Our second Christmas in the house was a lot different from the first. For one thing, the house felt like a home. Now I never thought about how small it was, or that it was really only a duplex, or that there was no backyard. Everything fit just fine.
Mom had been made assistant manager at Pasta Bella. That meant a bonus for her, and on Christmas Eve she wasn't in the mood for saving. "We'll do that after Christmas," she said. We went to Sky Nursery and bought a noble fir that nearly took up the entire front room. The tree was big enough to hold all the ornaments that Mom had hung on to. We also had some of our old Christmas lights. Dad had always made sure our house was the brightest in Sound Ridge. I couldn't match that, but I ran lights around the outside of the duplex, and the rest I strung up inside. On her day off, Mom baked about ten dozen cookies.
On Christmas morning a stack of gifts were under the tree. Most of them were for Marian. Clothes mainly, but in the heavy box was a Sony CD player. I'd seen Mom looking at a cheaper, off-brand player at Walgreen's, and I know that's what Marian thought she was going to get. "Oh, thank you!" she said as she pulled the Sony out of the box.
I got a sweatshirt, a new pair of pants, some wool socks, and a $100 gift certificate for Olympic Sports. "You're so grown up, I don't know what to buy you anymore," Mom said.
"This is perfect."
"Open your gift," Marian said to Mom. "It's from both of us."
Mom tore off the wrapping paper. Inside was a hand-knitted wool Norwegian sweater, blue and red with a reindeer pattern. Marian had picked it out and contributed some allowance money, and I'd paid the rest. "It's beautiful," Mom said, and she kissed us both. "Absolutely beautiful."
"I told you she'd like it," Marian said as Mom tried it on.
The phone rang. It was Aunt Cella, and we took turns talking to her. Then we cleaned up the wrapping paper and ate breakfast. After that Marian was off. "I want to see what Kaitlin got."
I helped Mom do the breakfast dishes. When we finished, she stretched her arms out and yawned. "Shane, I think I'm going to lie down for a while. I'm beat."
At ten o'clock on Christmas morning, I was alone in the front room with nothing to do. I had ten bucks, so I grabbed my jacket and slipped out the front door.
Once outside, I walked around the neighborhood, not heading anywhere in particular. After about fifteen minutes I found myself at Northwest Athletic Complex. I thought the baseball diamond would be a mud hole, but it wasn't half bad. There was a little pool of water out by second base, and another where the catcher would crouch, but otherwise the field was okay.
I walked across the infield to the pitcher's mound. It was the first time I'd been on a mound in six months. I stared at home plate, remembering how great it had felt to be on the mound with a baseball in my hand and a ball game on the line.
Suddenly I knew that there was something I had to do, something I should have done a long time ago. I walked home quickly. When I opened the front door, Marian, Kaitlin, and Laura Curtiss were on the floor, the Monopoly board spread between them. "Mom still asleep?" I asked.
"Yeah," Marian said. "Why is she so tired anyway?"
"Christmas is hard work," I said.
"You owe me eighteen dollars," Laura said, and Marian went back to her game.
I pulled out the phone book and flipped through it until I found the right page. We have a cordless phone, so I scribbled the number, took the handset to my room, closed the door, and punched in the digits.
"Reese?" I said when the voice at the other end said hello.
"Yeah, this is Reese."
"This is Shane. Shane Hunter."
Silence.
I swallowed. "I'll pitch to you."
More silence.
"Did you hear me?"
"Yeah, I heard you."
"Well, what do you say? Do you want me to or not?"
"You know I do," he said. "But only if you're going to throw your hardest."
"I will. Not right away, of course. But once my arm is loose."
"Fair enough."
"When do you want to start?"
Reese's red Beetle was already in the parking lot when I reached the baseball diamond an hour later. He was by first base, stretching.
We warmed up by playing catch. The tightness in my shoulder surprised me. The weightlifting had made me stronger, but those new muscles were going to take a while to loosen. Reese kept looking at me, waiting for me to say I was ready.
Finally my arm felt reasonably loose. "You want to hit?" I asked.
He nodded. "I've got a bucket of balls in the trunk."
He went to his car and came back a couple of minutes later. "Here's what I thought we'd do," he said. "There are ten baseballs in the bucket. You pitch them; I hit them. We shag them, then do it again. Okay?"
"Sounds good to me."
He picked up his bat, pulled on his batting gloves, headed toward home plate, then turned back. "I left something in the trunk." He dropped his bat and jogged to the parking lot. When he returned, he was wearing a batter's helmet.
I stepped up onto the mound. As I looked at Reese, all I could feel was the hardness of the ball. "Listen, Reese," I said. "I'm going to throw easy today. I haven't pitched in a long time."
"That's okay," he said. "I haven't hit in a long time either."
I rocked and came straight over the top. I was trying to groove a fastball right down the middle, but my pitch was about two feet outside and must have bounced five feet in front of the plate.
Reese started after it anyway, tried to hold up, then finished his swing so awkwardly he nearly fell down. The ball thudded into the wood boards of the backstop. He smiled. "We can only get better."
Again I went into my motion and delivered. The second pitch was a foot outside and a foot high. Reese flailed at it, nubbing the ball off the end of his bat down the first base line.
After that I reached in for another ball and then another. Sometimes I'd throw something resembling a strike. When I did, Reese would take a cut at it. Most of the time his left side flew open, making his swings awkward and ugly. But every once in a while he hung in, and when he did, the ball jumped off his bat into the alleys.
We went through two buckets, then a third bucket, and a fourth. He'd cream about every sixth pitch, his swing as sweet as ever. When the fifth bucket was empty, we picked up the balls and carried the stuff to his car. He opened the trunk, and I stuck the bucket inside. When he closed it, he turned to me. "You want a ride to Greenwood?"
"No," I said. "I feel like walking."
He headed toward the driver's door and opened it. Before he stepped into the car, I called out to him. "There's something I've got to tell you, Reese," I said, not sure what I was going to say.
He stood just outside his car. "What?"
"That pitch I hit you with?"
"What about it?"
"There was nothing accidental about it. I set you up with those outside pitches. When I saw you move closer to the plate, I came in high and tight trying to hit you, and I'm sorry."
You'd have thought I was telling him the weather report. His face didn't register anything.
"Aren't you going to say something?" I asked.
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something."
He looked off to the side. "I always thought you were trying to hit me. In fact, I was ninety percent sure. So now I'm one hundred percent sure. It doesn't change much."
I waited, but he didn't say anything else. "So you still want me to pitch to you?"
"Yeah. I do."
"Even though I hit you on purpose?"
"What are you after, Shane? What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. I guess I thought you'd tell me you hate me, or maybe take a swing at me."
His eyes flashed. "All right. You want me to say this stuff out loud, so I'll say it. Sometimes, after I take a terrible swing, I think of that pitch and what it did to me, and I hate you. I hate you so much I want to smash your face in. But then I stop myself from hating you, and I force myself to think about my swing. Hating you won't get me back to where I was. Standing in against that fastball of yours will. I need you to pitch to me. I need to be able to hit against you. I wish I didn't, but I do."
For a while I let his words hang there. Finally I spoke. "You'll hit again, Reese. By the time baseball season rolls around, you'll be as good as you ever were."
He frowned. "How do you know what I'm going to be able to do? You got a crystal ball or something?"
"I know because we'll work at it until you can. I'll pitch to you until my arm falls off if that's what it takes."
The anger slowly went out of his eyes. "Well, I hope you're right."
"I am right. You'll see."
He opened the door to his car and slid into the front seat.
"Tomorrow?" I said.
"Not tomorrow," he answered. "My grandparents are visiting. The day after?"
"Okay then. The day after."
He pulled the car door shut and drove away.