I was soon just as hot and sweaty as back then, too, and more than ready to take a break when someone showed up with the team’s drink cooler.
Quite a few people had come to play and were either waiting to start or still hanging around after their own games. There were also forty or fifty legitimate spectators in the stands, and among the kids who stood with their noses to the wire behind home plate, I recognized Ralph Freeman’s son Stan.
Ralph was called to preach at one of the black churches this past spring, but Balm of Gilead is in the midst of a major building program and membership drive and they can’t afford to pay him a full-time minister’s salary yet. In addition to his pastoral duties, he was going to be teaching here at the Dobbs middle school, and I wasn’t surprised to see him out on the field with other Colleton County teachers.
“Who’s ahead?” I asked Stan. “And what inning is it anyhow?”
“Dad’s team’s up by six,” he said with a smile as wide as Ralph’s. “Bottom of the fifth.”
So it’d be another two innings before our game started, and the way both pitchers were getting hammered, it could be six or six-thirty.
By now, the westering sun sat on a line of thin gray heat clouds like a fat red tomato on a shelf, a swollen overripe tomato going soft around the edges. All this heat and humidity made it look three times larger than usual against a gunmetal gray sky. The air was saturated with a warm dampness. Any more and it’d be raining. A typical summer evening in North Carolina.
Portland’s team and ours clustered loosely on the bleachers near third base and we sounded like a PBS fund- raiser the way all the pagers and cell phones kept going off. I hadn’t brought either with me since I had no underlings and was no longer subject to the calls of clients, but Dwight had to borrow Portland’s phone twice to respond to his beeper. Both were minor procedural matters.
Jason Bullock was on the row behind me and his phone went off almost in my ear. Nice-looking guy in an average sort of way. Mid-twenties. Brown hair with an unruly cowlick on the crown. He’s so new to the bar that the ink on his license is barely dry. He’s only argued in front of me four or five times. Seems pretty sharp. Certainly sharp enough that Portland and Avery had taken him on as a junior associate. I didn’t know his marital status, but I figured he was talking to either his wife or live-in.
I heard him say, “Hey, honey. Yanceyville? Already? You must’ve made good time. Didn’t pick up another speeding ticket, did you? . . . No, looks like our game’s going to run late. We haven’t even started yet, so I’ll be here at least another two hours. . . . Okay, honey. Any idea what time you’ll be home tomorrow? . . . Yeah, okay. Love you, too. . . . Lynn?
Beside me, Portland turned around to ask, “Something wrong?”
“Not really. She hung up before I thought to ask her what motel she’s at. She and her sister have gone antiquing up near the Virginia border.”
“I didn’t realize Lynn was interested in antiques,” said Portland, who’d rather poke through junk stores and flea markets than eat.
“Yeah, she’d go every weekend if she could. She loves pretty things and God knows she’s earned the right to have them. Not that she buys much yet. But she says she’s educating her eye for when we can afford the real things.”
“Take more than a few antique stores to educate
I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, but for once Portland looked immediately sorry she’d been catty.
“Jason’s smart and works hard,” she said. “Lynn, too, for that matter. He’ll probably be a full partner someday.”
In other words, it’s not nice to be snide about a potential partner’s wife.
“Why are all the cute ones already married?” sighed one of the Deeds clerks on the row in front of us as she watched Bullock walk toward the concession stand.
“Because they get snagged early by the trashy girls who put out,” said her friend.
“Trashy?” I silently mouthed to Portland, but she just shook her head and said, “So where’s Kidd? I thought he was coming this weekend.”
“Me, too.”
She immediately picked up on my tone. “Y’all didn’t have a fight, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, sugar. Tell momma.”
So we moved up and back a few bleacher rows away from the others where we wouldn’t be overheard and I spent the next half-hour unloading about Amber and how she seemed to be trying to sabotage my relationship with Kidd.
“Well, of course she is,” Portland said. “You’re a threat to the status quo. She’s what—sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Sixteen in October.”
“Give her till Christmas. Once she gets her driver’s license and a taste of freedom, she’ll be more interested in boys than her father.”
“Don’t count on it,” I said bitterly. “It just hurts that Kidd can’t see how she’s manipulating him.”
“You haven’t said that to him, have you?”
I shook my head. “I’m not that stupid.”
“Good. He may be subconsciously putting the father role above the lover, but you don’t want him making it a conscious choice.”
