Nell rubs a hand on her knickers and grips the bat tightly. Her topknot is coming loose. She can see strands of hair hanging in front of the wire frames of her glasses.
“What’s the matter, four-eyes? You nervous?”
She concentrates on the ball Pete holds in his right hand instead of the boys scattered across the dusty back lot. Any minute now, he’ll pitch, and if she thinks about the ball instead of the names, she’ll hit it.
“You hold that bat like a girl,” T.J. says from first base.
Nell keeps staring at the ball. She can see the stitches running along its face, the dirty surface disappearing into Pete’s fist. “That’s because I am a girl,” she says. It doesn’t matter if T.J. hears her. All that matters is that she spoke.
“Pitch already!” Chucky yells from the grassy sideline.
Pete spits and Nell grimaces. She hates it when he spits. With a sharp snap of the wrist, he releases the ball. It curves toward her.
She jumps out of its way and swings at the same time. The ball hits the skinny part of the bat, close to her fingers, and bounces forward.
“Ruuun!” Chucky screams.
She drops the bat and takes off, the air caught in her throat. She’s not good at running; someone always tags her before she gets to base. But the sweater-wrapped rock that is first base is getting closer and still she can’t hear anyone running behind her. She leaps the last few inches and lands in the middle of the rock, leaving a large footprint in the wool. A few seconds later, the ball slams into T.J.’s palm.
“You didn’t have to move,” T.J. says. “The ball was gonna hit you anyway.”
“Pete always does that so that I can’t swing.” Nell tugs on her ripped, high-buttoned blouse. “He knows I hit better than any of you guys, so he cheats. And besides, the last time he did that I was bruised for a week. Papa wasn’t gonna let me play anymore.”
T.J. shrugs, his attention already on the next batter.
“Nell?”
She looks up. Edmund is standing behind third base. His three-piece suit is dusty and he looks tired. “Jeez,” she says under her breath.
“What?” T.J. asks.
“Nothing,” she says. “I gotta go.”
“Why? The game’s not over.”
“I know.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face. “But I gotta go anyway.”
She walks across the field in front of the pitcher’s mound. Pete spits and barely misses her shoe. She stops and slowly looks up at him in a conscious imitation of her father’s most frightening look.
“Whatcha think you’re doing?” he asks.
“Leaving.” Her glasses have slid to the edge of her nose, but she doesn’t push them back. Touching them would remind him that she can’t see very well.
“Can’t. You’re on first.”
“Chucky can take my place.”
“Can’t neither. He’s gotta bat soon.”
She glances at Chucky. He’s too far away to hear anything. “I can’t do anything about it, Pete. I gotta go.”
Pete tugs his cap over his eyes and squints at her. “Then you can’t play with us no more. It was dumb to let a girl play in the first place.”
“It is not dumb! And you’ve gone home in the middle of a game before.” She hates Pete. Someday she’ll show him that a girl can be just as good as a boy, even at baseball.
“Nell.” Edmund sounds weary. “Let’s go.”
“He’s not your pa,” Pete says. “How come you gotta go with him?”
“He’s my sister’s boyfriend.” She pushes her glasses up with her knuckle and trudges the rest of the way across the yard. When she reaches Edmund, he takes her arm and they start walking.
“Why do you play with them?” he asks softly. “Baseball isn’t a game for young ladies.”
He always asks her that, and once he yelled at her for wearing the knickers that Karl had given her. “I don’t like playing dollies with Louisa.”
“I don’t suppose I’d like that much either,” he says. When they get far enough away from the field, he stops and turns her to him.
There are deep shadows under his eyes and his face looks pinched.
“I’m not going to take you all the way home. I just came because I promised I would.”
“You’re not gonna see Bess?”
He shakes his head, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out the slender ring that cost him three months’ wages. The diamond glitters in the sunlight. “Karl’s back,” he says.
Nell traced the nameplate. Karl Krupp. She hadn’t imagined it; the name didn’t disappear under her touch like so many other things did. Her fingers, with their swollen knuckles and fragile bones, looked defenseless beside that name. Slowly she let her hand fall back onto the cold metal rim of her walker. He would be how old now? When she had been ten, he had been twenty-five — a fifteen-year difference that would now make him…ninety-five. She glanced at the door to his room. It hadn’t been open since he arrived, and that frustrated her. She wanted to see how badly age had changed him.
She supposed it hadn’t changed him much, since he was in.
Household 5. The other residents were reasonably intelligent and ambulatory — except for Sophronia. But the nurses had removed her as soon as her senility became evident. Nell’s own memory lapses and growing tendency to daydream worried her. She wasn’t sure how much provocation the nurses needed before they moved her to a more restrictive household.
Nell lifted her walker and moved away from the door. She didn’t want Karl to catch her snooping. Her name was different and she certainly didn’t look like the scrawny tomboy he had known, but she didn’t want him to know that she was watching him until she knew exactly what she was going to do.
Karl slouches indolently in the settee. His long legs stretch out before him and cross at the ankles, his left arm is draped across the armrest, and his finely chiseled head rests against the upholstered back. He should not be comfortable, but he clearly is.
Bess sits in the armchair across from him, leaning forward. Wisps of hair frame her flushed face, her eyes sparkle, and her hands — looking naked without Edmund’s ring — nervously toy with her best skirt.
Nell lets the door swing shut. Karl doesn’t turn at the click, but instead says in his deep, rich baritone, “Is that my Nell?”
She freezes, not expecting the well of emotion that voice raises in her. She imagines herself running to him and burying her face in his neck, then pulling back and slapping him with all her strength.
“Nelly, it’s Karl.” Bess can’t quite keep the happiness from her voice.
“I know,” she says, flicking dried mud off her thumb. She is covered with sweat, her glasses are dirty, and her topknot is coming loose. She probably doesn’t even look like a little girl.
“Nelly…”
She hates the nickname almost as much as she hates Bess’s tone.
“I’m gonna go wash up.”
“Go around front so you don’t get mud on the floor.”
Nell suppresses a sigh and turns around to let herself out. Just then her father opens the door, bringing with him the scents of tobacco and hair tonic. He ignores his youngest daughter’s appearance and starts to go into the parlor.
“Who owns the fancy Model-T? Is it yours, Edm—?”
He stops just inside the parlor and Nell takes a step forward so that she can see everything. Karl rises quickly and extends his hand.
Bess is biting her lower lip, and Papa has flushed a deep scarlet.
“I told you,” he says in his lowest, angriest voice, “never to cross my threshold again.”
“Mr. Richter, things have changed.”
“I don’t care if you’ve become the richest man in the world. You are not welcome here.” Papa’s voice grows
