The informality of rules observed by the neighborhood baseball teams was such that John felt no rush to show up promptly for the first inning or, for that matter, even the bottom of the third. Players were frequently dropping out, trading positions, and even recruiting runners from the bleachers for those who moaned about bum knees.
It was all in the spirit of having fun, of course, and bringing families out to watch. If their interests ever turned to intellectual pursuits like Scrabble, John thought, there was no telling what kind of foreign words, abbreviations and misspellings they’d allow just to rack up outlandishly high scores for themselves.
Though he’d made quicker work of his late afternoon job than he had anticipated, the annoyance of Lenny’s comments and subsequent pestering phone calls still lingered even after he had gone home and changed his clothes. Certainly, the last thing he wanted or needed was to be under a magnifying glass at the park when his only objective was just to come and score a few runs. If he arrived well after the game was already in progress, he rationalized, his buddies would either be so glad to see him step up to bat or too buzzed on beers to start giving him the third degree about his supposed love life.
As Fate would have it, John wasn’t the only one who saw the wisdom in making a delayed entrance.
They were just coming around the corner as he stepped out of his truck and was reaching in to grab his cap and catcher’s mitt off the passenger seat. Jimmy, holding tight to Kate’s hand with both of his, was doing a hopping dance of his invention. John caught himself grinning at the carefree picture the pair made, and when Kate looked up and saw him watching their approach, he could have sworn that she incorporated a spring in her step.
“Are you stalking us or what?” she affectionately teased when she had closed enough distance between them to not turn any nearby heads with a shout-out.
“Almost looks that way, doesn’t it?” He bent down to say hi to Jimmy. “You guys just out for a walk?”
“Actually, we came to catch part of the baseball game,” she replied, explaining that Maria had invited them but that she wasn’t sure how Jimmy would handle the noise and excitement. “I thought we’d watch a little from outside the gate first and then maybe go in for a while.”
“Then I’ll have to make sure I hit a couple out of the park especially for you,” he promised Jimmy.
He noticed that Kate’s young charge hadn’t taken his eyes off of the worn leather mitt he was carrying and now held it out for his inspection. “Want to hold on to my lucky mitt for me?”
Jimmy looked at John, looked at the mitt, and then folded his arms with the stubborn defiance of someone about to be force-fed a plateful of Brussel sprouts.
“That’s okay,” John said, bending down to set it on the sidewalk so that Jimmy could approach it on his own without any pressure.
Kate tilted her head in amused curiosity. “So, if the game’s already started, what are you doing out here?”
“We play by pretty loose rules,” he told her. “I had a job to finish for a client and I figured it’d still be going on by the time I showed up.” Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Jimmy had unfolded his arms and was intently peering at John’s offering. “So are you settling in okay with your mom?” he asked, hoping to glean a clue about how permanent a plan she might be making insofar as her current arrangements.
“Oh, about as much as she’s going to let me,” she replied. “Mom never did take well to changes that she wasn’t totally in charge of.”
“I think it’s a standard default button of parenthood,” he said, pleased that his quip made her laugh with a carefree innocence that belied the seriousness of the situation with her sister’s nephew.
The light toss of her head dislodged a few wisps of hair from where she had casually pinned it up with a tortoiseshell clip, and it was only with tremendous self-discipline he resisted the urge to reach over and brush the loose strands off her slender neck. She was the kind of woman, he reflected, who could wear little makeup, or even none at all, and yet still be more gorgeous than women who spent all day trying to perfect themselves.
Mentally, he caressed the rest of her qualities. Her flawless skin, her smart green eyes, her graceful, athletic carriage. How, he wondered, had she come to be a thousand times more desirable in only a handful of recent chance encounters than in the culmination of all his dreams put together? It wasn’t sensible, his conscience chided him, to respond so heatedly to a woman whose life clearly didn’t have any room for him. If she sensed him pulling back, retreating from his fragile introspection about what might have been, she was doing nothing to betray it.
Only vaguely and from a fuzzy distance did he hear her say the name of his younger brother and express her condolences. “I only just found out about it today,” she was apologizing. “If I had known earlier…”
Amongst a short bout of disconnected thoughts about the past and present there flashed a brief image of Kate being with him, being with his family when the news had come. Until this moment, he had been conscious only of cessation, of a dark emptiness in his life that wasn’t even loneliness. Would she have left her glamorous life in another city, he wondered, and hopped a plane at a moment’s notice to be by his side during the agonizing days that followed the senseless tragedy that took his baby brother’s young life.
Or did the fantasy of her love and support all get down to being predicated on her never having left his side, never having left Avalon Bay, to begin with? The unbidden level of cynicism he had come to embrace after Jeremy’s death and his brush with death and subsequent rehabilitation from his injuries made it too easy for him to assume that most people, even Kate, would probably say anything if it was already too late to act on the sentiments expressed.
He forced a smile and thanked her for her concern. “I should get on into the game,” he announced to cut short any further discussion.
Her shoulders drew back slightly as if in reaction to some kind of realization she had just trespassed where she wasn’t welcome. “Yeah, I suppose so,” she replied, reaching for Jimmy’s hand.
Jimmy by this time had picked up the mitt, tilted his head back and was balancing it on top of his face. He squealed and flailed his arms when Kate tried to take it from him.
“Come on, Jimmy, give it back,” Kate coaxed him. “You can’t keep something that doesn’t belong to you.”
The warning voice that whispered in John’s head reminded him that the same thing applied to the heart he had once loved and lost.
On the one hand, Kate was surprised by the number of faces that looked faintly familiar to her as the three of them came within view of the bleachers. On the other hand, John Neal was enough of a popular fixture at the ballpark that the unexpected sight of him with a woman and a small child was bound to start a buzz before he even got up to bat.
True to her word, Maria had saved her a place. True to her character, she also wasted nary a second after a string of three effusive oh-my-goshes trying to find out if Kate had been holding out on her with what hinted to be some truly primo gossip.
“We just walked in together, that’s all,” Kate said. “No big deal.”
“Yeah, right. So, what did he say? What did you say?”
“I said hi, he said hi…”
“Seriously,” Maria insisted. “Doesn’t it strike you as just a little too coincidental that you just happen to run into him like that after all these years?”
Had Kate deigned to tell her about the coincidence of two taxi rides, she was certain Maria would declare it downright karmic and start asking her if they had set a wedding date.
“Not so strange, really,” she said instead. “It’s not that big a town.” She braced herself for the inevitable question of whether they were going to start seeing each other again. After the curiously brusque way he had shut down after she told him how sorry she was about Jeremy, she found herself wondering whether she had seen an earlier sparkle of interest in his eyes or whether it was just wishful thinking on her part. Across the field, she saw that he had donned his cap and was talking to a couple of the players. Is he getting the same third-degree I am, she mused.
“It’s so funny we were just talking about him this morning, huh?” Maria was rabbiting on, pausing only long enough to reach into the mini-cooler at her feet and pull out a beer for Kate and a juice box for Jimmy. “Do you think he’d like this?” she asked.
Kate opened it for him but Jimmy was more interested in trying to reach over her lap and get a better look at the cooler.
“He’s quite the little wiggle worm, isn’t he?” Maria observed with a laugh. “How old did you say he was again?”
Kate was quietly thankful her friend was ascribing his behavior to age-appropriate excitement and not as yet looking any closer. “He ‘s five,” she said a split second before he smacked the open beer can straight out of her hand and sent a splash of suds down the front of Maria’s tee-shirt. Jimmy giggled and tried to grasp at the juice box for a repeat performance.
Kate was helpless to halt her embarrassment, a state intensified by the scrutiny of the spectators seated closest to them.
“Nothin’ to see here, folks!” Maria good-naturedly quipped to them, assuring Kate in her next breath that kids were kids and that it was just an accident. “I’ll probably spill more on myself when Tony hits a homer,” she confessed with a giggle. “Oh look, he’s next up at-bat.”
Kate was only marginally aware of the lanky, black-haired Italian who was waving in response to whistles, at least a few of which were coming from Maria. Jimmy clamped both his hands over his ears and was now rocking back and forth. I knew it was a mistake to come here, Kate told herself, worried that her nephew’s erratic behavior at the loud noise was just the tip of the iceberg if they tried to stay around for the entire game. She racked her brain for an excuse that would appease Maria but not require a whole lot of detail.
The sudden crack of the bat not only brought an outburst of cheers but several spectators to their feet as the ball quickly ascended into the sky. Jimmy suddenly stopped rocking and, for a moment, Kate caught the transfixed look of wide-eyed wonder on his face as the ball seemed to hover indefinitely against a backdrop of cornflower blue.
And then it began to come down.
In her brief fascination with watching Jimmy’s reaction, Kate nearly missed what was happening on the field. Little Tony had just reached first base and was going to try to take second as well. Try, but not succeed, for there, standing almost directly beneath the descending ball, was John Neal wearing the cocky expression of someone who had found his grail. In a seamless move that appeared almost effortless, he held up his right hand as the ball sailed into his waiting mitt.
“Out!” the ump shouted.
Kate glanced at Jimmy, hoping he had seen it. Jimmy, however, had already lost interest and was trying to peer through the metal gaps between the bleacher seats.
“For an old guy, he’s still got it, that’s for sure,” she heard Maria say.
Kate immediately contested the remark about old. “He’s the same age we are,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, but I mean compared to my honey,” Maria waved and blew a kiss to him as he loped back to the bench. “You gotta admit he turned out pretty cute.”
“John?” Kate asked, taking a sip of the orange drink that Jimmy was showing no interest in.
Maria playfully slugged her in the arm. “Tony.”
“Oh.” She still had her doubts about the age difference but knew better than to criticize her for it.
Maria took a deep chug of beer. “So anyway,” she said as if the recent play had been little more than a commercial break in their conversation, “I think he’s started seeing someone.”
“Tony?” Kate said, perplexed that Maria was handling her new beau’s possible infidelity with such detachment.
“John,” Maria matter of factly replied. “I mean I don’t know for sure but remember Kim Sherzer? She goes by Kimberly Henning now. Anyway, she was at the drugstore this afternoon and she was talking to this new girl in Pharmacy who said that her boyfriend’s sister was going to start doing daycare out of her home and she had to go pick up some stuff last night from a friend who got home late and by the time she left she took a shortcut past John’s street and she saw a gorgeous brunette leaving his house.”
Kate only half-listened as she struggled with her conscience. Just because a woman was leaving his house, she tried to convince herself, doesn’t mean he’s in a relationship with her. A louder voice in her head chimed in. And just because you left him 14 years ago doesn’t mean he was going to wait forever for you to come back.
She nearly missed Maria’s next words. “Of course, it sounds like John’s not the only one with a hot secret in this town,” she said.
“Huh?”
Maria donned a Cheshire cat grin. “I hear a certain somebody got an expensive bouquet of roses from a certain somebody else.”