Conviction (7 page)

Colin slices his finger across his neck at Greg, who shuts up. The ump signals for the inning to start, and Cardy yells for Greg to go bat. Greg looks relieved. Before he can get up, I snag the
sleeve of his jersey and pull his head down toward me. Greg blanches.

“Listen, Greg,” I say, so only he can hear. “Everyone gets nervous. You’re supposed to. I’m still a wreck before each pitch. If you don’t feel that way,
it’s because you don’t care. Okay? You’re in a good place.”

When he walks out to the plate Colin says, “What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

“Right.” He glances at me, and then, just as quick, turns his gaze on the chain links between us and the field. I’ll bet he’s the reason why, except for just now, the
guys on my team have been pretty good about not saying anything about my dad. “Weird kid, huh?”

Greg takes a ball outside and then a strike at the knees. Then, on a curveball that barely breaks, he hesitates for what feels to me like a second too long and then unloads. The ball sails over
left field and there’s a startled silence from the crowd, and then, when the ball keeps going over the fence, everyone yells. Colin’s laughing.

“Greg
Harmon
,” he said. “Who knew?”

That’s the thing about baseball, though, is it lays you bare: play long enough and eventually who you really are will show through.

In Greg’s next at bat, Logan beans him right in the thigh with a pitch so obviously intentional our bench nearly clears and it takes the umpires’ threats to call the
game to make Cardy sit everyone back down. When Greg comes back in the dugout, rubbing his thigh with a grimace, I grab his wrist—you don’t rub a wound like that and let the other team
see how much you’re hurting—and tell him to pick someone for me to hit back.

“Um…” He drops his hand and looks uncomfortably at the field. “I don’t really want to start anything.”

“Hit him in the
cacahuetes
,” Dutch says, and Chase snaps, “That guy’s a joke.” He’d jumped up when Greg got hit, ready to charge the mound.
“Braden should hit him in the fucking head.”

Greg looks alarmed. I say, “You’re not
starting
anything, Greg. You’re righting a wrong. He did that because you took that homer off of him, you know.”

“Yeah, I figured. But—”

“Where you played before you moved here, your pitcher would’ve just let that slide?”

“Probably. My coach would’ve made him.”

That sounds like the worst kind of person to play for. Something like that left outstanding would eat away at me all game. Cardy’s like my dad; after winning, loyalty matters most. My
freshman year, he overheard me say I thought we might lose to Beyer, and he had me doing push-ups until my arms gave out. I say, “Well, it doesn’t work like that here, so. An eye for an
eye.”

Greg lowers his voice, looking uneasy. “Um, what Chase said—”

“Chase can join the football team if he wants to knock people out cold for fun. Ignore him. He knows I don’t play like that.”

“I just don’t want anything bad to happen.”

“It won’t. I have two rules for how I deal with batters, all right? No intentional walks, no throwing at anyone’s head. Nothing bad will happen.”

I can tell he doesn’t believe me. But you can ask anyone; I’ve never broken either rule. The first is from my dad, because giving someone a free base that way is broadcasting to the
world that you think he’s better than you and it’s a matter of my pride, and the second’s from Trey, because back when he still played, he got his jaw shattered on a wild pitch.
If you look closely, you can still see how things didn’t quite heal right—the left side of Trey’s jaw juts out more than on the right—because he talked the surgeon into
unwiring him early because, he claimed, he was sick of being hungry all the time. That’s the story he’s told once or twice in interviews (I always read them online; for years it was the
most of him I had) when people asked him how he knew he wanted to be a cook. I was six when he got hurt, and when he got back from the hospital, he pulled me aside and said, “Don’t ever
throw up high like that at someone.” The words came out gritted because of the jaw. “Give me your word, Braden. Don’t ever even make a guy think you might.”

Since Greg’s batting first today, I tell him I’ll go after Sierra’s number one, the shortstop, in retribution. When their shortstop comes up again in the fifth, I throw inside,
way inside and as hard as I can, but my throw goes wide and the shortstop leaps back just in time. He’s got quick feet. I smile at him, like I meant to do that. I won’t let him see that
one got to me.

The next pitch, Colin jerks his thumb to his right and then sets up inside. It’s a mean trick to throw behind someone, because nine times out of ten the guy’ll jump back and put
himself right in the ball’s path. Which is exactly what the shortstop does, and the pitch gets him just between his stomach and his side. He leans over with his hands on his knees, trying to
catch his breath, and then he straightens to try to walk it off.

That one was for Greg. And for myself, too—to remind myself who I am. That no matter what else in the world is shot to hell, baseball will still hold.

We win, 7–2. I got eight strikeouts and went seven innings deep, but I missed the shortstop that first time and I also gave up two runs in five hits—five hits, to Sierra
West—and, most of all, there wasn’t much behind my curveballs.

It’s a complete din when we push open the doors to the locker room, the celebration ricocheting off the metal lockers. Chase has gotten one of the showerheads loose and is spraying water
at everyone and screaming
“Suck it, Sierra West!”

“Hey,” I say to Colin over the noise. “You think we should’ve laid off the curveballs?”

“Seven–two, man. Come on. You were playing Ping-Pong with them out there.”

Alex Reyes has been beating out the fastballs; it’s the ones that break that he’s struggled with. I don’t say that part aloud. “You know I’m going to have to throw
curveballs when we play Brantley. Our best shot is getting them to keep grounding out.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Brantley. Today was Sierra West, and we took them out with the trash. Today was good. I feel good about today. You should feel good about it, too.”

“Yeah, but—” I exhale and cut myself off. Colin’s the only person I’ll let catch me because I trust he’ll lay himself out to get behind whatever it is I
throw, and I won’t disrespect him by questioning his calls. “You’re right,” I say. “We’ll worry about that another day.”

T
here are a million ways you’re wrecked by the absence of someone who belongs there with you—like when Trey left, the way his name died
out inside the house and my dad only ever referred to Trey as
him
, or all the times my dad went on my computer when I was at school and didn’t erase his search history and my computer
was littered with tabs from the homepage of Trey’s restaurant and every interview he’d ever given and all his Yelp reviews, or the stack of takeout menus we keep pinned with magnets
over the barren fridge because now there’s no one here who cooks.

With my dad, though, aside from his name in tatters on the news, the worst part is the quiet. A whole week in, I still catch myself wanting to turn on the radio in the morning like an idiot,
like he’s just at work and everything’s fine. On his station they’re broadcasting reruns in his time slot, and I can’t bring myself to listen, and in the silence of the
house all the things I’m scared of swell big enough to fill every single room.

My dad’s a good father, always putting me first. He used to take me camping by the lake on weekends and he’d drive around an extra hour, wasting gas, just to make me feel like we
were going somewhere exciting and farther away; he’s taken me to see over half the Major League ballparks all across the country. And he’s a good man, even when no one’s looking.
Once in third grade, Dutch Hammell wet his pants after a Little League game, and my dad saw it and dumped half a cooler of water on him before anyone else noticed and even though Dutch’s mom
got all mad at my dad about the water, all he’d say was that it was an accident, and he never told anyone what happened except me. He gives money to charities, and he can rattle off hundreds
of Bible passages he’s memorized by heart, and he cares a lot about what’s right and isn’t afraid to speak out even when he gets attacked for not being politically correct.

My dad was fourteen when his mother died of liver failure, and two years after that, his father, who was a trucker and spent most weeks pulling overtime shifts hauling garlic and tomatoes to
places like Wyoming or New Mexico or Montana, shot himself to death in the garage. It was winter and my dad was watching TV in the den when he heard the gun go off, and he was the one who went in
and found the body.

It was baseball that saved my dad’s life after that. He had a legendary fastball that touched ninety-nine when he was seventeen, and when he went out as a first-round draft pick after high
school, he left the house and the town he’d grown up in and never went back, and he was set on making something of himself. When he was working his way up through the farm system he met
Elaine, and had Trey, and he was happy then, or something like happy, and they had all these dreams for what their lives were going to be like when he finally made it big. Then, in a road game in
Reno, he stumbled going after a grounder that took a strange hop and hurt his shoulder so bad that he knew as he was curled on the ground, the field blurry from the pain, he’d never pitch
again.

I don’t know what it’s like to have one real purpose in life and watch that fall apart in front of you on one bad play, but I know it messed him up. Within a few years Elaine left
him for someone else, and my dad won custody of Trey because Elaine failed a drug test. When his disability money ran out, the only job my dad could find was as a janitor at a radio station, and
even though that would turn out to be part of God’s plan for him, he didn’t know it then; faith always makes more sense when you can look back later on, but when you’re in a bad
place you don’t know that’s not where your story ends.

My dad’s always told people my mom died in childbirth. He told
me
that, even, half my life. It was on Trey’s birthday the year I was in third grade—after Trey quit
coming home, my dad was always kind of a wreck on his birthday—that he told me the truth. What he said seeped into me like water into the land after a drought, something irrevocable, and
I’ve remembered every detail exactly as he told it ever since.

Aureliana Stoddard-Huff. That was her name. (Later, when I turned thirteen and got a Facebook account, the first thing I did was look her up.) She showed up when I was four months old. It was
August, and it was the first Wednesday of the month. My dad remembered that part clearly because three nights before that had been the last Summer Special at the bowling alley. He’d planned
to go bowling with Trey and then get pizza, which he’d been saving up for, but that same day he’d caught Trey trying to buy a bus ticket to the airport. His own son had tried to leave
him. It had been maybe the lowest point in my dad’s whole life.

“Hi, Mart,” Aureliana Stoddard-Huff said when my dad opened the door that afternoon. She was small, like a dancer, and less pretty now that he was sober, but definitely not bad.
“It is Mart, right?” She lifted the baby a little bit as if somehow he might have missed it, then said, “Yeah, he’s yours. And also, I know this is kind of late notice, but
I’m leaving and I can’t take care of him anymore, so I thought maybe you’d want him instead.”

My dad stared at her, then at the baby, then back at her. He only half heard her explanation: she was going to Los Angeles to be a dancer, and she was going to split the rent on a studio with
her friend, and anyway she’d be too busy; the baby was a lot of work. Her cousin’s kid was much better behaved, but this one—

“You’re serious,” he interrupted. “You want to leave your kid with
me
?”

“Well,” Aureliana said patiently, “he’s your kid, too.”

The stunning part wasn’t actually the kid; it was the girl showing up here to ask him this. Was she stupid? They’d met at a disgusting dive bar, for Christ’s sake, and half
those guys there lied about their incomes just so they didn’t have to pay child support. And sure, there was a time back before he got hurt when he seemed destined to really go
somewhere—he was going to rise above his crappy past and be someone—but now he was just a ruined ex–minor leaguer who drank too much and had a custodian job at the radio station
and a runaway kid who seemed to hate his own father and couldn’t even stand being hugged.

“Well?” Aureliana said. “I can’t take him. But you’re a dad already. You told me you went to court to get custody of your other son. I could bring him to the fire
station, or something, but I thought he’d be better off with you.” And this, he’d told me—he was gripping his glass with one hand and my knee in the other—this is
something he’s always been proud of; this is who he really is: he never considered saying no.