32

THAT SATURDAY, ERIC’S MOM drove us to the first day of the two-day tryouts. By the time we got there, the gym was already packed with players. Some were stretching, some were playing catch. There was equipment in the corners: bats, a tee, a hitting net. Three orange rubber bases had been placed on the court, with home plate directly below the raised basket on one baseline.

“Wanna play catch?” Eric said. Now that he had his coat off, I saw just how overdressed he was. While everyone else wore shorts and a t-shirt, he sported a pinstripe jersey with his name on the back, real baseball pants (the stretchy kind with a stripe down each leg), and those socks with the stirrups painted on. To make matters worse, every article of clothing was brand new. No holes. No stains. No fading from the sun. His shirt tucked snugly into his pants. It looked as if the entire outfit had been a single present—because it had been. He told me on the car ride over that his relatives in California sent all this stuff to him.

He tossed his softball into his glove over and over from close range as he waited for me to stand up. He had been using the softball to make the pocket of his glove as big as possible.

To say he looked nervous is an understatement of epic proportions. He could barely keep himself contained inside his crisply-ironed uniform.

“Sure,” I told him, standing up. “But we probably don’t want to play catch with your softball.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Forgot about that.”

He held the ball and stared at it as though he wasn’t sure what to do next.

“Here,” I told him, holding out my hand. He tossed me the ball and I put it between my boots before standing up.

As for me, I didn’t feel nervous at all. Who cares about baseball tryouts when everything else in your life sucks?

Including your father.

Yeah, I knew he was going through a lot right now, but I couldn’t help being a little annoyed with him. When I got up that morning I’d felt as good as I’d felt in weeks. No, things weren’t back to normal. I didn’t know when Mom was coming back, if ever, and I still had no idea what happened between Kirsten and my dad. But I couldn’t help feeling excited to go to tryouts and even more excited about Dad’s and my pre-planned game of indoor catch. I got up early enough to make breakfast for me and Dad. In fact, I’d made his specialty: frozen waffles with chocolate chips in each square. I’d even brought Dad his breakfast in bed. Or I’d tried to. He didn’t answer when I knocked on his bedroom door. When I opened the door, he was nowhere to be seen. I finally found him downstairs watching more film. He thanked me for breakfast without even looking at the plate. Then he asked if I could carpool with someone else to tryouts.

Apparently, the game of inside-the-house catch had been postponed indefinitely.

Eric and I found a place next to some others playing catch. Eric backpedaled until he was about twenty feet away.

“Mind if we do some short toss first?” I said.

“Oh, right,” he said again.

After he moved closer, I took the ball out of my glove and tossed it in his direction. I took it as a good sign that my arm didn’t creak. Eric caught the ball and threw it back to me as if he was in a hurry. The ball was high and to my left, and I had to leap in the air to snare it.

“Dammit!” he muttered, kicking the wooden floor as though he was kicking dirt.

“Take it easy,” I said. “We’re just playing catch, Eric.”

We threw the ball back and forth, gradually backing up until the whistle blew and everyone gathered in front of the coaches. After we signed in, the varsity head coach, Coach Wilson, split us all up into four groups and assigned each group a station in one of the four corners of the gym.

I started at the hitting net, where a coach sat on one knee next to a bucket of balls. He tossed each batter ten balls to hit into the net before the batter handed the bat to the next guy in line.  As I waited for my turn, I spotted Eric at the station to my left. He was doing a drill where he stood with his back to the wall and a coach hit balls at and around him. The goal was to stop as many as he could before they hit the wall.

And, I have to say, Eric did look better than when I last saw him. The movements he made with both his feet and his glove were more efficient than they used to be. He successfully stabbed his glove at a waist-level line drive and then lunged for a ball before it sunk below his knees.  

By that point, his body weight was all leaning in one direction, though, and when the coach sent a ball behind him, Eric had no way to prevent it from smacking into the wall.

Eric slammed the wall, too—intentionally, with his glove—and yelled, “Move your feet, butthole!”

I’d never heard him call himself a butthole.

We moved in our groups from station to station, and every time Eric muffed a play he had a mini, and increasingly loud, tantrum. He threw his glove and stomped on it. He slapped his hip in frustration. He called himself every butt-related name he could think of.

Eventually, the guys in my group, mostly upperclassmen, took notice. They thought it was hilarious. “Is this kid for real?” one of them asked.

I don’t think the guys in Eric’s group knew what to think.

Maybe if I had been at the stations with him I could have done something about his behavior, gotten him to calm down. But I wasn’t, so I couldn’t.

Anyway, by the end of the session, I didn’t want anything to do with him.

The coaches told us to get some rest and they’d see us tomorrow—same time, same place.

Eric found me after I’d put my boots back on.

“How’d you do?” he asked me.

I told him I did fine.

“Me too,” he said.

“What?”

“I think I did pretty well, too.” He said it calmly, as though he’d really given it some thought. “I was counting the number of mistakes I made compared to the number of mistakes everyone else in my group made, and it was pretty close but I think I made less than most of the others.”

“It’s not all about mistakes,” I said.

We started walking out of the gym and down the hallway.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I just mean the coaches are probably looking at other stuff, too.”

“What other stuff? This is a tryout. Nothing else should matter besides performance.” His voice was getting heated.

We were out in the parking lot by then. “There’s your mom,” I said.

When I was fifteen feet from the car, I realized Eric wasn’t walking with me. “Like what?” he said.

He was far enough away that he had to raise his voice.

“What?” I asked.

“Like what?” he said again. “What other things would they be looking for?”

“Forget it,” I said. I moved toward him so I could lower my voice. “I just meant, you know, attitude and stuff like that.”

“I’ll work as hard or harder than anyone out there,” he said.

“I know you will,” I said.

“I’ll practice all day if I have to.”

“I know you will, Eric. That’s not—that’s not what I meant.”

We were standing off to the side of the parking lot, almost out of the way of cars but not quite. Dane Bauer, the starting center fielder on the varsity team, had to swerve a little in his truck to get by. Eric’s mom stuck her head out the window and said, “You boys coming?”

I looked at her and nodded my head—but Eric didn’t budge. “What did you mean?” he said.

Another upperclassman drove by. He had to steer around us, too. Eric’s Mom still had her head out the window.

“Nothing,” I said. “I wasn’t talking about you specifically—just generally.” I took a few steps towards the car; when he didn’t follow, I repeated, “I didn’t mean you, okay?”

Finally, he said, “Okay” and followed me to the car.

Once we were on the road, Eric’s Mom asked how it went, and Eric repeated what he told me: “Pretty well,” he said. Then he told her about counting his and others’ mistakes, and said, “So as long as these tryouts aren’t rigged or something, I should be in pretty good shape.”

As Eric’s Mom drove me home, I wondered if Dad would be home. If he was, I’d ask again to play catch in our house. He and I used to play a lot. That was back when Mom traveled more frequently on business trips. One of us would stand by the front door, the other by the dinner table. The ball we used depended on the season—football, basketball, or baseball.

There was something satisfying about playing catch in the wrong setting. It’s hard to explain, and it might sound a little cheesy, but I don’t think Dad and I ever felt closer than when we tossed the ball back and forth, from the entryway to the dining room. It felt both rebellious and right—like we understood something in a way that most people couldn’t. Most people being my mom, I guess, not that she ever found out about it. Maybe that’s why I wanted to play inside-the-house catch so badly; doing so would make it easier to convince myself that things would soon turn back to normal. Any day now, I wanted to believe, Mom would return with her suitcase and start unpacking—just like she had when I was a kid.

We were only a block from my driveway when Eric’s mom stopped the car. Which was odd. Why hadn’t she turned into the driveway like she usually did?

Then I got my answer. I watched Dad’s car back out of the driveway and pull up beside Eric’s mom. Both of them rolled down their windows.

“Hi, Betsy,” Dad said. “Thanks so much for carting Mike around today.” She told him it was no problem at all. They stared at each other for a little while, then Dad said, “Well, I’m off to do some scouting.” He thanked her again, rolled up his window, and drove away.

Eric’s mom looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Do you want to have dinner at our house?” she asked me.

I told her thanks but no thanks.