Chapter Eleven
Five years later
September, 2022
Natalie would be going into the first grade. All the predictions her doctors had made had come true. By the age of eighteen months, she started to speak in complete sentences, such as “I would like to go outside now.” Around the same time she also rose beneath her own power and started to walk briskly throughout the whole house, without grabbing onto railings or couch armrests for support.
Nathan once again pitched for San Diego. He had turned 47 before the season started and could now say that he’d pitched in big league games over four decades: the 1990’s, the 2000’s, the twenty-teens and now the twenty-twenties. Even though San Diego released him after the 2016 season, they kept their condo in Oceanside. Suella loved to disconnect herself from everything and ride the bullet train down there with Natalie. Nathan managed to sign with Detroit for a couple of years and he bought a condo there. Suella stayed away from it during the first season. Finally, Nathan persuaded her to spend a month there the next year.
Suella had envisioned an empty ghost town with crumbling buildings from the last century hosting gangs and crankheads. Instead she saw emerald glass buildings over brightly floral walking parks with magnet trams shuttling people to work at thriving auto plants. Their first night there, Nathan had stood behind her and held her while they admired the twinkling stars in the sky outside their balcony. “See, it’s not so bad,” he said.
The next winter, Detroit released him, though he sold the condo easily.
He also found work easily, with Cleveland. Just before the all-star break they traded him to San Francisco. “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Nathan complained one night during the break. At the end of the year, he considered retiring.
Toni talked him out of it, though. During Christmas at the house she told him “Go for another year. You have a chance to be the oldest pitcher ever to play.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Jamie Moyer grabbed that honor in ’12, the prick.” he said. “If a contending team calls, maybe.”
That contending team was San Diego.
Nathan became a father figure to many of the new young pitchers on the team and he worked several times a week, pitching to one or two batters as a “spot man.” Late in the summer, the team enjoyed a comfortable lead in the standings, causing the fans to whisper “post season.”
On that September morning, he padded through the kitchen yanking on cabinet handles while Suella sat in the dining room trying to catch up on some work. “Honey, have you seen the WD40?” Nathan asked.
“It should be in those cabinets you’re looking through,” Suella told him.
Nathan stood in the middle of the tile floor and sighed, slump-shouldered. “I forgot the damn combination.”
“It’s 773,” Suella said.
“773? Damn, no wonder why I can’t get in. When did you change it to 773? I thought it was 442.”
Suella blinked “send” and closed out the program to give her husband her undivided attention. “I changed it last week. Remember? I told you. But you were on the way out the door, I guess it didn’t sink in.”
Nathan dialed the combination and opened the cabinet door. “I swear, you have to be fucking Houdini to get into any of the cabinets around here.”
“There’s a really good reason we did it that way and she’s in her bedroom napping.” Suella wanted to make sure the little girl was rested for her first day.
Later, Suella herself faced difficulty trying to sleep. She lie awake beside Nathan staring at the way the moonlight made shadows in the nooks and crannies of their colonial style beveled ceiling. How would she get along with the other children in her class? Kids were impressionable. Was there any way they would be able to tell she was slightly different from them? As the thought tumbled around in her mind like socks in an old style clothes dryer, she resolved that if the New School was too much, she could always have her transferred.
When the radio came on at five a.m., she was still wide-awake. To make herself useful, she started breakfast, preparing Natalie’s favorite: waffles with blueberries and cream. After the plate had been set for her, she entered Natalie’s bedroom, stopped to admire all the delicate, frilly, French provincial furniture and approached her daughter. Natalie lay peacefully in the center of the bed. For a moment, she simply stood and gazed at her. She looked at the way Natalie’s curly hair tumbled in waves around her shoulders, and how she always appeared so angelic an innocent when she was sleeping. She leaned down and kissed her gently on her forehead. “It’s time to wake up, baby.”
Suella held her daughter’s hand as she brought her from her bedroom to the kitchen on the other side of the house. Natalie rubbed her eyes and squinted. When she saw the place settings on the kitchen table, her eyes opened wide. “Boo-berries!” she said, jumping up and down on the tile floor.
Suella reached for her coffee while Natalie plopped down into her chair and grabbed for her knife and fork. “Wait a moment, young lady. We’ve discussed this before. What is the fruit on top of your waffles called?”
“Boo-berries,” Natalie exclaimed triumphantly while she stabbed at the waffles.
“Natalie, put your knife and fork down and look at me.”
She did exactly as she was told, causing her mother to smile inside. Her little feet, covered in her footed pajamas dangled inches from the floor.
“Today you’re going to school. Do you know what that means?”
Natalie grinned, her perfect, spaced baby teeth showing as she gazed up at the ceiling. “I am going to be with the other kids.”
“Yes. And what else?”
“We’re going to practice making numbers and letters.”
Suella wondered if she should simply stop and just lecture the child but let their game continue instead. “And what else?”
“Um, I’m going to learn about the world?”
Suella patted her daughter atop her head and responded “Yes!” enthusiastically. “You’re going to learn about the world. Now tell me again what the little pieces of fruit on top of your waffles are called.”
She looked down at the plate with the whipped cream started to melt and run over the waffles in watery trails. “Boo, I mean blue-berries.”
“Perfect,” Suella said.
“Can I eat now?”
“Yes.”
Suella watched her daughter rip the waffles and blueberries apart as if she’d been lost in the woods for a week. At least she chewed delicately, with her mouth closed.
Later, she helped Natalie put on her pink, textured tights and one of the beautiful casual chic ensembles from the closet. Suella stood back in awe when she finished.
Natalie was wearing ruffles and lace but her eyes were downcast, looking at the floor and her new matching Mary Jane shoes. Suella touched her arm. “What’s wrong darling? Do you feel all right?”
“Mommy, why do I always have to wear a dress?”
Her innocent little question knifed through Suella, and as she sat on her haunches in front of Natalie, she had to take a deep breath to regain her composure. “Because you look so beautiful in it, honey! You’ll be the prettiest girl in your class. Your mama loves you. That’s why she bought you the most beautiful clothes, to show you how much she loves you.” She traced a fingertip along the ridge of Natalie’s nose, a movement that never ceased to make her smile. Suella had spent lots of time in some of the higher-end shops on Rodeo drive to get Natalie all the clothes. With a small voice, Natalie asked “Can I wear pants some time?”
Suella thought about the pink “Kitty Cat” overalls she had bought during one of her recent shopping expeditions. “Sure darling, like when you go on a field trip with your class or chase butterflies out on the lawn.”
The New School was a private elementary school in a residential neighborhood near the business district. Suella made sure that they left the house in pl
enty of time to get to the school by eight o’clock. One could never predict how bad traffic would be. A circular drive swirled through the grounds in front of the school and a carousel of cars dropped off children by the front walk. In this way, things had changed very little in the 38 years since she’d been in first grade herself.
When Suella’s car reached the front end of the carousel, she looked down at Natalie, who’d allowed her to put silver and gold tassels in her hair at the last minute.
“This is it, honey, the start of your long journey through school.” She pushed a lock of Natalie’s hair out of her face. “I love you and want you to do well.”
Natalie looked up at Suella with a small smile that melted Suella’s heart. “I love you too, mommy.” The little girl then opened her door and lunch box in hand, skipped toward the front door of the school, where all the other children were headed. Suella sat still, watching her until she reached the door and disappeared inside. The blaring of a car horn behind her knocked her out of her reverie. She drove away from the curb and headed home, marveling that she’d kept herself together during this. A year ago, when she brought Natalie to kindergarten, she started shaking and crying when she was supposed to pull away from the curb and go home. One of the teacher’s aides rushed up to her car and invited her inside. Suella’s tears soaked through three tissues as she sat in an employee’s lounge, trying to get calm.
For now, Suella let Natalie wear her pants and overalls on the weekends. The magnet train had been finally completed a couple of years ago. They could travel to their beach house in thirty minutes, much quicker than it took to drive there. Another five minutes beyond that, they could go to the stadium to watch Nathan and his team. The games were exciting since the team was in first place and would probably go to the playoffs. On one Sunday Suella and Natalie traveled down to watch them play. They stayed up in the luxury box level with all the other wives and children of various ages. Late in the game, when Nathan came in to pitch, Suella took Natalie to the theatre seats below the box to watch closely. “Daddy throws the baseball hard!” Natalie remarked while Nathan tossed warm up throws to the catcher.
When the first player from Arizona came up to bat, he hit a high pop up to the infield. Suella smiled when she remembered what Nathan had always said about how it felt to induce the players to hit harmless pop ups.
The second batter, a white man with dark hair and retro sideburns, smashed the ball a long way, toward the fence. They watch it drop onto the dirt track between the left and center fielder. Suella knew neither of the players since it had been so many years since Nathan returned to the team.
With a runner on base, Nathan would snap his neck around to watch the player, sometimes pretending to throw to second. “Why doesn’t daddy throw the ball to the catcher?” Natalie asked.
Suella hugged the little girl sitting in her lap. “Because he doesn’t want the man to run home.” When Nathan finally did throw a pitch to home plate, the batter hit a ground ball to third. The next batter popped the ball up. Immediately after that came the seventh inning stretch. Suella wondered why she suddenly craved a cosmopolitan. “Let’s go up to the dining room, sweet pea,” she said, lifting her little girl from her lap. “Maybe we can get you an ice cream.”
“Yay!” Natalie screeched, jumping up and down as she reached for her mother’s hand. It turned out that they served dipped frozen custard cones. Though Suella still wanted a drink, she had an idea. She asked the waiter to prepare two vanilla and chocolate-dipped cones for them.
When they returned to their seats, Suella with a drink in one hand and a cone in the other, she noticed that a new pitcher was coming into the game for the eighth inning. Natalie held her cone out away from her body, as her mother had suggested, waiting until they reached their seats and settled in before she would start eating.
“I’m going to show you how to eat a dipped cone without making a mess,” Suella said, placing napkins down onto Natalie’s lap.
Natalie looked out through the glass, toward the baseball field. “Hey, that’s not daddy! Where’s daddy?”
“He’s sitting on the bench in the dugout with the other players,” Suella said, marveling to herself once again how much money her husband made for hardly any work. She brought the ice cream cone close to her lips. “Now what you do is go to the very top of the cone and break off a little piece with your teeth. Then, you lick the ice cream to keep it from dripping.”
Suella had eaten dipped ice cream cones that way since she was little, never spilling any melted ice cream or chocolate on her. Natalie chomped down around the edges of the chocolate tip, smearing chocolate dip and vanilla ice cream on her lips and chin. She smiled peacefully as she enjoyed the sweet richness of the flavors.
“Now honey, lick the ice cream so that it doesn’t melt and drip down onto your pretty pants,” Suella said.
Natalie hungrily lapped at the ice cream and a rivulet of it flowed over her lips and dribbled down, dripping off her chin onto the pile of napkins. Suella was glad she put plenty of them down there. Though dozens of people surrounded them in the seats and in the luxury box, and they were in a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, Suella felt completely alone with her daughter. Together, they nibbled at the dipped ice cream, swirling it on their tongues until they reached the stiff cake cone. By that time the napkins in Natalie’s lap held a puddle of melted ice cream.
“Very good!” Suella said, patting Natalie on the top of her head. “See how we kept it off your pants?” Next time, she vowed, she would take longer to show her daughter the step-by-step process of eating a dipped cone cleanly.
A few nights later, at home, she found Nathan sprawled over his easy chair in the den, with the television off. He was starting at the ceiling, his mouth showing a short frown. Suella had left her optical splitter in there earlier, when she searched his bookcase for a file. When she entered the room to put the book back, Nathan still stared upward.
“Pensive tonight, aren’t we?” she said.
“This is it,” he announced, his voice booming as he straightened in the chair. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Then don’t.” When he still sat, frowning, a twinge of anxiety frosted her stomach. “You meant pitching, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then retire. You know how I feel about that.” She lowered down onto the edge of the easy chair, beside Nathan’s thighs. After leaning forward to hug him quickly she sat up and stroked strands of his hair.
“It’s not easy. What’ll I do after that?”
Suella poked him playfully. “You could be a coach.”
Nathan’s eyes rolled. “What am I going to teach some rookie pitcher? How to scuff the ball with a hidden tack? How to throw a spitter?”
“You could teach them how to throw….what was that you said? Sugar strikes?”
He laughed. “Sweet strikes, hon. It’s a good thought, but nothing you can really teach.”
Suella sighed. “Then be one of those guys on TV who comments on the games,”
“A color guy? That’s funny. I’d probably say ‘Look at that fucking hit!”
and they’d have to fire me in the first week. No, I’m done with baseball. Time to move on! Maybe I can get a bit part in one of the movies Toni’s in.”
Two weeks later, he called Suella from Milwaukee: “We’re in!” A team he played on was going to the playoffs for the first time in fifteen years.