“I’ve already root-pruned six or eight waist-high dogwoods, three oaks and two ten-foot maples,” I told him as I marked the spot where he stood with a cement block left over from laying the foundation. “Robert’s going to take his front-end loader this fall and move them here for me. Want to come help me dig some five-dollar holes?”
He smiled at that mention of my daddy’s favorite piece of planting advice: “Better to put a fifty-cent tree in a five-dollar hole than a five-dollar tree in a fifty-cent hole.”
“Tell you what,” Dwight bargained. “You play second base for me this evening and I’ll come help you dig.”
“Deal!” I said, before he could figure out that he’d just swapped half a Saturday of my time for at least two full Saturdays of his. “Give me ten minutes to wash my face and change into clean shorts. Make any difference what color shirt I wear?”
Back when I was playing regularly, the closest we came to uniforms was trying to wear the same color tops.
He turned around so that I could see JAILHOUSE GANG stencilled on the back of the red T-shirt that stretched tightly across his broad shoulders. (And yeah, long as I was checking out his back, I took a good look at the way his white shorts fit his backside.) Dwight’s six three and built tall and solid like most of my brothers. Not bad-looking either. I can’t understand why some pretty woman hasn’t clicked on him and moved him on over to her home page before now. My sisters-in-law and I keep offering suggestions and he keeps sidestepping us.
“I brought you a shirt,” he said, reaching into his truck for one like his.
I had to laugh as I took it from him. “Pretty sure I’d come, weren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Been a couple of years since you played. Thought you might enjoy it for a change.”
“So who’re we playing?” I asked as I headed up the steps, already unbuttoning my sweat-drenched shirt as I went inside.
“Your old team.” Dwight followed me as far as the kitchen, where he helped himself to a glass of iced tea from my refrigerator.
“The Civil Suits?” I asked through my open bedroom door as I stepped out of my dirty shorts and pulled a pair of clean white ones from my dresser drawer. There were enough law firms clustered around the courthouse in Dobbs to field a fairly decent team and I’d been right out there with them till I was appointed to the district court bench and decided I probably ought to step back from too much fraternization with attorneys I’d have to be ruling on. “They as good as they used to be?”
“Tied with us for third place,” he drawled. “Today’s the playoff. You still got your glove or do we need to borrow one?”
“I not only have it, I can even tell you where it is,” I bragged. My sports gear was in one of the last boxes I’d hauled over to my new garage from Aunt Zell’s house, where I’d lived from the time I graduated law school till this summer.
I found myself a red ribbon, and while I tied my hair in a ponytail to get it up off my neck, Dwight spent a few minutes rubbing neat’s-foot oil into my glove. The leather wasn’t very stiff. Half the time when they come over to swim in the pond, my teenage nieces and nephews wind up dragging out balls and bats. Just like their daddies—any excuse to play whatever ball’s in season—so my glove stays soft and supple.
* * *
I poured myself a plastic cup of iced tea and sipped on it as we drove over to Dobbs in Dwight’s pickup. He was going to spend the night at his mother’s house out from Cotton Grove and since neither of us had plans for later that night, there was no point taking two vehicles.
Our county softball league’s a pretty loosey-goosey operation: slow pitch, a tenth player at short field, flexible substitutions. It’s played more for laughs and bragging rights than diehard competition because the season sort of peters out at the end of summer when so many people take off for one last weekend at the mountains or the coast. Instead of a regulation field, we play on the new middle school’s little league field where baselines are shorter.
For once, Colleton County’s planners had tipped a hat to environmental concerns and hadn’t bulldozed off all the trees and bushes when they built the new school. They’d left a thick buffer between the school grounds and a commercial zone on the bypass that lies north of the running track. Mature oaks flourished amid the parking spaces and a bushy stand of cedars separated the parking lot from the playing field.
Dwight’s team, the Jailhouse Gang, are members of the Sheriff’s Department, a couple of town police officers, a magistrate and some of the clerks from the Register of Deeds’s office.
The Civil Suits are all attorneys with a couple of athletic paralegals thrown in, and sure enough, Portland Brewer called to me as I was getting out of Dwight’s truck.
“Hey, Deborah! Whatcha doing in that ugly red shirt?”
Portland’s my height, a little thinner, and her wiry black hair is so curly she has to wear it in a poodle cut that makes her look remarkably like Julia Lee’s CoCo. We’ve been good friends ever since we got kicked out of the Sweetwater Junior Girls Sunday School Class one Sunday a million years ago when we were eight. Her Uncle Ash is married to my Aunt Zell, which also makes us first cousins by marriage.
Back when I was on the verge of messing up my life for good, I noticed that Portland was the only one of the old gang who seemed to be loving her work. It wasn’t that I had this huge burning desire to practice law. No, it was more like deciding that if she could ace law school, so could I. She snorts at the idea of being my role model, but I laugh and tell her I’m just grateful she wasn’t happily dealing dope back then or no telling where we’d’ve both wound up.
“Cool shirts,” I said when Dwight and I caught up with her and her husband Avery, who’s also her partner in their own law firm.
Their T-shirts didn’t have the team’s name on the back, but they
I was rusty with my first few throws, but it’s like riding a bicycle. Before long, I was zinging them into Dwight’s glove just like old times when I was a tagalong tomboy and he’d drop by to play ball with my brothers.
