The Murphys’ garage is bigger than the entire bottom floor of my house. It’s cleaner and more organized, too. In my experience, garages are where people store all the junk they don’t want inside their home. But Larry Murphy seems like the sort of guy who doesn’t tolerate junk. He just throws it away.
Zoe’s father asked me to join him in here while the ladies cleared the dinner table. I usually help Cynthia, but tonight we’re just two guys talking shop. The fight with my mom is only a shadow now. Larry doesn’t want to interrogate me. He wants to help me.
He’s showing me the contents of a plastic storage bin that he pulled off a high shelf. “Brooks Robinson,” Larry says. “Jim Palmer.”
I don’t recognize these people as baseball players until he shows me their cards sheathed in protective plastic.
“Look at this,” Larry says, probing deeper into his bin. “Here’s the entire ’96 team.”
“Wow,” I say, because I assume I’m supposed to.
“You get the right people to come to an auction, baseball fans, I bet you could raise a thousand bucks for the orchard, easy.”
“It’s a great idea. I’m definitely going to talk to Alana about it.”
Larry didn’t have much to say about our idea to rebuild the orchard when we first presented it. Cynthia was all in, but Larry just sat there quietly. Maybe that’s his style. For all I know, that’s the style of all dads.
He pulls out a baseball glove from the bin and sets it aside. “I swear I have a Cal Ripken in here somewhere.”
“This is really generous of you,” I say. “To donate all this stuff.”
The door to the house opens and Zoe appears. “Mom says that your show is on and she doesn’t want to DVR it again.”
“Well, tell her we’re busy.”
“Dad, are you torturing him?”
“What?”
“Evan, is he torturing you?” Zoe says. “You can tell him he’s being boring and you want to leave. He won’t be upset.”
“He can leave whenever he wants,” Larry says.
“Evan, do you want to leave?”
In the first moments alone with Larry, I was praying Zoe would come rescue me. He and I have never really had a conversation, just the two of us. But I’m actually having a good time talking to him. “No. Really,” I say, “it’s cool.”
“Fine,” Zoe says. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And, Dad, don’t let Evan take any more selfies for his groupies.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Larry says.
“Ask Evan. He knows.” Zoe smirks at me before shutting the door.
Larry looks to me for guidance. I shrug, trying to not let the fact that Zoe just exhibited what I’m pretty sure was jealousy cause me to unleash an embarrassing fist pump.
He’s quiet a moment. Then he says, “So, you and Zoe…?”
My face turns what I can only assume is the reddest red a face can turn.
He keeps looking at me, not unkindly.
“This glove is really cool.” I pick up a baseball mitt.
“Pretty nice, right?” Larry says, seeming just as happy to have switched topics. “You can have it if you want.”
“Oh. No. I couldn’t.”
“Why not? It’s never been used. I probably bought it for a birthday or something.”
Only now does it sink in whose baseball glove this is. To hand it back wouldn’t look right. Wouldn’t feel right, either. A birthday gift. Connor will never get another one. Even worse, the gifts he did get are being given away.
“My dad and I, we used to throw the ball around in the backyard every Sunday afternoon,” Larry says. “I thought Connor and I could do that. He used to complain that I was never around, I was working all the time, so I said, all right, let’s set aside Sunday afternoons for just the two of us. And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t interested anymore.” He laughs softly. “Nothing with Connor was ever easy.”
He slides his hands into his pockets. “Take it,” he says, like he’s offering me nothing more than a breath mint. “It’s just going to sit here, collecting dust.”
I guess I have no choice.
“You’ll have to break it in, though, first,” Larry says. “You can’t catch anything with it that stiff.”
Great. The gift comes with responsibility, too. “How do you break it in?”
“Your dad never taught you how to break in a glove?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
“Well, there’s really only one right way to do it,” Larry says, reaching into the bin. “You have to use shaving cream.”
I figure it’s a joke, but then he pulls out an actual can of shaving cream and starts to shake it.
“Here,” he says. “It’s full.”
Now I’ve got a baseball glove in one hand and a can of shaving cream in the other. I don’t play baseball or shave.
“What you do is, rub that in for about five minutes. Then you tie it all up with rubber bands, put it under your mattress, and sleep on it. The next day, you repeat the same thing. You do that for at least a week.”
“A week? Really?”
“Every day. Consistent. There are no shortcuts.”
Larry even has a bag of rubber bands. “Nowadays, with your generation, I hate to say it, but it’s all about instant gratification. Who wants to take the time to read a book when you can read the Facebook instead? But there’s no substitute for doing the work. None. It just takes a little patience.”
He sprays the shaving cream onto the glove and begins to work it in.
“I didn’t let Connor take shortcuts. Cynthia was the one with the second chances and the ‘Try harder next time.’ And I was the one who said no. I said, ‘Connor, you keep taking shortcuts, you’re going to lose the trail eventually, and pretty soon you’re going to end up somewhere you don’t want to be with no idea how to find your way home.’”
There’s a slight crack in his voice. He clears his throat, composing himself, and stares down into his bin. It’s all emptied out. We’re not talking about sports or girls anymore.
“Connor was lucky,” I hear myself saying. “To have a dad who cared so much.”
Larry arranges the items on the table. “Well, your dad must feel pretty lucky to have a son like you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He does.”
Here I am, lying about things that don’t even require lying.
Larry smiles. “Well, if you want to go catch up with Zoe…”
“Right. Yeah.” I head for the door, my hands full—glove, shaving cream.
But something stops me. I turn back. “I don’t know why I said that. About my dad. It’s not true. My parents got divorced when I was seven. My dad moved to Colorado. He and my stepmom have a new family now. So, that’s sort of his priority.”
Larry studies me. Instant regret sets in. I’m not sure why I revealed all that. It’s just, he was open and true with me, vulnerable, and I wanted to be the same way back to him. It seemed right and fair, and now…
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t forget the rubber bands,” he says, dropping the bag into my hands.
I nod, breathing out. “Thanks.”
“You’re good to go.”
• • •
The light is still on in my mom’s bedroom when Zoe pulls up to my house. But by the time I make it up the stairs, there’s no longer a glow underneath her door.
The note I find in my bedroom reads: Te amo hijo mio. I’m baffled until I remember that I told her I was with Jared working on a Spanish project. I picture, for a moment, my mother having to Google how to write what she wanted to say.
It’s past eleven. She was clearly waiting up for me. I told her not to, but I guess she couldn’t help herself.
Cynthia suggested I spend the night at their house. Zoe drives you to school anyway, Cynthia said. Call your mother and let her know. You can take Connor’s bed. It was a kind offer, but too much. I couldn’t sleep in Connor’s bed. As numb as I’ve become, I’ve still got a little sensitivity left.
Actually, scratch that. To call what I’m feeling numb isn’t accurate. If anything, I’m feeling more now than ever. And not just because I stopped taking my medication. For the first time I’m actually experiencing life. I finally know what it means to kiss someone. Like, really kiss, for many seconds at a stretch. That happens all the time now. It’s basically commonplace, although never boring. And tonight I learned how to break in a baseball glove. Something my own dad never bothered to teach me.
Zoe says I should send my dad a link to the speech. But I don’t think he’d care about any of it—the Connor Project, the orchard. When he wrote one time on Facebook that he was having trouble keeping the shape of his new cowboy hat, I sent him an article that contained time-tested care instructions; he never responded. I used to mail him postcards, hoping we’d become pen pals, but the one time I received a response, it was in Theresa’s handwriting. He enjoys hiking, so I suggested we walk the Appalachian Trail together. He seemed to like the idea, but when I reminded him about it this summer, he came up with an excuse about how he’s already flying east for my graduation in the spring, and now with the baby coming, he can’t afford to come twice. So what do I do next? I research a trail close to where he lives in Colorado and I pin all my hopes on that. (Pun very much intended.)
I walk over to my map. I’m tired of putting myself out there. For what? How long am I supposed to wait? Eighteen hundred miles between him and me. Maybe it’s just too far. Pretty soon he’ll have another kid, a baby pressed in his arms. You can’t get any closer than that. How can I compete? Why do I even want to after all he’s put me through? I just thought, on this one specific occasion not too long ago, I really thought he’d be proud, that he might appreciate the fact that I brought back to life that faded WELCOME sign outside Ellison Park, a place he used to love to visit, often with me by his side, the two of us together, the memories we had. I just thought that my accomplishment, the gesture of it, would reach him somehow, would connect, but then, of course, like always, that day when I told him, when I sent him that photo…
It doesn’t matter. I’m done. I remove the pin and toss it in a cup. While I’m up, I fit my new baseball glove onto my hand. I use my free arm—the one that’s no longer broken, the one I’m still learning how to live with—to throw a punch at the stiff leather. I punch again, a little harder this time, and then again, harder, and again, and again, until my fist shines the most satisfying red.