’t have bothered. My dad probably wouldn’t notice it was missing.” I turned my back on him before I could be more of an idiot.

I pocketed my ball and ran to get the kids their lunch. When I looked around, he was gone. Good thing. There was nothing more offensive than a man blessed with looks where he should have been given courtesy.

Vivian

My drive home from work was ridiculous. Friday traffic going west from East Hollywood was a running joke.

“Can you make it by six thirty?” Francine’s voice came though my speakerphone as I stopped at a green to avoid blocking the box at Doheny.

“Not to Silver Lake, I can’t.”

“I want you to meet him. You have to meet him. That’s it, I’m laying down the law, and he’s going to enforce it.”

I made it across before the light changed. It was the little victories that made life worth living. “If I date him, are you going to make cop jokes?”

“Hot cop jokes. Hot cop. Hot. With ink.”

Francine had a listening problem. When I’d told her I wanted a nice guy, she confused that with good-looking, tattooed, and law-abiding.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“I’ll try to hold him for you. But I can’t speak for all the other girls there.”

“If he’s so desperate to get in someone’s pants—”

“Vivian Foster. Don’t even. Just get there and put a little mascara on, okay? And try not to start finding reasons to hate him before you even get there. Just go with an open mind. Have fun. You don’t have to marry the guy.”

“All right. I won’t marry him.”

I got stuck behind an SUV at a light. Couldn’t see anything down the block, which I found the most frustrating thing in the world.

She blew me a loud kiss. “Love you, blondie.”

“Love you too, brunettey.”

We hung up. I wasn’t the demonstrative type. I didn’t say I love you all the time, and I wasn’t girlish or giggly. I hated shopping in pairs and preferred staying home with a good romance novel to a girls’ night out. But I figured sometimes you have to meet someone halfway. So if Francine needed me to escort her to the bathroom when we were out or say I loved her at the end of a phone call, I’d do it for her.

When Carl and I broke up six months earlier, she had been there for me. She took me out and let me cry on her new blouse. She got me drunk and made sure I didn’t go home with anyone but her. But as the months wore on and I still wasn’t interested in dating, she got more and more worried. Which meant she had to fix it.

I didn’t want to be late for the setup with the hot cop, but when I pulled into my driveway, I was too tired to even think about wearing mascara.

My dumpy little Nissan with sun-damaged paint and a missing hubcap looked ridiculous on my block. I lived in Beverly Hills. It was almost embarrassing. Almost. Because having regular trash pickup and flat sidewalks wasn’t a joke. Neither was feeling safe when I got home late. And the library was gorgeous. The school district was one of the best, which would matter when I had kids, and the restaurants were great when I could afford them. Which was never.

The front door was ajar. If I lived where I worked, I would have panicked. But this was Beverly Hills, and an open door meant I didn’t have to worry about intruders as much as I had to worry about my stepfather.

“Dad?” I called from the porch. “Dad?” I said again, dropping my bag by the door.

Another reason to keep the doors and windows sealed in winter was the heat. We blasted it to keep Dad’s joints comfortable. Warm and dry were the doctor’s orders.

The house was built like the letter O, with a courtyard in the center, the public part of the house in the front and on the east side, the kitchen in the back, and four bedrooms and a den on the west side. The furniture had been top-of-the-line circa 1967, going out of style and back in again in the time I lived there.

I could cross to the other side of the house through the center. So I slid open one of the heavy, seven-foot-high glass doors that separated the living room from the courtyard.

“Close that!” a voice came from the kitchen. “I don’t have stock in LADWP.”

I slid it closed. “LADWP isn’t publicly traded.”

Dad stood in the dining room, leaning on his walker. It had tennis balls stuck onto the two back legs. We’d tried everything to get a controlled slide out of those back legs, and nothing worked like a couple of Wilsons. He was still young, but he had to have done something to piss off the gods because arthritis was crippling him before his time. “You keep saying that, but I was around when LILCO went public.”

“In New York.” I kissed his cheek. “We don’t privatize utilities here in paradise.”

“Such a know-it-all. A real
wisenheimer
.” He turned his hand into a flat plane and shook it at me. He’d brought his comedy
schtick
right from his family synagogue in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

Our kitchen was massive, and the appliances were from the same era as the furniture. Only Dad’s handy repairs kept everything in beautiful working order.

I took the lid off the simmering pot. “Oh. Pot roast.”

“You staying for dinner?”

He looked at me with his brown eyes. Mine were an icy non-color. Almost blue. Sometimes grey. His skin was olive, and mine was peachy. But he’d been a father to me since I was born.

As her divorce attorney, he’d fallen in love with my pregnant mother. He got her the house in the settlement and moved into it. I was six when my mom died. He hadn’t blinked, adopting me without my biological father’s interference. I didn’t appreciate that properly until I was twelve, when he’d brought a woman home to meet me. I didn’t remember her name, but she had red hair and was younger than he was. She ignored me so noticeably that Dad excused himself, picked up my plate, and he and I ate dinner in the kitchen while she finished alone.

She never came back. When I’d asked him about her later, he said he only needed one woman in the house. It was then that I felt chosen, and that feeling had never left me.

I put the lid back on the pot. I felt chosen, but I didn’t want him to stay single the rest of his life.

“How did you peel the potatoes?” I glanced at his hands for signs that he’d aggravated his arthritis.

“They come peeled at the store now. It’s like they read my mind. So I asked the deli to cut them. Then the lady back there, nice Spanish lady, she cut the carrots too. Even peeled the skins.”

He shrugged as if to say, “I still got it.”

“You didn’t close the door again. We should get those lever handles so you don’t have to grip a knob to lock it.”

He waved again. “Such a
mensch
. Eat. Then go out.”

“How did you know I was going out?” I got two plates and cups from the cabinet. They were my mother and bio dad’s good wedding china.

“You’re single and beautiful. It’s Friday. You don’t need to be a genius.”

I couldn’t stay home after that. He’d sulk if I did.

I set the table, and he made his way to his chair, tennis balls sliding across the linoleum. Some days he didn’t need the walker and it was fine, and some days he broke my heart.

Vivian

“Well? What do you think?” Francine fidgeted with the fringe on her vintage crochet poncho. It looked like an afghan with a hole, and she looked like a cover model in it.

“He’s a nice-looking guy.”

He was Latino, built like a god, probably sang like Enrique Iglesias and fucked like James Deen. But I was barely fifteen minutes late because of an accident on the 10, and he was already making small talk with another girl at the bar.

“Those are real gang tats,” Larry, Francine’s boyfriend, said. He’d shaved his beard in favor of a Rollie Fingers curled moustache.

“He’s reformed,” she said with an excited smile.

My bones could feel how badly she wanted to jumpy-clap. I was her project. Sometimes I wondered if she put my face on Tinder and swiped right on my behalf.

I had a book burning a hole in my Kindle, and Officer Hotpants was coming at me with an LED smile and two glasses of something I was sure was alcoholic. My mother had been killed by a drunk driver, so if I had the car, I drank Sprite or took a cab home.

“Thank you,” I said, taking my drink. How long could I nurse it? Maybe ten minutes. And I was thirsty. But I couldn’t be rude and reject the glass, nor could I sound judgmental and tell him the real reason I wasn’t drinking. So I figured I’d just hold it then go home sober enough to remove my mascara and read myself to sleep.

Francine took the glass from me. “Oh my God, I’m sorry.” She made an apology face at Officer Hotpants. “She’s allergic to lemon. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“Cool, man, I hate lemon too.” Officer Hotpants took the glass. “They look prettier than they taste, you know what I’m saying?”

He cocked his glowing handsome face at me. I had no idea what he was trying to say.