He’d always wished he had a big brother, someone he could look up to. But that wasn’t the case, and he’d had to learn early on to fend for himself.
Pop hadn’t instilled a hard work ethic in him, and the male-slanted values he’d learned held little weight. His dad had been a British Petroleum fire-fighter in Carson—a job that nobody ever quit from because firefighters were heroes. But Pop said the pay was lousy for having to smell oil refineries all day and being in one of the most dangerous jobs in L.A. County.
It had been true. A main pipe busted and the place practically blew the Port of Los Angeles into the ocean. But Pop had been long gone when that happened; he’d gotten excited about making more money at Union Oil—which made no sense, since he’d said he hated the smell of petroleum. He eventually quit that because he disliked working a long shift. Ending up at the Department of Water and Power, he spent more years working for them than any other company. In fact, he’d put in a good word for Drew, and reading water meters had been his first job.
Drew’s childhood had been pretty much just an existence. He was a body at the dinner table, a mouth to feed. Sometimes he was forgotten about, sometimes he stayed overnight with a neighbor when his mom took off and his dad was working the night shift. Not having a close family had never allowed him to warm up to people, to trust and to expose his emotions. He kept things locked inside, not one for sentimentalities.
But he’d known at a young age that he was special. Special in that he had a charm about him, and when he turned it on, that charm could get him pretty much anything he wanted.
Friends’ moms would have home-baked cookies fresh out of the oven on the days they knew he was coming over after school. If he needed to be somewhere, a ride was always available. When he had a question about homework, someone’s dad had the answer.
Puberty hit and he was the most popular boy in school. Never mind that he had no home life. He hid the fact that he was lonesome and didn’t have parents who cared. Frequently, he steered kids away from his house and went to theirs so nobody would see how he lived.
When Drew got his first girlfriend, he didn’t know what to do with her. He’d been eleven and she was thirteen. She’d already had sex and had hinted she wanted to experiment with him. One day they ended up under the crawl space of her house, on the dirt, and she took off her dungarees and let him look at her.
She’d had a patch of downy soft hair between her legs and he recalled being excited about it. Seeing her had given him a woody like he’d never experienced with his dad’s bathroom magazines. He never had sex with her, didn’t have the education to really go about it. Looking back, he thanked God he hadn’t; he’d been way too immature to consider it. He lost his virginity two years later, to Stacy Ritter, a middle school cheerleader who’d taken one look at him and said to her friends, “I’ve got to get me some of that.”
Ever since, women had been looking at him like he was the best eye candy on the block. And sometimes he felt like just another piece that was made to satisfy.
Early on, when he started dating, he never did stuff alone with a girlfriend unless it was to have sex in his car, or her bedroom when her parents weren’t home. He always made sure they went out with other couples. It saved him from dealing with being in a relationship and dealing with real stuff. He had no experience with forming an emotional bond.
Eventually, his mother left one night and never came back home. They figured out where she was some ten years later. She’d remarried, which was illegal, since she was still married to his dad. The details of exactly what had happened were never explained to Drew. Only his dad had the answers, and he’d died a couple of years later, just before Drew signed on with the minors.
If it hadn’t been for baseball, Drew would have had a lost life, drifting in and out of one thing for another—just like his dad.
Sports saved him.
The love of the game was what pulled him up, took him into a world he didn’t fully understand.
Baseball made him a man.
Some would debate just what kind of man. He’d done so many things he regretted while playing for the majors, but a person couldn’t reverse the clock and take everything back. It was a part of who he was, what had molded him.
If it hadn’t been for that steroid story breaking wide-open—
Drew’s cell phone rang, the melody making him grimace. He really had to change that ringer.
Pushing the talk button, he said, “Tolman.”
“Drew, it’s Lynette.”
Drew stopped heading for the stands, where the parents and kids had begun to arrive.
Every time Caroline’s sister called, his pulse slowed and felt thick in his veins. Lynette took in Mackenzie after Caroline died. He always wondered if this would be the call that would send his daughter to him, and he could try and make things up to her.
“Lynette, how’re you doing?”
“Fine. You?”
“Good enough. Starting Little League today.”
“That’s nice for ya’ll,” she drawled.
He switched the cell phone from one ear to the other. A pause lingered, Drew rubbing his jaw and feeling the grit of stubble. The dead span of time was more than he could take.
“Has she changed her mind?” he asked, his chest tight.
“I told her you have a ticket for her
