The Whore's Child (19 page)

CENTER

A strange car was parked right in front of the house when Lin returned home that evening, a Dodge that looked brand new. Leaning his bike up against the porch railing, he went over and peered inside, looking for clues, but the interior was clean, with nothing on the seats or the floor except a paper mat on the driver’s side.

In the house he found his father, wearing a sport coat and sitting in the chair he’d used back when this was his house too. His mother, all dressed up, lounged on the near end of the sofa, and both held short highball glasses half full of murky liquid. His father’s busted lip was swollen, but otherwise he looked perfectly natural, and they were both smiling at him so smugly that Lin was forced to consider the possibility that one of the improbable scenarios required to bring this domestic scene to fruition had actually occurred: either his father had grown up, or his mother had kissed his ass.

His father spoke first. “Who won?”

“How come you’re here?” Lin said.

“I live here.”

Lin looked at his mother, who nodded, with a crooked smile that for an instant made her look like his Connecticut grandmother.

“Whose car is that outside?” he said.

“Ours,” his father smiled.

“How about that?” his mother said. “We’re no longer a foot.”

And just that quickly, a flash of understanding. “Afoot” was one word, not two. “On foot,” it meant.

“Anything else you want to know?” his father said.

There was. The baseball game had run long, making him late for dinner, but there were no food smells. “What about dinner?”

“We’re going out to eat,” his mother said.

“To Rigazzi’s?”

“If you like. Why don’t you go get cleaned up and put on some nice clothes?”

“I don’t get it,” he finally admitted, which struck both of them as about the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

Ten minutes later, they’d climbed into the new Dodge and were just about to pull away when Mr. Christie’s pickup rumbled up behind them. Lin’s father looked pleased by this turn of events and, ignoring his wife’s whispered plea to drive off, immediately turned off the ignition and got out. Lin got out too, leaving his mother the only one in the car. The two men shook hands, Mr. Christie beaming his usual good cheer, Lin’s father wearing a knowing grin.

“I guess you’re about done here,” he said.

“Just stopped by to pick up my ladder and brushes,” Mr. Christie said.

“Good,” his father said. “Then you’ll be gone when we get back.”

This remark appeared to sadden Mr. Christie more than anger him. Turning to Lin, he said, “Linwood tell you he saved the game?”

“Lin, you mean?” his father said. “My son?”

Whatever he was driving at, Mr. Christie didn’t seem all that interested. “You should’ve been there,” he smiled, and Lin found himself smiling back. Given how things had worked out, they were friends again.

“I will be, from now on.”

“Well, that’s good,” Mr. Christie said, sounding like he meant it. “Today was just the beginning, right, Linwood? Wait’ll
next
year. All he needs is to grow a little, and then he’ll be a natural shortstop.”

Lying in bed that night, Lin replayed what had happened that afternoon over and over, trying to decide if he really had saved the game. It was thrilling to think so, and to know this was the conclusion that everybody else had come to, even if he himself wasn’t so sure. The truth, insofar as he was able to reconstruct it, was that he’d been daydreaming when the big Stop & Shop kid uncoiled at Hugo Wentz’s pitch, and what followed wasn’t at all like his nightly fantasies of snagging line drives. For one thing, he didn’t have to dive, because the ball had headed straight for him—was on him, in fact, before he even had time to consider ducking. Rather, his glove had somehow been there in front of his face, and the ball had rocketed into the stiff webbing, closing the mitt around it without Lin even having to squeeze, and then yanking it clean off his wrist. Glove and ball together had described a graceful arc in the air above his head before landing in the dirt behind second base.

Recalling the moment, Lin realized he’d been in no great hurry to retrieve the glove. The batter, he’d concluded, was out, by virtue of the fact that the ball was still right there in his glove. That the glove was no longer on his hand didn’t seem all that significant, so he was confused by all the yells coming from both teams, as if everybody had forgotten that this was the third out or else couldn’t quite believe that Lin Hart, who always flinched away from slow dribblers, had managed to catch a baseball hit this hard. To prove they were wrong, he picked up the glove, turned toward the umpire to show him that the ball was still in the glove, and, in so doing, collided with the runner who’d been on first and was now bearing down on second. The collision knocked both boys down, but Lin was holding on to the glove with both hands and didn’t drop it, which meant that the runner had been tagged out. Naturally, the other boy protested, complaining that Lin hadn’t even meant to tag him, but the umpire was having none of it. “You don’t have to
mean
anything,” he explained. “This is baseball. You just have to do it.” Lin repeated this last part in the dark, satisfied, more or less, to have done it.

His parents’ voices were coming up through the heat register now, in the early stages of an argument, unless Lin was mistaken. His mother was saying that of course they were obligated to pay Mr. Christie, whereas his father was of the opinion that it would serve him right if he got stiffed. As they moved through the rooms below, the conversation went from inaudible to audible to inaudible again.

Earlier in the summer, Lin would’ve concluded that he was hearing all the important parts, that nothing essential to his understanding or well-being would be said if his ear wasn’t receiving and processing the information. Now it seemed just as likely that the really important things— like his parents’ decision to live together again, like his father quitting bartending and selling cars for Uncle Brian, like his mother’s refusal to do as his grandfather, Linwood the Third, had asked—would play out quite naturally in scenes that did not require his presence. Coming home from the restaurant, they’d parked in front of the barbershop and climbed the dark, evil-smelling stairs up to the dingy flat to gather the last of his father’s things. It was an awful place, but Lin understood it was as perfectly real as every place else in the world, which was large beyond imagining, containing every single place he himself had ever been or never would see in his entire life. Earlier, when he’d been sent upstairs to clean up and change clothes, he’d passed by his mother’s room and seen through the open door the unmade bed—his parents’ bed again, not just his mother’s—and intuited in the tangle of sheets at least part of what made the world go round. And he knew that when Sunday came and the three of them were at church, for the first time since last autumn, it would be a different usher who leaned the wicker offering basket down their pew, and that it wouldn’t linger there before them like some hard-to-ask question.

It was into this entirely different world that Linwood Hart now fell asleep, sadly grateful that he was not and never had been, nor ever would be, its center.