Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [86]
Sam and I bought and drank a lot of beer. To get to it, we had to walk down a concrete ramp past two Boston police officers, big men with gray hair, their arms crossed over their pale blue shirts and badges, glancing at us like we might be trouble, then concluding we weren’t. On the way back to our seats, we had to scoot by ten or fifteen people and every one of them stood without hesitation as we squeezed by them, trying not to spill any beer, and when we got to our seats we folded them back down and sat and drank and looked out at the bright green field and the big men playing ball in their white uniforms and their gray uniforms, a number on the back of each, and I was sweetly, happily drunk and couldn’t believe I’d never come to this place before, that I’d hardly even known about it. I smiled over at Sam and he smiled over at me, though something happened in the field, and he looked up and stood and so did all the people around us, a foul ball floating fast ten feet above our heads and behind us. I turned partway around and saw the bare hands reaching for it, heard a rustling, then a thunk. In my seat lay the ball. I picked it up and somebody slapped me on the back, Sam too. “You should bring that home to your father.”
I nodded and smiled and studied the ball in my hand. It was harder than I’d thought it’d be, but it was also just like the one Pop had thrown to me on the sidewalk four years earlier. I liked its red stitching. I stuck it in the side pocket of my jacket, Sam and I tapped our plastic beer cups, and I raised mine to the batter who’d fouled right to me, Jerry Remy, Sam said. Then Remy got a hit and made it to first base without being thrown out and I cheered for him, this man I’d never heard of in this game I’d never played or watched.
THE NEXT afternoon Sam and I stopped by my father’s house to thank him for the tickets. His young stepkids were at school, and Lorraine was out somewhere, and Pop lay on one of her sofas under a light blanket. He was pale and still had a fever. Sam was telling him about the game, using language I still couldn’t speak from a culture I still didn’t know, but at least now I knew where the country was, had seen some of its people and smelled some of its food. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the baseball. I handed it to him. “Here, you can have this.”
He propped himself up on one elbow. “You got a ball?”
“Yep,” Sam said. “It landed right in his seat.”
Pop took it from me, turned it over in his hand, glanced up at me. “I’ve been going to games for thirty years and never got a ball.” He said something else about it, but I kept hearing the last thing he said. Thirty years. He’d been going to games for thirty years? Why didn’t he ever take me before? Or Jeb? Or Suzanne and Nicole? And as Sam and I left him to rest and get over his flu, as we stepped outside and walked past the faculty housing in the clear September air, I thought it must be the money. That’s why he never took us before. It’d be too much money.
Lorraine was walking toward her house, a ladies’ store shopping bag dangling from her hand. She smiled at us, though she looked tired and distracted and took her time walking back home.
WEEKS LATER, a cold blue October dawn, my mother’s voice shot up the stairwell to my attic bedroom. “Andre? Telephone.”
It was just after six in the morning and it was Lorraine.
“Andre,” she took a deep breath that seemed to catch in her throat, “your father has left me for a nineteen-year-old child. I need your help moving his things.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, he’s with her right now. In Boston.” She took a deep breath, and I pictured her smoking. “Please, Andre. I need your help. Please.”
IT WAS close to nine when I knocked on my father’s door. I was sweating lightly from the three-mile walk through town, my French textbook in my hand. The air smelled like oak dust and dry rot, and Lorraine answered the door right away. She was in a