Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [187]
Still, she watched him, poking and prodding the air and producing the hellish glissandos, with something like admiration. Her own sons were not like that. There was no other boy like him.
“There’s no one else like him,” Estelle said to Randall, who was bending over the grill, the left side for the hot dogs, the right side for hamburgers. He had put on his chef’s apron and was worrying the hamburger buns on the edge of the grill with a spatula. Freddie sat writing his story on a picnic bench, on the other side of the back deck. He was concentrating with fierce inward energy.
Late summer evening, and Estelle sat watching Randall cooking the hamburgers and Freddie working on his story. Somewhere in back, the cicadas, harbingers of autumn, were chirring away. Their neighbor Jerry Harponyi, who played cello in the city orchestra, was watering his garden, and when he saw Estelle across his back fence, he raised his hand, still holding the garden hose, to wave. The water gubbled, airborne, in a snakelike line, before falling.
“No, there isn’t,” Randall said. “But let’s not talk about this now. By the way, I’ve drafted about seven of the neighbors to play softball in the park in an hour. And Freddie said he’d join us.”
“Freddie said that?”
“Yes. I used all my persuasive skills.”
“What did you say?” Estelle asked.
“I said it’d be nice if he played.”
“He didn’t object?”
“I just said that it’d be a nice gesture.” Well, Estelle thought, that was Randall, all right: the King of Nice Gestures. “After all, you bought him that baseball bat. And he loves you, you know.”
“Who?”
“Freddie, your grandson.”
“No, he—”
“Of course he does, Stel. Please. You’re the only thing in this world holding him on.” He looked at her with a smile, his face disfigured momentarily by smoke from the grill. “I can’t do it the way you can. You’re his lifeline. Don’t you know that? Can’t you see it?”
Harponyi waved again. “Looking forward to the game!” he shouted, and the water from his hose flung itself out again in patterns in the air.
“Me?”
“Yes, my dear. You. You’re a rock, an anchor. You’re all he’s got. I love you, too, you know, but I’m not desperate. Anyway, you know what position you should play?”
“No,” she said. “First base?” She always liked it when Randall told her he loved her.
“No,” Randall said. “Outfield. You need a rest. You can just stand out there and wait for balls to fall into your glove. Like a nun. Like a little sister of mercy.”
“I’d enjoy that, I think,” Estelle said.
Standing in the outfield, with the sun setting below the park’s trees to the west, Estelle felt the early-evening breezes blowing across her forehead, the same breezes that blew Randall’s hair backward on the pitcher’s mound, so that he looked surprised, or like one of the Three Stooges, she couldn’t remember which one. With grown children of his own, and his own sorrows—his wife had pitched herself through a window eight stories up two months after learning that she had inoperable cancer—Randall had every right to be moody, or grumpy at times. Or just sour. But, no: he was relentless in his cheerfulness. And tiresome, if you didn’t share it. Somehow the tragedies he had lived through hadn’t altered him. They had no relevance to him. There he was. In the fading light, he still gleamed a little.
Randall had just struck out Harponyi, the cellist. The first baseman, a fifteen-year-old from across the street, whistled and cheered. His name was Tommy. He was already chunky with muscle, a real athlete who in a year or two would be playing high-school football, and for a moment Estelle wondered whether it wasn’t a bit unfair to have boys like that playing on their side. But it all balanced