beat me to the marquee.
There he was, sitting right under it and shaking the last ice cubes in his soda cup from the Grill. I didn’t say anything—not because I was trying to creep up on him, but because I didn’t have the right words anyway.
Instead, I grabbed his other hand, pulled him up, and started our favorite Rockskipper high-five whether he wanted to or not. By the time we got to the shoulder-tap part, we’d both found some words.
“What’s up with the lipstick?” Marcus asked, and even though I wished he’d found something different to say, it sounded nicer than what he’d said about my face at the creek.
“June gave it to me.” I pressed my lips together, not entirely sure if I thought I was fixing the Christmas Nutmeg or hiding it.
“Is she gonna give you a hairbrush one of these days?”
I could see all over his face that he was teasing, but since he didn’t understand a single thing about being glamorous, I shoved him on the last shoulder I’d tapped.
“Help! Please! My raking arm—” He taunted right back with a real pathetic fake groan. The combination of me trying not to let him see me laugh and his fake stumbles sent us both into fits. And when Marcus collapsed once more underneath those marquee letters, I sat down right next to him on the concrete steps.
“Ferdie already changed the sign.” Marcus looked down.
“Oh.” I made myself look up, and tried to hide the shake in my own voice. “‘Sunglasses Tuesday! Sport Rockskipper Shades!’”
Marcus took a big sip of nothing from his empty cup.
“That’s—real important,” I said. “You know, with how dangerous the sun is these days and all.”
I couldn’t figure out the look Marcus gave me. But then, quiet as a whisper with laryngitis, he said: Franklin.
I knew then that his look was a kind of flood wall, holding back the choppy waters of sorrow and hope and boys-don’t-cry. So I put my hand on top of his. It took a while for his shoulders to stop shaking, and when they did, his face was still red-hot with leftover tears.
“You’re his Sugar Sue?” As soon as I asked that question, I knew it sounded ridiculous, but I was still so startled by his storm.
“I’m his Skipper. He calls me that. Well, called me. This year, while you were out rambling.”
I studied his face, threw time in reverse, and tried to see what I had missed. “So, the grounds crew? That’s why you couldn’t watch batting practice with me like always? You’d rather dig around in the dirt than watch the boys knock homers on it?”
“Derby, I don’t want to play that old ball. You know how my dad’s been forever and always—thinking I’m some mini-Lump, ready to drop in and take over left field the second he gets a head full of grays.”
“You love baseball,” I said, trying to understand.
“Yeah, yeah, I do. But I figured out that I don’t want to play it. Goose and Scooter probably aren’t having those same conversations my dad is with me, because Betsy and Lollie are just girls. I mean, not that I wish I was one of them, but at least they can’t play ball. For me, it’s like there’s not even a choice.”
Marcus’s unwinding threw me a bit off-balance, but that girl part still stung. He kept on. “What would Garland say if you told him you hate Christmas trees and flipping burgers? Wouldn’t he leave you right on the side of the road?” Marcus threw his cup to the ground, and it rolled back and forth before it settled down.
After that, it was quiet. But since friends know the different kinds of quiets, I waited for him. I didn’t think he was actually expecting an answer to that last question anyway, seeing as that was pretty much what my mama had done.
“Sorry about the girl thing. And the side-of-the-road thing,” Marcus said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I know.”
“Ferdie caught me after Franklin was gone, Lefty,” Marcus said, riding a wave of relief. “Poking around in the bullpen. At first I thought he was afraid I was gonna raid the fertilizer stash or something, but then I figured him out a little.”
Marcus said it with all the seriousness of Miss Houston’s organ-playing hopes, but I couldn’t suck the chuckle in fast enough. “Marcus Emmett: The Baseline Lime Looter!”
He shot me a look that would freeze an August creek, but I knew he thought it was funny. “Ferdie’s not so strange, you know. Stood next to June at Franklin’s service. Patted her shoulder and handed her tissues every once in a while.”
“I’ve never seen him that friendly with anyone,” I said, looking up at the marquee. Those letters tonight seemed so silly for someone with such a quiet way about him.
“I know. And so he told me that Franklin wouldn’t have wanted me just poking around, and he gave me the keys to the mower. Haven’t lost them yet.” Marcus patted his pocket and it gave a little jingle. “He’s even paying me a little bit of money, but I’d have done it anyway.”
“For Franklin,” I said.
“For Franklin,” he echoed.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know and love Franklin Mattingly like the rest of Ridge Creek did, but I didn’t remember him and Marcus having much of anything in common besides the Rockskippers. Maybe my friendship with June had gotten in the way of realizing other people might be looking for someone to share lemonades with.
“It started over Thanksgiving,” Marcus continued, as if he’d heard me wondering. “My dad and I went over to the stadium with Goose and Scooter. We had to throw balls and run off some pie, and my dad thought that was why I was all weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, like I’d had one too many pieces of chocolate chiffon and the sugar had made me grumpy or something.”
Turns out, the grumping was because Marcus didn’t want to play that old ball. Not one bit. And he let his dad know.
Marcus said Lump was so mad that he left his best glove right there in the outfield. And Marcus said he was so mad that he just stayed there, with Lump’s best glove. When the sun dropped and the chill rose, Marcus moved to the bullpen and fell asleep under Franklin Mattingly’s tarp.
“How did you make it under there, sleeping in the cold all night?” I knew Ridge Creek never got to be Wisconsin cold, but I never would have thought Marcus’s stubbornness would be bigger than his comfort. It made me awful sad, though—the thought of only that tarp protecting Marcus, as if he were just plain old dirt and grass.
“I mean, I was mad, but my dad was right about having one too many pieces of chocolate chiffon,” he said. “That sugar knocked me out cold as the weather.”
Bright and early the next morning, when Thanksgiving had barely turned into a regular old day, Franklin had found him.
“Ah, the Skipper awakes,” Franklin had said.
Marcus said he was a jumble of apologies and embarrassment and the shivers, but Franklin didn’t seem to see any of that. It was like he’d been waiting for him, for who knows how long.
And from then on, Marcus was just the Skipper, wrapped up into Franklin’s fold. Neither one of them would know they’d only have a month together.
“Hey,” Marcus said. “We almost forgot.”
He dug into his pocket, the one that jingled with the groundskeeper’s keys, and pulled out the penny from earlier. I inspected the date to make sure our luck might work, and we placed the coin right between our thumbs. When we were little, Lump had told us that if you found a penny that matched the year, you could make a wish that would come true by the close of summer. He said the James Edward Allen Gibbs Stadium was as good as any old pool of water, and so each year after that, we’d wished on as many new pennies as we found, thinking Lump was as reliable as the heat. As we got older, I figured we were just leaving pennies in the bleachers for Ferdie to have to clean up, but maybe he needed a little bit of luck too.
Garland never did like me digging through the tip jars, so it was a good thing that Marcus had found this one on the ground. I don’t know if we broke the rules by sharing a penny and not our wishes, but it was the way it was.
After the wishing, Marcus and I sat under the shouts of until I was pretty sure we saw the stars shift. We crossed the parking lot once more, me toward the Rambler and him toward home.
I didn’t tell Marcus, but I’d wished on June herself. Why had she wanted me to meet her at the box office and not her front porch? If Marcus could keep a secret, then I could too. Except this secret was just a whole bunch of I don’t know yet.