Hardball (4 page)

The Monday after Dash Wallace had blown a kiss behind my back was no more up than any other up. I was amped and happy walking to the library, swinging my bag of apples. I had a fun event to go to with a nice guy. Dad’s ball was almost finished in time. I had a job I loved. The sun was shining, and all the world was…

I turned the corner. The world was… weird.

The library was locked, and outside it stood a man in charcoal pants and a jacket. Pale blue shirt undone at the neck. I almost didn’t recognize him in dress shoes. I thought he was some overdressed LAUSD administrator coming with a surprise talk about a reduction in funding for libraries, how there was a public library three blocks away, how they were going to just have some shelves in the hallway, how they needed the space for a classroom. I was already listing the phone calls I would have to make to stop whatever it was he’d come to do.

Not until he was two steps away did I swallow a ton of professional antagonism.

“Are you Miss Foster?”

“Vivian,” I said, neck bent to look up into those damned blue eyes. “What brings you here, Mr. Wallace? If you want to make a big donation to the library, the children could use it.”

“You can call me Dash.”

Because he never gave interviews on camera, I’d had no inkling of how resonant his voice was. Out in the park, with the ambient noise of the wind and children, I hadn’t noticed it. But in the stark hallway of a brick-and-stone building, it vibrated against the center of my body.

“Dash then.” I unlocked the door. “You got past security.”

“I autographed a banner, and they patted me down.” He smiled, and I kept my cool. “Things have changed since I was in school.”

I opened the door and let him into my modest domain. I felt suddenly ridiculous that I had a full-time job managing this tiny room with two tables and kid-sized chairs. A couch. Two Ikea padded chairs. The windows had bars, and the top shelves were empty.

He didn’t know how hard I’d fought for a water cooler and that I paid for the cups. That I went to sales on weekends to find new books. How I fought to use the Dewey Decimal System so the kids would know how subjects were organized even though computer searches were now the norm.

“This is really nice,” he said.

I spun on him, this anomaly in a custom suit. Was he making fun of me? He was a god, expanding all over the simplicity of this simple room. Nothing had ever been so incongruous as his presence in my library.

The way he looked at me, those lips tightening just a little, his hands crossed in front of him—he meant it. Or he meant to be polite. I couldn’t tell past the glow of perfection. My every intuition misfired. His looks and stardom were short-circuiting my senses.

“Thank you.” I indicated the metal folding chair across my desk. “I have only one other grown-up-sized chair.”

He nodded and sat in it. I didn’t think the little library had ever contained a man like Dash Wallace. He was tall, of course, but he also cut the space he moved in like a scalpel, and when he crossed his legs, the angle of his legs against each other was the opposite of awkward.

“So…” Opening my apple bag gave my hands something to do. “If you’re not here to fund my palatial library, what brings you?”

“Well…” He cleared his throat. “First, I wasn’t trying to insult you on Friday.”

“What were you trying to do?”

“Make conversation.”

I dumped the apples into a big yellow bowl on my desk. “I’m sure I was oversensitive.” I shook out the last apple. It tumbled to the top of the pile, bounced, and went to the floor.

With a speed that defied the laws of physics, Dash shot his arm out and caught it. The rest of his body barely moved. His fingers tensed around the fruit just enough to hold it, as if he was about to throw it to second base. Those fingers. The way they curved. The flesh on bone. How would they feel against the curve of my hip? The inside of my thigh?

“You catch it, you keep it,” I said, looking away.

He put it on top of the pile. “Leave it for the kids.”

“Breakfast doesn’t always happen for the kids who get here at seven thirty.” I sat behind my desk, comforted by the furniture between us. “And they don’t all get a good lunch. The ones who fall between the free hot lunch program and lunchmeat on bread. There aren’t enough fruits and vegetables. And everyone loves an apple.”

He nodded, looking at my face as if reading a book. Was I babbling? Was he reading my attraction to him like a story he only needed to skim? He was sucking the breath out of me.

“You’re right,” he said, taking his apple back. “Everyone does.”

“I have a class coming in five minutes.” I didn’t mean for my voice to be husky and low. I cleared my throat. I’d done enough talking. I just met his gaze. Let him read my story. He was a beautiful man, and he knew it.

“I have a problem,” he said.

“Oh, looking for a place to make an endowment?”

“Let’s not start on my endowments.”

My throat did something that made a sound, and my jaw clamped shut to prevent me from responding. He was smiling. I was dying thinking about his endowments.

“Sorry,” he said, and I remembered that blown kiss on the TV.

He thought I was sexy, and he didn’t know that I knew. Why was I letting a little joke between adults make me feel small? I should have felt terrific. He may or may not have wanted me, but he certainly found me physically appealing. I could choose to feel good about that.

I cleared my throat and decided on a new start. “Don’t be. I brought it up. This problem. It’s something I can help you with, I assume?”

He fingered the apple as if it were a baseball, thumb looking for stitches, turning, feeling, turning. A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and Dash Wallace was a man in motion. “I had something before your students came to my table on Friday. When they left, it was gone.”

My body went from warm and aroused to cold and tense. I had to work to not get defensive right away. “Really?”

“A glove. It was in my things under the table. I need it back.”

My kids. He was accusing my kids of stealing his glove. That was a problem. No matter how poor they were, they weren’t supposed to steal things. I felt personally responsible. I wanted to apologize profusely, beg forgiveness, sell something to pay for it.

But couldn’t he buy another glove? For Chrissakes, he had only one glove in the world? He’d signed a seventeen-million dollar two-year contract. Who did that then came to East Hollywood looking for a missing piece of equipment? How much was the most expensive baseball glove? Five hundred dollars? A thousand?

As if reading my mind, he said, “It’s not just any glove. It’s important to me.”

“I understand.” I didn’t. Not at all. I sat in my creaky chair.

He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. My desk. I couldn’t move. If I leaned forward, I could have kissed him.

“I came to you because I remembered you. If I went through my agent, he’d make a stink. I don’t want to make a big deal about it. But I need it back.”

His body held so much power, so much forward motion. His stare was a swing in my direction, and instinctively I curved. I held my hands folded in front of me, and all my tension flowed down from my shoulders. I squeezed my hands together as if I was cracking a walnut between them.

“I’ll ask the kids. If it doesn’t turn up, we’ll find a way to pay for it.” I wished I could swallow that last sentence back. There was no way I could cough up enough for whatever that thing cost, and the LAUSD would laugh me out of a job if I asked them for it.

“I don’t want money.” Ever so lightly, he tapped my desk with the tip of his middle finger. It was the only movement of his body, as if he was conserving his energy to spring. “I have the money. It’s the glove.
That
glove.”

“It’s the glove you love.” I smiled at my joke and felt like a dumbass at the same time.

“You’re a poet.”

“I know it.”

He laughed, really laughed at my silly rhyming game. Oldest joke in the book, and he laughed.

The bell rang.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” I finally said. “I’ll make it my business to get it back.”

He regarded me, my face, my eyes, my posture. The look was so deep I felt not physically naked but morally, as if he were stripping me bare to see if I was not only capable of finding his glove but if my desire to do it was real.

I scribbled my number on a scrap of paper. “Here. I’m personally responsible for this. You can call me and harass me any time.”

I slid the paper across the desk. He’d probably throw it in the trash and call the school’s superintendent, who would fire me outright for not watching the kids.

He took the paper and folded it in half against his thumb. “You buy the apples with your own money?”

“Yeah. Oranges sometimes, but the peels get messy.”

“You seem like a good person.” He slid the paper into his breast pocket.

My response burst out of the base of my throat without taking the usual route through my brain. “And you’re very handsome.”

I turned red—I knew from the hot tingle in my neck and shoulders—but oddly, his cheeks went a little red as well. He always seemed so cocky, in part because I only saw him on the field, but maybe he wasn’t.

You’re a school librarian. Did you even brush your hair this morning?

That little voice brought me back to reality. Dash may have turned a little red, and he may have been a little awkward, but that made him charming and sweet to more accomplished, more beautiful women. It did not put him in my league. I was triple A, and he was the majors.

The bell rang. He stood.

“Thank you.” He buttoned his jacket.

I didn’t look at him as I walked to the door and opened it. “I’ll ask around. Do you have a deadline? It could take time.”

“Opening day’s my deadline.” He handed me a card. “Call me if you find it. Or just have it sent to the address on the back.”

“I will.”

A line of second graders made their way down the hall, and they parted for him as if he was an unseen wall with a space all his own. He turned back as he walked, giving me a wave. I wished I hadn’t told him he was handsome, and I wished I didn’t have to interrogate the entire third grade on his behalf.

Vivian

I hated going into Mom’s closet, because she wasn’t around anymore. It still smelled like her. As soon as I slid the door open, I was assaulted by rosewater and memories. I sighed and stepped inside.

She hadn’t been born to money, but my bio dad had gotten the house cheap when his four-minute-long career had turned a corner. My stepdad was a hard-working divorce attorney in a city that didn’t take marriage seriously, and he was generous and kind, but his career had skidded when his arthritis took over his life.

In the years he’d been married to my mother, he treated her like a queen. She never wanted for a dress, and what became apparent as the years went on and I plumbed the depths of her closet, she often didn’t want for a choice of dresses for any occasion. Some still had tags. Some were too expensive for price tags but had obviously never been worn.

I was an inch shorter than she’d been but the same shoe and dress size. As the years wore on, the contents of the closet had gone from dated to cutting edge, and in the hours before the Petersen event, I ran my hands along the sleeve of a matte gold gown that looked as if it had been smelted by a goldsmith.

“She never wore that one,” Dad said from behind me. He was having a good day, and the walker was in its little hallway, waiting for the rain.

I pulled the hanger off the rod and draped the fabric over myself. “It’s too much.”

He waved. “Please wear it. It’s a waste not to.”

Dad hated waste. I didn’t know if that was a new thing or if the excess he’d poured on my mother was the result of a surplus of love.

“All right,” I said, turning to the side and back again. “But if I can’t find the shoes that go with it, I’m changing to the blue one.”

Dad stood against the doorjamb with his arms crossed. His eyes stared in the middle distance. It was his Missing Mom Face.

“Dad?”

He snapped out of it. “I think the shoes are in the bottom rack.”

I crouched to hunt for them. Couldn’t miss them. Matching matte gold stilettos. Insane.

“You look just like her, you know.”

“Like mom?” I huffed.

That was a load of crap. My mother had been ethereal. She’d stopped modeling when she got pregnant and never got back to it because it was more boring than being a wife and mother.

He snapped open a drawer and rummaged around before pulling out a little velvet box. He handed it to me open. Two gold hoop earrings each strung with a single pearl.

“Wow. They’re gorgeous.”

“She was wearing them when we met. She said they were lucky.”

I couldn’t deny him, so I put them in my ears.

“Have you thought about dating?” I asked.

“You get married first.”

“Oh, please.”

“Who is this guy tonight?”

“A friend. I’m not his type, and he’s not mine.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

Of course he’d never address the fact that a man wasn’t interested in me. He thought any sane, straight man would want Vivian Foster.

“Nothing. He’s just, I don’t know. Nice, but I work with him, and—”

“He’s not a star in a romance novel?” I snapped the light off, but he kept on. “Those men don’t exist, peanut. We have flaws. We’re a little nuts but not in the ways you like.”

“I’m aware.”

He’d never understood why I didn’t go back to Carl when he called. Maybe I hadn’t articulated it well enough. Whatever forward motion Carl had without me had happened because I was gone. If I went back to him, I’d blame myself for every stumble in his life. I couldn’t shoulder his life as well as my own.

I put in my contacts, which I hated doing. I didn’t like touching my eye, and the whole thing made me nervous. But I blinked twice and looked at myself in the mirror. The mascara would look great without the glasses. I snapped my fingers. Blink. Blink. Boom. In.

As I got dressed, I reminded myself that my father was only looking out for me. He never spoke a word that wasn’t out of love. That train of thought took me to his sixty-fifth birthday in April. I had another signature to get from last summer’s twenty-five-man roster. Duchovney had gotten himself on the sixty-day DL mid-season for a meniscus tear, and that was it. He hadn’t been around to sign anything.