Chapter Six
Reed
“Baseball is a game of inches.”
—Branch Rickey
My shins were on fire.
Coach should’ve let me keep my shoulder warm by throwing with Ben. Instead, I ran bleachers with the rest of the guys at the A Field in the scorching sun.
“Pick it up, Fulton!” Coach Monaco yelled. “Even pitchers need to be in shape.”
I was a thousand times more in shape than most of these guys.
“Who put a stick up his ass?” Ben asked between breaths as we ran back down a set of metal stairs.
I groaned as I reached the bottom. “I never thought I’d say I missed the hills from our high school, but fuck, I do now.”
“It’s not our fault we were pranked by those Crowleys. If you could even call it a prank. Amateurs.” Ben panted and cursed under his breath. “They obviously don’t know who they’re messing with.”
Ha. True.
Ben and I also bonded over our love of pranks.
After his dad left, everyone treated him differently, so he spent his time creating elaborate setups.
The same went for me. When one of Ben’s traps strung me upside down in a tree, I knew he and I would hit it off.
Only, while I was fine keeping the mischief purely funny, he recently started moving toward vandalism, tagging the back walls of buildings or schools.
Hope he didn’t plan to go that far here.
As for the Crowleys’ idiotic prank, all that hay would take forever to clean up. It went almost to the roof of the dugouts in the sandlot and poked through the rusted chain-link fence in each.
Where the hell did they get it all?
It was almost as much as what I helped Granddad move into the loft of the barn years ago before Thanksgiving.
Finally, Coach blew his whistle twice. None of us made it to the field. We all dropped on the warm metal. Two of our guys rolled over and puked, but my arms and legs spread out around me like a body at a crime scene.
“You were up late last night.” Ben’s chest heaved. “What were you doing?”
“Nothing.” I sat up slowly. “Just watching some pitching videos on YouTube.”
And spending far too long scrolling through Eliza’s Instagram, and then maybe falling down a rabbit hole of her and Lauryn’s TikTok videos.
Neither of which I could share with him.
No girls. All baseball.
Ben sat up and motioned for me to help him stretch. We spread and straightened our legs so our feet touched, leaned in, and pulled each other across the space between us. “Did your grandparents tell you I took the combine harvester out yesterday?” he asked.
I laughed. “Yeah, Nana mentioned it. How many rows of corn did you take down before you could stop it?”
“A few.” He stretched forward. “Your granddad showed me his antique lighters collection too. Makes mine look like crap.”
“When do you get yours back?”
He smirked. “Already got it back.”
Translation: stole it back.
Ben’s mom had taken his lighter away the week before we came to Fairfield, to “prevent him from causing any trouble with it.”
True, he had gotten caught multiple times smoking on the campus of our high school while skipping classes, but he would’ve found a way to smoke with or without his own lighter.
The lighter wasn’t the root of his problems.
He had the literal scars to prove it.
Maybe if Mrs. Talbot spent more time talking to her son instead of working herself to death, she would’ve noticed that.
Later, after a short intrasquad scrimmage, everyone trudged back to the sandlot to clean up the shit-tons of hay.
Using a couple of infield rakes and our bare hands, we managed to move it to the edge of the woods.
I had been around hay all my life, but it was clear the others hadn’t. They sneezed nonstop.
Once Coach gave us his second speech of the day about “growing up” and “taking the higher road,” we hauled our gear toward the parking lot.
“You heading home now?” Ben tossed his duffle into the back of my truck. “Or you wanna grab a quick burger at the diner?”
“I think I’m gonna go for a walk. Can you take the truck home?” I dropped my bag next to his and tossed him the keys.
“A walk?”
“Yeah. Just wanna see how much the town’s changed.”
Ben took a long drink of water. “Cornfields. Main Street. A tiny-ass creek. What’s there to see?”
I tugged my hat lower. “Let Nana know I’ll be home in time for dinner, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“And don’t take any more equipment out of the barn.”
“Yes, Mom.” He climbed in my truck and started it up while rolling the window down. “Brett’s got some decent ideas about how to get the Crowleys back later tonight.”
“What if Coach finds out?” I could think of a hundred things I’d rather do than run bleachers again.
But Ben ignored my question and started backing out of the parking spot. “Hey, let me know if you hear the voice of Shoeless Joe Jackson out there.”
I whispered loudly, “If you build it, he will come.”
“Go the distance, my friend.”
Ben wasn’t wrong when he said there wasn’t much to Fairfield. But it had a past, and whether I liked it or not, I was a part of it. Where he saw cornfields, I saw acres and acres of hiding spots and the mere minutes it took Mickey—that dog had a nose like no other—to find me.
Where he saw a run-down Wade’s Grocery near a shadowed alley, I saw the perfect brick wall for tossing a ball back when I had no one to play catch with.
The same alley where I accidentally broke Granddad’s radio after it fell off my bike.
Where moments later, Eliza appeared out of nowhere with a paper tiara on her head, crouched down, and fixed the radio in a matter of seconds.
He saw a creek. I saw a place where I dug around for crawdads. The same creek where I tripped and fell into a fallen beehive. Where Eliza, again, had appeared out of thin air and helped me up, never mentioning my crying while she quickly slapped mud on my stings.
But that was a lifetime ago—six years, to be exact.
Before her family cheated my family out of the stadium.
Before her father and my granddad forbade us to hang out together—the one thing they truly agreed upon.
Walking through this town with my glove and ball made me feel like a kid again, and for the first time since I had come back, I felt like myself.
After a half an hour of wandering and counting over five bougie cardinal statues around town, I reached the old train station. Its red paint had peeled, and it leaned a bit. A few abandoned, rusty railcars shone burnt orange in the sunlight. Tall grass and weeds covered the tracks.
Dad had taken me here sometimes after we hit a few balls at the elementary school field.
“You can tell a lot about a town by what it keeps and what it throws away,” he had said.
“Fairfield keeps everything. Remembers everything. Do good things here, and they’ll love you forever.
Screw up, and it’ll follow you to your tombstone. ”
They may have kept the train station and the old barbershop on Maple Drive, but he had been wrong about the doing-good part. All Granddad and his farm did was good for this community. And they repaid him by taking a cash offer from the wealthiest family in town.
Fast money always made people look the other way.
I tucked my glove and ball under my arm before picking up a couple of rocks. Winding up slowly, I tossed them at one of the already broken windows of the station. Dirty glass shattered loudly to the ground.
“Do you mind?” a familiar voice snapped.
Well, damn. Of course she’d be here.