The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words STERLING HOUSE on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other — an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.
‘Which one is Sully-John?’ I asked. She looked at me, a little surprised . . . but with the smile. In any case, I thought I already knew. Sully-John would be the one with the broad shoulders, the wide grin, and the tumbled black hair. It reminded me of Stake’s hair, although the boy had obviously run a comb through his thatch. I tapped him. ‘This one, right?’
‘That’s Sully,’ she agreed, then touched the face of the other boy with her fingernail. He had a sunburn rather than a tan. His face was narrower, the eyes a little closer together, the hair a carroty red and mowed in a crewcut that made him look like a kid on a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. There was a faint frown-line on his brow. Sully’s arms were already muscular for a kid’s; this other boy had thin arms, thin stick arms. They were probably still thin stick arms. On the hand not slung around Carol’s shoulders he was wearing a big brown baseball glove.
‘This one’s Bobby,’ she said. Her voice had changed, somehow. There was something in it I’d never heard before. Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? ‘Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then. Not so long ago, 1960, but it seems long ago.’
‘What happened to him?’ I was somehow sure she was going to tell me he had died, this boy with the narrow face and the crewcut carrot-top.
‘He and his mom moved away. We wrote back and forth for awhile, and then we lost touch.
You know how kids are.’
‘Nice baseball glove.’
Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver — the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale.
‘That was Bobby’s favorite thing. There’s a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?’
‘There was.’
‘That’s what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.’
‘Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.’
‘Bobby’s got stolen,’ Carol said. I’m not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I’ve heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. ‘Willie took it.’
‘Willie?’
‘Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn’t by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby’s glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby’s address in Massachusetts and I’d send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was his glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He’d erased Bobby’s — best as he could, anyway — and printed his own over where it had been. But I could still see the bby, from Bobby.’
A creepy sort of indignation had crept into her voice. It made her sound younger. And look younger. I suppose my memory could be wrong about that, but I don’t think it is. Sitting there on the edge of the white light from the dining hall, I think she looked about twelve. Thirteen at the most.