Screaming at the Ump (18 page)

***

Zeke stayed to help clean up the stands with me.

Sly came over while I was hauling a bag of trash out to the Dumpster. “Here's your whistle,” she said.

“Keep it,” I said. “You did a great job.”

“See, Grandma? I told you I could keep it. Bye, Casey. And bye, you,” she called over to Zeke.

He waved goodbye to both of us too, heading home to edit the video he'd just shot. And I started walking back to my house.

***

So imagine you were walking along, minutes after the end of an awesome You Suck, Ump! Day, whistling a happy song. Now, don't feel bad if you're not a whistler. I happen to be a great whistler, but I know there are plenty of good people—otherwise talented people—who couldn't whistle to save their lives. So maybe you were walking along humming. Anyway, you were kind of absently happy. It was a nice day, the sun was hotter than you'd think it would be in late September, and then out of nowhere, someone appeared in your path and kicked you in your most private area repeatedly.

While that isn't an actual description of what happened to me (I am a good whistler, though), it was what it felt like. I turned the corner to BTP, and when I looked up at the top of the stairs to our house, there was my mother.

I hadn't seen her in seven months. And that time was just because I was forced to attend my cousin's wedding, which I mostly blocked out of my brain because it led my memory to another wedding, one I never wanted to think about.

She was just sitting there, my mom. But really, I didn't think of her as my mom. She was more the woman who used to live here back when she was my mom. She started to hate everything about Behind the Plate except for the baker who came each morning, and she became Mrs. Bob the Baker when she chose to leave. She chose that. And now I chose not to say hello.

I could hear the chatter of instructors calling out situations on the fields behind me: “Nobody on, nobody out,” and then the crack of bat on ball. That was where I wanted to be. In fact, anyplace but right here, right now, was where I wanted to be.

“You're a hard guy to reach,” she said with a friendly-seeming smile.

I shrugged. I didn't care.

“I just want to talk to you, to see how you are.”

“I'm fine,” I said.

I heard students yelling out their calls: “You're out! No run scores! No run scores!”

“When your dad and I got divorced, the plan was not that I would never see you again,” she said. She was looking right at me, but I couldn't keep looking back. “The deal was that I had you every other weekend, and one or two weeknights when it wouldn't be too disruptive. We kept it loose and friendly.”

She paused, the conversational hint that it was my turn to speak. But I had nothing to say to her.

“I never thought it was a good idea to force you to stay with me when you didn't want to. You were angry, and I understood that, and I thought I was doing the right thing. But it's gotten out of hand. The agreement is that I get you every other weekend.”

“Even if I don't want to be gotten?”

“What's the alternative?” she asked.

I sat on the bottom step so I didn't have to look at her anymore. Not that I cared, but her eyes were wet. “This. I live here. With Dad and Pop. I don't live with you and Bob the Baker. I don't.” That was a choice
she
had made.

“But you're my son, and I love you.”

I stood up and walked into the house.

T
HE
next morning started so quiet, maybe because Zeke wasn't around. He had to go to Brooklyn to visit his grandfather. Maybe we had all spent more energy on You Suck, Ump! Day than we realized. Dad and Pop said their heads were still throbbing when they woke up, echoes of all the crowd noise. And me, well, let's say seeing my mother took it out of me. I felt like someone had hollowed out my stomach with one of those sharp spoons Pop used to eat grapefruit.

But instead of being just a not-bad mellow quiet, the day kept getting worse. Despite my protests, I had to spend the day at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bob the Baker. Dad was driving me there. I didn't want to be in this car, and I didn't want to spend time with either one of my parents, to be honest.

“You could be more of a sport about this, Casey,” Dad said.

Not really. He could make my body go. He couldn't make me be happy about it.

“She's your mother.”

“Is that supposed to be some magic kind of word? Because it doesn't have a lot of meaning to me. She gave birth to me, yeah. And then she left. She got to make that choice, and now I'm not given one at all. First she decides not to live in the same house as us, and then she randomly decides it's time to be some kind of parent to me, and I'm supposed to what? Be happy? I'm not happy.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “I get that. But you're making it sound like your mom didn't want to be with you. It was you who didn't want to be with her, right?”

“Once she left, yeah.”

“And I think what happened there,” Dad said, pulling up to the light at Clay Coves Community College and slowing to a stop, “is that your mother and I made a mistake.”

I didn't hear that every day.

“Your mother never wanted to force you to visit with her. She thought she was doing a kind thing, giving you time, not making you do something you didn't want to do. But we both expected that you'd get over it, and miss her, and want to get back to some kind of relationship.”

“Well, you expected wrong.” I looked out the window at the 4-C soccer team practicing.

“But do you see what I'm saying, Casey? We made a mistake, and now we're fixing the mistake. It shouldn't have been your decision. You should be spending time with both parents.”

It surprised me, the way this came flying out of my mouth: “Is this all so you have a place to dump me when you need to? Is that why you're suddenly so interested in my relationship with my mother, when you were happy enough to let me not have one for a long time? This is about you wanting to go to Florida for Academy, right? Stick me with Mom so you're free to do whatever you want to do.” Maybe the valve that had always held in all my . . . feelings stuff had gotten broken when everything poured out at the right-field foul pole yesterday.

Dad looked into the rearview mirror and pulled into the faculty parking lot behind 4-C. “You've been holding a lot inside you, huh?” I could feel him waiting for me to look at him, but I couldn't. “And you've apparently been eavesdropping a lot too.”

I wanted to open the door and start running away, around the parking lot, forcing my dad to run behind me and catch me if he wanted to have this conversation. But he would. He'd catch me. And make me have the conversation. So I slid down lower in the seat and tried to brace myself. But he waited me out. So I talked.

“I should want your school to be better, as good as it can be. But I like living here. And I like you being here. And I don't want to visit Mom because I don't even know her anymore, and I really don't like her, and I definitely don't want to stay with her so you and Pop can leave me here and go to Florida without me. And I'm mad.”

All Dad said was, “Exactly.”

“So I can go home?”

He made a face like,
AS IF!
“No. Today you start visiting your mother. We'll start out with once a week, but you can count on more in the future.”

I tried to interrupt, but he kept going. “Look, the courts spelled out the custody, and she has a right to you half the time. This once-a-week thing is nothing. You can also try to open your brain to the possibility that once you get over the mad—and you will—you might even remember how much you like your mother. You might
want
to visit her.”

And maybe Santa and the tooth fairy would come by with the Easter bunny and take me on a magical sleigh ride through a fuzzy cotton-candy fairyland, too.

Dad looked at me for a while, but I really had nothing left to say, nothing left inside.

“About Florida,” he said, and then I could feel him looking really closely at me. I'm not sure what he saw, but whatever it was made him say, “We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that when you get home.”

He started driving again.

I knew we were getting close when the air got that weird beach smell—stinkier than the beaches around Clay Coves. Mom and Bob the Baker lived south of us, three blocks off the beach, and all I really remembered about their place was the way that smell felt heavy in your nose. And also some really good muffins that she once had for me, covered with this cinnamon-buttery stuff. I wished I could walk in the house, nod at Mr. and Mrs. Bob the Baker, eat two muffins, and then get back in the car, but I was pretty sure that was not how this would play out.

“So she drives me straight to school tomorrow and then I can take the bus home and be at BTP all week?”

“Until next Sunday, yes,” Dad said.

I hated the way I had no say in this. But for today at least, it didn't seem like fighting was going to change anything.

I kept thinking about that sign:
SURPRISE IS THE ENEMY OF THE UMPIRE
. How could I have possibly prepared for a night at my mother's? What could prepare me for that?

I
HAD
imagined that Dad would drop me off and I'd have to walk in and face them myself, but maybe he got how hard this was for me, because he grabbed my backpacks—the one for school and the one with my overnight stuff—and walked me to the door.

My mother opened it before we even rang the bell. It was obvious from her look that she wanted to hug me, and I hoped it was obvious from mine that she had better not. She didn't.

She let me in, and I remembered the place more than I'd thought I would. I felt something creepy slide up against my ankle and then I felt it on the other ankle, and I jumped about four feet off the floor.

“Oh, let me introduce you to Theodore,” Mom said.

She picked up a handful of fur ball. Now, THIS was a kitten who deserved the name Tiny.

“He showed up on the back porch. We put milk out, and he kept coming, so, I guess we have a cat, though I'm surprised each time I see him.”

I was waiting for Bob the Baker's big, stupid, booming baker voice to boom its big, stupid way into the room. But so far it was just the three of us, complete with very noticeable patches of quiet.

“So here's your stuff,” Dad said, slinging backpacks off his shoulders at me. “I'll see you after school tomorrow.”

“I'll be on the late bus,” I reminded him. “Newspaper meeting.”

He nodded and then, again, there was a look that indicated someone might be planning to hug me, but I managed to not-hug my way through the moment.

When he left, Mrs. Bob the Baker asked, “Do you want to hold him? He'll purr.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking it would give me something to do.

“I thought Sundays would be good because Bob visits his mother and then has poker night. It will give you and me some time to reconnect, talk about some things.”

I nodded, but I was definitely not ready to jump into the reconnecting pool.

“Come on in here,” she said, walking into the kitchen. The refrigerator was covered with papers. I took a closer look and saw a picture I drew of a rocket in the sky when I was in nursery school. And I had to look twice when I saw the one with my name written down the page vertically, like the one Sly did, the one I'd thought wasn't hanging anywhere.

“Would you like a muffin?” my mother asked. On the table there was a plate full of that kind I loved, and a big glass of milk.

T
HE
good thing I could say about Mrs. Bob the Baker was that she didn't push it. She gave me some space. She showed me the room I was going to sleep in, and let me spend some time in there by myself. I came out for dinner, and we talked about safe things. I did not like being with Mrs. Bob the Baker in her house. But after a while, holding on to the silence was harder than talking about stuff that didn't matter.

But then I somehow started talking about school, and that accidentally led to telling her that sixth-graders never wrote for the paper and how I'd tried but my article didn't go through. She gave my arm a quick squeeze, the kind of hug you might give someone you knew didn't want to be hugged, and asked, “And what are you going to do about that, Casey?” There was something in her voice or in how it never occurred to her that I'd let anything keep me from doing what I wanted to do—or maybe it was just that arm hug, or hearing my mother say my name while we sat at a kitchen table eating her delicious and impossibly sticky barbecued chicken—that was so familiar. And so good. And almost . . . right. I didn't think she saw the tears that came to my eyes, and I knew she couldn't hear the thought in my brain, which was,
Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap. I think I actually love her. I do. I still love her
.

Crap
.

After dinner, I went right back to what she called my room. I didn't even help clean up the dishes.

That article revision was due tomorrow, and I felt a lot more comfortable focusing on that than on sorting through that crazy wave of tears and love that got all mixed up with my normal feelings for Mrs. Bob the Baker, which I guess were closer to . . . well, nothing like love.

I had to get this article right. I had written seven different versions since I interviewed J-Mac, and I had thrown them all away. There were a lot of ways you could tell J-Mac's story and it was hard to figure out which one was right, or best, or most likely to get published. I'd always been determined to get that byline,
by Casey Snowden
. This was my only chance to get it right.

For some reason, this was what I kept thinking: If someone told the story about the time Sly zoomed into the street on a skateboard and almost got flattened by a lawn-mower-towing truck, you might think,
What irresponsible jerks those guys are
,
getting a little girl into such a dangerous situation
. All you'd really know was that two older boys told a little girl and her cat to ride a skateboard down a sloping driveway toward a busy street so they could film it. I bet if Sly's mother wrote it, that's exactly what that article would say.