Safe at Home (11 page)

And yet.

And yet from the first day of practice, Coach Williams had been telling his players that the sides were even this time. And although the Tigers had only managed to win two games so far, both by one run, Nick could see the other varsity players starting to believe.

“Last year they beat us 15–0,” Jack Elmore said. “But this ain’t last year.”

“Yeah, but remember something,” Nick said, sounding as sarcastic as he could. “We’ve got a secret weapon this year—me and my total inability to throw out base runners. Watch out, King, and watch out, world.”

“Hey,” Jack said. “We won today, right? Because you act as if we were the ones who blew the 7–0 lead.”

Nick knew Jack was right.

It was still not hard to feel as if he had blown it, too.

Nick and Gracie were sitting in the circle waiting for Gracie’s mom to drive them home, since Nick’s mom and dad had had to rush back to their school for a faculty meeting.

“Why so quiet, Captain?” Gracie said. “Our team won today.”

“No thanks to me,” Nick said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gracie said.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

And it all came out of him then, everything he’d been feeling for the last week or so, some of which he’d already talked about with Gracie, some not. Came out of him the way it had with his dad that night at dinner.

“I don’t belong with these guys,” he said. “On the varsity, I mean. And just because we won today doesn’t change that. We won in spite of me, not because of me. The whole team knows that. Coach Williams has to know that by now, he just won’t admit it.”

He waited for Gracie to say something. When she didn’t, he kept going.

“I used to love baseball,” he said. “More than comics, more than anything. But it’s not fun anymore, and now I feel more lost than I ever have, because if I don’t at least belong on a baseball field,
I don’t belong anywhere. And I
sure
don’t belong with my mom and dad. They don’t know what to make of me any more than I know what to make of them.”

He stopped now, took a breath, closed his eyes, felt the heat and sting of the tears he’d been doing his best to hold back for a week.

Just then he saw Mrs. Wright’s car coming up the drive from Frogtown Road.

When Nick opened his eyes, he saw Gracie staring at him.

“To be continued,” she said.

She didn’t say anything on the ride home, just stared out the back window. Nick didn’t say anything, either. When they got out of the car, Nick, seeing that his parents weren’t home yet, started walking toward Gracie’s front door.

But she stopped him.

“Let’s go around back for a few minutes,” Gracie said.

“Okay,” Nick said. “But why?”

“Now there’s something
I
need to talk to
you
about.”

“Sounds important.”

“That’s why we need to go to the swings,” Gracie said.

They walked around the side of her house and back to where the swings were, the place where they’d always done their best and most serious talking from the first day they’d known each other.

Nick sat down first and said, “Okay, Miss Mysterious, what do you want to talk about?”

“About how you’ve turned into the biggest baby I know.”

She didn’t sit down in the swing next to his, the way she usually did when they were out here kicking things around. She just stood in front of him, hands on her hips, and let him have it.

“I can’t figure out what’s worse,” Gracie said, “how dumb you’ve gotten about sports, or how
totally
dumb you are about your mom and dad.”

“You don’t get it,” Nick said.

“No,
you
don’t get it,” she said.

“Get what?”

“What an idiot you’ve turned into.”

Nick felt the way you did when the other pitcher was coming with high heat.

“Hold on—”

“No,” Gracie said, “
you
hold on. I’ve been listening to you complain for weeks. Now you listen to me.”

He did.

“First question,” she said. “When did you become such an expert on being a parent? Seriously. You know how many kids we go to school with every single day who have parents who take no interest in anything they’re doing, either ’cause they’re too busy or just don’t want to be bothered? I’ll tell you how many, Captain: a lot.”

In a quiet voice Nick said, “I didn’t say they don’t care.”

“This isn’t about caring,” Gracie said. “My parents care about me. But do you see them showing up for all my lacrosse games? My dad hasn’t been to one yet.”

Nick sat there.

“It was a
pain
for your parents to get here for your game today, then have to leave the minute it
was over. But guess what? They were there. They made the effort. You know how I know that? I did this amazing thing—I talked to them. You should try it sometime.”

“I do try talking to them. They’re just so mad different from me.”

“Well boo
hoo
,” she said. “You think all parents aren’t that way? You don’t think all kids don’t think their parents are from Mars? How totally thick are you? You know what you need to do? Get your head out of your comic books once in a while and look at what you’ve got instead of whining about what you don’t have.”

No stopping her now, no slowing her down. Nick waited for steam to come pouring out of her.

All heat.

“You ever hear the saying ‘you can pick your friends but not your family’? Well, guess what? Your family chose you. They could have picked anybody to be a luckier-than-any-foster-kid-in-the-world kid. And they chose
you
, Crandall. They’re trying to learn about baseball because of
you.
They’re trying to get you to be better in school—which, Earth to Nick, you should be—because they want the best for
you.
”

“That’s what
they
say.”

“And guess what?”
She was really yelling now. “They’re right!”

Gracie turned and pointed across the street at his house. “You told me yourself one time, when you were living in that apartment with the Boyds, you always dreamed about a house like this in a neighborhood like this. A real home with parents inside who’d love you the way your mom and dad do. So they don’t love baseball the way you do. Another boo hoo. My dad loves me to death, and he doesn’t even know what
position
I play in lacrosse. I mean, what planet are you living on?”

Gracie started to walk back toward the house, as if she were done. But halfway across the backyard, she turned around and nearly ran back at him, like she was going to tackle him in the open field.

“I almost told you this in the car, but I didn’t want to say it in front of my mom,” Gracie said. “But you’ve spent so much time in your life feeling sorry for yourself, you don’t know when it’s time to stop.”

Gary Watson was so dominating against Maumee Valley that Nick never had a chance to jam things up for him.

He gave up just one hit, struck out ten, and the Tigers won, 10–0.

When the Maumee Valley center fielder got his team’s only hit, a single in the fourth, Joey and Jack promptly turned a 4-6-3 double play to take him off the bases. By the time Gary got around to walking two guys in the top of the last inning, there was no point in either of them trying to steal—they were too far behind.

Nick even got a hit, on a day when everybody who started for the Tigers got a hit, but he wasn’t thinking about that when the game was over. What he was thinking about was how he hadn’t made any
bad throws and how that made the day a total success almost as much as the final score did.

Now it was Friday, and the big game against King was coming up on Monday. Nick was upstairs in his room, even on a Friday night, doing homework—he’d been trying to do better with that since Gracie had lit into him—when he heard a knock on his wall.

He looked up. It was his dad, wearing jeans and an old green Dartmouth sweatshirt and his one pair of sneakers, tennis shoes that Nick always thought were as old as his dad was.

“Glad to see you hitting the books,” his dad said. “How close are you to being done?”

“Pretty close.”

“Well, when you are, come on downstairs, there’s something I want to show you.”

This was one of those nights when Nick was stretched out on the floor, papers all around him, his signature studying position. He looked up now and said, “Please tell me it’s not more e-mails from my teachers.”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “Just come downstairs when you’re finished working.”

Nick worked for ten more minutes on math, closed his book, stacked up his worksheets and went downstairs to the living room.

When he got there he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Paul Crandall was sitting on the couch, pounding his fist into a brand-new Wilson baseball glove, black with a brown pocket.

“Dad, I don’t need a new glove. And, besides, I’m a catcher, remember?”

“The glove isn’t for you.” His dad grinned. “It’s for me.”

“You bought your
self
a glove?”

“Be logical, son,” Paul Crandall said. “How can we play catch if I don’t have a glove?”

After just a few minutes in the yard, Nick wasn’t worried about making accurate throws anymore. He was a lot more worried that one of them might send his dad to the hospital.

Even his softest throw seemed to be hitting his dad everywhere except his new glove.

“Remember when I mentioned that I wasn’t
perfect?” Paul Crandall said at one point, an embarrassed smile on his face.

Coaches always told you to try to aim the ball at the middle of the other guy’s chest. Trouble was, when Nick managed to pull that off, the ball would actually hit his dad in the chest.

“I’m a little out of practice, as you can see,” his dad said as he reached over to pick up another ball he’d just dropped.

“You’ll get it,” Nick said. Sounding like the dad here, not the kid.

Amazingly, Paul Crandall was as bad—and awkward—throwing the ball as he was trying to catch it. When his dad threw the ball back, he bounced it in front of Nick the way Nick had been bouncing balls in front of varsity fielders all season.

“I probably should have started doing this a little sooner,” his dad said. “Say about 1952.”

Nick smiled then, a smile he couldn’t have stopped if he’d tried. “Tonight’s fine,” he said. He held the ball for a second. “But can I ask you a question?”

“I just hope answering it isn’t as hard for me as this game of catch is turning out to be.”

“Why tonight?” Nick said.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “Your mother and I had a bit of a discussion the other night. Well, technically, it was more her talking and me listening. And what she told me is that maybe it was time for me to do more than talk a good game when it came to baseball, because that’s what dads are supposed to do with their sons.”

“I had the same sort of…
discussion
with Gracie,” Nick said.

“About baseball?”

Nick said, “About everything.”

“Anyway,” his dad said, “here I am.”

“I’m glad,” Nick said.

“Me too.”

They kept playing catch in what daylight they had left. Paul Crandall didn’t turn into a Gold Glover while they did. But he didn’t quit, no matter how many times Nick saw him wince in pain after he’d demanded Nick start throwing the ball harder, throwing it as if he meant it.

And his dad did get a little better the longer they stayed out there.

Nick was so focused on his dad, so focused on
giving him throws he could handle, even aiming them so they ended up on his glove side, a little away from his body, that it didn’t occur to him until afterward that the ball was ending up where he was aiming it almost every single time.

What did occur to Nick Crandall while they were out in the yard was this: It wasn’t just a house like this, on a street like this that he had imagined when he was still in foster care. It had been a
night
exactly like this.

Not playing ball with the world’s greatest baseball dad.

Just his own.

When they were inside, Nick decided this was as good a time as any to show his dad something, too.

“A present I bought,” Nick said. “With my own money. For myself.”

They went up to his room, and he opened the top drawer of his desk and took out the book:

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

He’d bought it at the Hayworth book fair the day after Gracie had yelled at him.

It had
Great Illustrated Classics
printed across the top of the cover, over a drawing of King Arthur and some of his knights, and it was written by a guy named Howard Pyle. For a used copy, Nick thought it was in pretty decent shape.

Paul Crandall stared at the book, then back at Nick.

“You were right,” Nick said. “It
is
one of the great stories in the history of stories.”

“For boys of all ages,” his dad said, gently taking the book out of Nick’s hands now, opening to where it was bookmarked. “And I see you’re well into it.”

“I’ve been reading a little of it every night the past few nights,” Nick said. He grinned and said, “Maybe under the covers sometimes with that book light Mom got me.”

“I seem to recall another boy who used to do the exact same thing,” Paul Crandall said, “at about your exact same age.”

The two of them sat down on the bed, his dad still holding the book.

His dad said, “What made you get it?”

“Kind of a long story,” Nick said. “But not nearly as good as this one.”

Nick didn’t tell him how he’d gone home that night from the swings and realized he had turned into a baby. How he added things up—not needing a worksheet this time—and realized that if one
bad slump in baseball was the worst thing that ever happened to him, his life wasn’t just good.

It was great.

He didn’t tell his dad any of that, just said to him, “I figured it was about time for me to do something more than talk a good game about books.”

Then Nick and his dad were talking about King Arthur and Lancelot and Merlin and Queen Guinevere, Nick telling his dad he couldn’t believe it once he got into the book, how much Merlin reminded him of the old wizard guy who gave Billy Batson his power in Captain Marvel. How he had no idea that Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone when he was a kid was just the beginning of the cool stuff that would happen later.