she had to work and Ted was retired. Except Ted had to stay clear of the low men in the yellow coats, and that was a full-time job. The fact that they didn’t exist wasn’t the point. Ted believed they did . . . but had come out to see him play just the same.
‘Probably some dirty old man wanting to put a suckjob on one of the little kids,’ Harry Shaw said. Harry was small and tough, a boy going through life with his chin stuck out a mile. Being with Bill and Harry suddenly made Bobby homesick for Sully-John, who had left on the Camp Winnie bus Monday morning (at the brain-numbing hour of five A.M .). S-J
didn’t have much of a temper and he was kind. Sometimes Bobby thought that was the best thing about Sully — he was kind.
From Field C there came the hefty crack of a bat — an authoritative full-contact sound which none of the Field B boys could yet produce. It was followed by savage roars of approval that made Bill, Harry, and Bobby look a little nervously in that direction.
‘St Gabe’s boys,’ Bill said. They think they own Field C.’
‘Cruddy Catlicks,’ Harry said. ‘Catlicks are sissies — I could take any one of them.’
‘How about fifteen or twenty?’ Bill asked, and Harry was silent. Up ahead, glittering like a mirror, was the hotdog wagon. Bobby touched the buck in his pocket. Ted had given it to him out of the envelope his mother had left, then had put the envelope itself behind the toaster, telling Bobby to take what he needed when he needed it. Bobby was almost exalted by this level of trust.
‘Look on the bright side,’ Bill said. ‘Maybe those St Gabe’s boys will beat up the dirty old man.’
When they got to the wagon, Bobby bought only one hotdog instead of the two he had been planning on. His appetite seemed to have shrunk. When they got back to Field B, where the Wolves’ coaches had now appeared with the equipment cart, the bench Ted had been
sitting on was empty.
‘Come on, come on!’ Coach Terrell called, clapping his hands. ‘Who wants to play some baseball here?’
That night Ted cooked his famous casserole in the Garfields’ oven. It meant more hotdogs, but in the summer of 1960 Bobby Garfield could have eaten hotdogs three times a day and had another at bedtime.
He read stuff to Ted out of the newspaper while Ted put their dinner together. Ted only wanted to hear a couple of paragraphs about the impending Patterson-Johansson rematch, the one everybody was calling the fight of the century, but he wanted to hear every word of the article about tomorrow night’s Albini-Haywood tilt at The Garden in New York. Bobby thought this moderately weird, but he was too happy to even comment on it, let alone complain.
He couldn’t remember ever having spent an evening without his mother, and he missed her, yet he was also relieved to have her gone for a little while. There had been a queer sort of tension running through the apartment for weeks now, maybe even for months. It was like an electrical hum so constant that you got used to it and didn’t realize how much a part of your life it had become until it was gone. That thought brought another of his mother’s sayings to mind.
‘What are you thinking?’ Ted asked as Bobby came over to get the plates.
‘That a change is as good as a rest,’ Bobby replied. ‘It’s something my mom says. I hope she’s having as good a time as I am.’
‘So do I, Bobby,’ Ted said. He bent, opened the oven, checked their dinner. ‘So do I.’
The casserole was terrific, with canned B&M beans — the only kind Bobby really liked —
and exotic spicy hotdogs not from the supermarket but from the butcher just off the town square. (Bobby assumed Ted had bought these while wearing his ‘disguise.’) All this came in a horseradish sauce that zinged in your mouth and then made you feel sort of sweaty in the face. Ted had two helpings; Bobby had three, washing them down with glass after glass of grape Kool-Aid.