Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [288]
'Don't worry,' Naomi said. 'It won't be.'
8
As they drove back to the airport, Sam asked Stan Soames if he could tell them about Dave and the baseballs.
'If it's personal, that's okay. I'm just curious.'
Soames glanced at the bag Sam held in his lap. 'I'm sorta curious about those, too,' he said. 'I'll make you a deal. The thing with the baseballs happened ten years ago. I'll tell you about that if you'll tell me about the books ten years from now.'
'Deal,' Naomi said from the back seat, and then added what Sam himself had been thinking. 'If we're all still around, of course.'
Soames laughed. 'Yeah . . . I suppose there's always that possibility, isn't there?'
Sam nodded. 'Lousy things sometimes happen.'
'They sure do. One of em happened to my only boy in 1980. The doctors called it leukemia, but it's really just what you said - one of those lousy things that sometimes happens.'
'Oh, I'm so sorry,' Naomi said.
'Thanks. Every now and then I start to think I'm over it, and then it gets on my blind side and hits me again. I guess some things take a long time to shake out, and some things don't ever shake out.'
Some things don't ever shake out.
Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman.
I really have to go home now ... is my fine paid?
Sam touched the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand.
'Well, hell, I'd known Dave a long time before it ever happened,' Stan Soames said. They passed a sign which read AIRPORT 3 MI. 'We grew up together, went to school together, sowed a mess of wild oats together. The only thing was, I reaped my crop and quit. Dave just went on sowin.'
Soames shook his head.
'Drunk or sober, he was one of the sweetest fellows I ever met. But it got so he was drunk more'n he was sober, and we kinda fell out of touch. It seemed like the worst time for him was in the late fifties. During those years he was drunk all the time. After that he started going to AA, and he seemed to get a little better ... but he'd always fall off the wagon with a crash.
'I got married in '68, and I wanted to ask him to be my best man, but I didn't dare. As it happened, he turned up sober - that time - but you couldn't trust him to turn up sober.'
'I know what you mean,' Naomi said quietly.
Stan Soames laughed. 'Well, I sort of doubt that - a little sweetie like you wouldn't know what miseries a dedicated boozehound can get himself into - but take it from me. If I'd asked Dave to stand up for me at the wedding, Laura - that's my ex - would have shit bricks. But Dave did come, and I saw him a little more frequently after our boy Joe was born in 1970. Dave seemed to have a special feeling for all kids during those years when he was trying to pull himself out of the bottle.
'The thing Joey loved most was baseball. He was nuts for it - he collected sticker books, chewing-gum cards ... he even pestered me to get a satellite dish so we could watch all the Royals games - the Royals were his favorites - and the Cubs, too, on WGN from Chicago. By the time he was eight, he knew the averages of all the Royals starting players, and the won-lost records of damn near every pitcher in the American League. Dave and I took him to games three or four times. It was a lot like taking a kid on a guided tour of heaven. Dave took him alone twice, when I had to work. Laura had a cow about that - said he'd show up drunk as a skunk, with the boy left behind, wandering the streets of KC or sitting in a police station somewhere, waiting for someone to come and get him. But nothing like that ever happened. So far as I know, Dave never took a drink when he was around the boy.
'When Joe got the leukemia, the worst part for him was the doctors telling him he wouldn't be able to go to any games that year at least until June and maybe not at all. He was more depressed about that than he was about having cancer.