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There was a car in the driveway when Del came home from the gym just before noon, a lemon yellow Mustang with pink ribbon magnets lined up on the trunk and a Betty Boop sticker blowing a kiss at him from the back window. Cyndy’s maybe, or the other one with the big ass whose name he could never remember. It was parked behind Gwen’s side of the garage, blocking the gravel pullout where Del normally left his Grand Am. He took Milo’s spot instead, and started up the walkway to the front door.
The house was located on a heavily shaded suburban street that lacked both sidewalks and curbs. A modest two-story home with pale-blue cedar-shake siding and fading black shutters adorning the front windows, it stood out in the neighborhood for the simple fact it could be readily seen from the street. In contrast to the heavy vegetation dominating most of the surrounding yards, their landscaping was limited to a pair of neatly trimmed azalea bushes on either side of the front steps and a towering pine that cast its long shadow over the house every afternoon. The rest of the yard was all grass, right up to the painted brick foundation.
The house was quiet. Del stopped at the kitchen table and leafed through the mail, all of it junk addressed to Gwen, aside from Milo’s Sports Illustrated. He paged through the magazine to the baseball news. Twice he paused his reading when he thought he heard laughter and a woman’s voice. Then came a muffled thud, as if something had been dropped on the carpeted floor upstairs.
He followed the sound through the dining room and up the flight of stairs that led to their bedrooms. Through Gwen’s closed door came the voices, hers and one other. Cyndy, he thought. But she wasn’t laughing. It was more of a soft moaning. Then maybe a hand slapping bare skin, followed by a playful shriek. He listened for another minute, until he could no longer harbor any doubt about what was taking place, and quietly retreated downstairs.
Somewhere deep in his subconscious he’d known. For years perhaps. The signs had been there. The hickey her tank top didn’t quite conceal when she returned from a girls-only weekend his last year in high school. The photo of Cyndy with her arm around Gwen’s neck, fingers casually grazing her breast. He’d dismissed all his suspicions out of hand. She couldn’t be. She was married, right?
He had never known his parents to be intimate. Not as far back as he could remember, anyway. His buddy Doug Halling had once confessed to walking in on his parents having sex. Gwen and Milo slept in separate rooms. Del had always assumed it was because of their incompatible sleep schedules. How blind could he be?
She should know he knew. That she’d been caught. Del grabbed a bucket of baseballs and a bat from the garage and walked out into the backyard, where the homemade batting cage, fashioned out of pressure-treated lumber and chicken wire and topped with a blue plastic tarp, occupied much of the lawn. The blind on Gwen’s window was down, but the slats weren’t tight and he could make out shadowy movement, perhaps the silhouette of a woman’s back and head. How would they like a fungo or two up there? Over the top, perhaps, but he was angry and felt petty and mean. There was a time for clearing your throat to let someone know you were there, and there was a time to blast your trumpet. And this was a time to ... he didn’t know. It wasn’t a situation that came up with enough frequency to fall clearly into either camp.
No, he’d go subtle. He entered the cage and dumped the bucket into the pitching machine. He’d let the whirring of the mechanical hurler and the crack of his bat tell them they’d been busted. Stationed on a square of Astroturf carpeting that marked off home plate and the batter’s boxes, he triggered the remote starter and tossed it onto the grass behind him. He spun his bat in his hands until it felt just right and took a quick practice cut. It was wound in dirty white tape from handle to barrel, mummified to prevent cracking despite the heavy use it saw both out here and on the tee in the garage. The first pitch came in slightly high, and in his ill humor he swung through it. His presence, in the end, was announced to Gwen and friend by a loud echoing slap as the ball met the tarp hanging behind him.
Del connected with the second pitch, driving it off the back fence. He lined the next one lower, into the screen that protected the machine. As a kid he used to try to hit it, the ultimate goal being to zing one back into the opening where the balls came out. When he finally did, Milo had a conniption. “You know what that thing cost me?” he demanded. The next afternoon they built a crude shield, with a hole just big enough to allow the pitches out.
He was the only kid on the team with a batting cage. Their high school didn’t even own a pitching machine. But Milo was haunted by not being able to throw to him. Right-handed he couldn’t grip the ball well enough to do more than shot put it towards home plate. He’d worked out the mechanics to throw lefty, but like his handwriting his pitches travelled in big, childlike loops. When Del was small it was okay that the balls came in on a lob, gravity drawing them down toward earth about where the catcher would have squatted. When Milo tried to ramp up his velocity he was prone to losing his balance and falling. He’d get up, make a self-deprecating joke about his clumsiness, and throw another pitch. But even the good ones weren’t much to brag about later as he iced his landing knee. Gwen took over as Del’s practice pitcher for a season, until he smoked a hard grounder through the box that caught her on the hand and tore her fingernail off.
That memory was among dozens that flashed through his head as he peppered pitches around the wire cage. Gwen sleeping through the championship game the year his Little League team made it to the regional final. Gwen going down to Reno the weekend they celebrated Milo’s parents’ fortieth anniversary. Gwen bailing on Thanksgiving dinner so she could tend bar at Woody’s. That damn bar was the root of it all. She’d tried to work days, first as a crossing guard when he was in kindergarten, later for a landscaping company tending to the yards of people down toward the lake who could afford gardeners. She’d lasted longest on the road crew, rotating a sign on a stick between Slow and Stop. She always wound up back at the bar, claiming the other jobs couldn’t match what she made in tips, even if the hours kept her away from dinner most nights. Damn that place. That’s where she met Cyndy. And the other one. And the ones that came before them, now that he thought about it.
When the machine was empty, he glanced up at Gwen’s room. The blinds had been drawn tight. She knows, he thought. She knows I know. But that didn’t satisfy him. He gathered the balls in the bucket and reloaded the machine.
He was midway through the next round when he realized she was standing there, just outside the door to the cage, watching him hit. Concentration broken, he reached for the remote and killed the motor.
“Should I have left a sock on the front door handle?”
Del fought back a chuckle. She wasn’t going to disarm him like that. Gwen had weaseled her way out of his bad graces so many times with a clever line. Not today.
“Cyndy left,” she said. “So you can come back in when you’re through out here.”
She wore the same jeans and sweatshirt she had on earlier in the morning, with her sockless feet slipped into a pair of unlaced sneakers.
“How could you do this to Milo?”
“Milo’s a—”
“Does he know? About you, about you and her?”
Gwen’s eyes lacked their usual mischief. They were softer, almost contrite. Or maybe just seeking compassion.
“I suspect he does.”
“I can’t ... you ... how in the ... ohhhh, God,” Del muttered, tapping the head of his bat against the ground every time the words got too jumbled to come out. “So you’re a lesbian now?”
“No,” she said calmly.
“What do you call that then?”
“Can we talk about this inside?” she asked.
“Why?”
“Because you’re talking very loud, and this is really no one else’s business.”
Leaving the balls scattered around the cage, Del followed her in through the back door of the garage and up the steps into the kitchen.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“No thanks.”
He leaned against the counter, waiting for his mother to say something. Instead she hummed to herself as she rinsed the coffee pot and scooped the grounds into the filter. He watched her, searching for signs that she was somehow different.
“It’s not my first choice, you know. Being with her. Being with any woman.”
“Then why do it?”
“We all need to be loved, Del. To be touched. Even old mothers like me.”
“What about Milo?”
“Milo and I ... we don’t love each other that way. We never really have. We’re friends. I love Milo like I love my brothers. But we haven’t been intimate since, well, pretty much since you were born.”
“Why are you together then?”
“Milo’s good to me. He’s a good man. We thought it would be easier to bring you up if we were together, and so we did. I think he hoped for a while I’d fall in love with him. I never did. Not like that, anyway. I wish I had. Life would have been different.”
“I still don’t get the women part. Why Cyndy?”
“I don’t think it would be right to be with another man as long as I live with your father.”
“Don’t think it would be right? How is this right?”
“We’ve all got lines we’re willing to cross, Del. And one’s we’re not. Even you.”
A tear leaked out the corner of her eye, down the side of her nose, glistening against her ruddy skin in the pale light sneaking in through the window over the sink. She could be crude, sarcastic, and loud. And sometimes, in a rare moment like this, she could be incredibly sincere and honest. Del stepped toward his mother and pulled her head to his chest, his fingers tangling among the auburn coils of hair as she sobbed softly into his sweatshirt.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t be so ...”
But he couldn’t even figure what it was he was so much of, other than resentful, and for what he couldn’t say. He had always favored Milo. By junior high, when he was old enough to get up and get ready for school on his own, there would be entire days he didn’t even see Gwen, sometimes two or three in a row. Seeing how much interference his friends’ mothers ran in their lives, he’d been perverse enough to think he had it good. And then when he’d gotten into trouble, and Gwen had traded bartending for yet another day job she hated, he’d bristled at her sudden interest in his life. Who was she to ask about his homework or harangue him for coming home late? She’d barely graduated, and then flunked out of college. He’d literally laughed in her face one night when she counseled him to talk about his problems before they ballooned on him. She, who had been on meds for depression as far back as he could remember, maybe his entire life. When those weren’t enough she would go out with her friends and drink until she collapsed.
“No, I’m sorry. I was never much of a mother. I was too young. I didn’t know what to do. Milo was so patient with you, even when you were just a little shit. I let him take over, and I never really stepped back in.”
“You tried.”
“Not really. When you pushed me away I was happy enough to go off and do my own thing. So here we are, all these years later, and you finally catch a glimpse of who your mother is.”
“A glimpse?” Del grinned. “I didn’t actually see anything.”
“Well, then, maybe we were just up there painting our toenails.”
“We can go with that.”
The sparkle returned to Gwen’s yet moist eyes, softening and spreading like an oncoming headlight reflected off a rainy street. She squeezed his hand and returned to the coffee pot.
“So Milo’s never said anything?”
Gwen shook her head.
“Then how do you know he knows?”
“There’s not much that gets by Milo. He’s very perceptive. And, God bless him, probably the least judgmental person I know.”