9 Letters (5 page)

“Alright, mutt, get off
me.” Funny how I never talk to myself, but there I was talking
to my dog. “I told the pretty girl I was going to clean my
room, so I better go clean my room.”

I plugged the phone back in and
turned the music up even louder, loud enough for me to hear upstairs.
Cracked open a beer, found a trash bag from under the sink, then went
at my closet. Jeans I never wore, T-shirts I’d worn to hell and
back. Four pairs of khakis, and I couldn’t even tell you why I
owned four pairs of khakis. It’s worth keeping around some
dress pants, I get that, but four pairs of khakis? I wasn’t
going to throw out any ball caps or flannels, though. You couldn’t
toss a hat that’d been with you for years just because it was
too beat up to wear.

Even still, there was an awful
lot to get rid of. I went back downstairs for a second trash bag,
then a third. Thinking back, I was glad Natalie had fought with me
last year about coming over to take away most of Emily’s
clothes, clean up the personal items like razors and toothbrushes and
her books and knitting basket. It was good Natalie had stepped in. I
hadn’t been able to do what needed to be done. I still kept
some of Em’s things in a box in the closet, but I made sure to
avoid that box. There are some things you just don’t let go of.
When I got to the stack of our wedding photos, I held them reverently
in my hands before tucking them into the drawer of my bedside table,
where they’d be safe.

The Goodwill bags went in my
truck bed and then I tossed my jeans in the wash. I found Rae’s
number in the pocket, and before I could let myself think it over too
much, I threw it away. King was settling in just fine. We would be
okay. Another pretty girl was the last thing I needed to get myself
mixed up with.

It felt good throwing all the
clutter into those garbage bags. Everything I took out of my closet,
it was like just one little piece of weight off my soul. The same as
cleaning had been.

Maybe there was something to
those letters.

Tomorrow, I’d go out and
get some cleaning supplies, do it right.

“You saw it, though, right?
Boom, that ball is up in the air and then it’s gone, over the
fence.” I was a high school junior, and I can’t say that
anything mattered to me quite so much as how far I could knock a
baseball or how many people saw me do it.

“That wasn’t nothing
though,” Dave said.

Dave was my best friend. An
alright pitcher, too. But a better friend than a pitcher, to be
honest. We were in the hall, outside the cafeteria, waiting for first
period. It was the best place to hang out before class, and we had a
small crowd around us. Yeah, we were showing off.

“Anyone can knock a home
run. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy as shit you knocked it out
of the park when I was sitting on second. But naw, man, it was that
catch.”

“I saw that shit,”
Damon said. Damon played football. He said he hated baseball, but he
went to every game. I guess I said and did the same in reverse. “That
shit was dope, I didn’t think you were going to get it. When
you dove for it, you probably ate so much grass the cops are going to
be after you. But you came up with it and that kid was out, out, out.
End of the game, end of the line. Go home, kid.”

Damon had everyone laughing, and
everyone there who had seen the game was glad they had seen the game.
Everyone there who hadn’t, they wished they had. By the end of
the day, the story would go around so much that they’d think
they
had
seen it. They’d seen me save the day.

“Yo, you hear there’s
gonna be a scout next game?” Damon asked. He didn’t talk
much shit like the rest of us did, but he was alright. He could throw
a ball, and he always had your back.

“You’re shitting me,”
Dave said.

“That’s cool,”
I said. No big deal, just a scout. Just a chance to make something of
my life, just a chance to make a life doing what I loved.

“He’s just getting
you excited,” Dave said. “Why would he know, and we
wouldn’t?”

“No, I ain’t
shitting,” Damon said. Some of the crowd had wandered off to
their lockers. We only had a few minutes before the first bell, and
it was just us three guys left. Damon leaned in close. “Coach
Mendez came into the locker room, was talking to Coach Pike. Said
there’s going to be a scout at the next game. I think it was
the next game, mighta been the one after, I don’t know. Said he
wasn’t going to tell you fools because you’d get all
worked up about it, said he didn’t want you fucking up or
showing off or some shit like that.”

“That’s cool,”
I repeated. No big deal.

The bell rang, and I was off to
math. Math was alright, but I’d liked geometry better than
pre-calc. Geometry was good for carpentry. Pre-calc, well, there was
a guy who applied it to baseball. He liked to figure out trajectories
of swings and stuff like that. But he wasn’t very good at
batting. Geometry, that at least was practical.

“Who’re you going to
ask?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

I was sitting in English, half
paying attention, half dreaming about how I’d show off for the
scout. Jennifer Hales was sitting next to me, her blonde hair in
perfect ringlets. She and the rest of the girls on the cheerleading
squad were doing their hair in ringlets now.

“To the prom. Who’re
you going to ask to the prom?” She cracked her gum and shot me
a quizzical look.

“That’s not my
thing,” I said. I don’t dance. Sports, I feel powerful.
Dancing, I’d just feel clumsy.

“You should ask someone,”
Jennifer said.

The bell rang for lunch, which
was good because I didn’t want to think about prom anyway.

I sat down at the end of the
table, our table. Dave was across from me, the rest of the guys on
the seats beside me, and most of the girls from the cheerleading
squad were at the table across the aisle. It was all smiles when I
walked up. It was good.

Then Emily walked in.

Every head turned. Not just
because she was new. Not just because she was beautiful, either,
though it didn’t much hurt matters. No, Emily had something
else going for her—a kind of quiet, self-assured confidence
that radiated off her like sunlight. She walked with her head high
and her blue-eyed gaze steady, as if she owned the place. As if high
school was the least of her concerns, and certainly nothing to fuss
over. You couldn’t help but stare.

“Who’s that?”
Dave asked me, his voice lowered.

I didn’t know, so I leaned
over and asked Jennifer. “Who’s that?”

“Emily,” she said.
Jennifer kept track of everyone in school worth knowing. She even
kept track of the people who weren’t worth knowing, to her
credit. “Emily Jackson. Freshman. Just moved to the city. From
Kansas, I think.”

She was cute as hell, but she
wasn’t petite; there was muscle tone to her arms. She had a tan
already, and it didn’t look fake. She wore a sleeveless flannel
and had Levi’s tucked into her cowboy boots. Her hair was dirty
blonde, like she didn’t care about bleaching it, but she’d
done herself up enough to show she cared about looking good.

But cowboy boots? I mean, come
on.

“Hey,” Dave said, as
she walked by. She turned, half-nodded, kept walking.

“Nice flannel,” one
of the girls said, sarcastically.

Emily kept walking, didn’t
even turn to look at the girl who said that. Instead, she headed
away, across the cafeteria.

I watched her go.

Later that day, I was walking to
gym class and ran across the new girl at her locker.

“Hey,” I said. And
then I froze.

Talking to most girls was easy,
but Emily wasn’t most girls. She looked up at me,
expectant—and, judging by the smile playing at her lips,
slightly amused.

“Uh, I’m sorry about
that girl,” I stammered. “The one who made fun of you
like that. I didn’t catch who it was…” I started
to tell her.

“I don’t care what
those people think,” she said with a shrug.

She meant it, too. Suddenly, it
occurred to me that I wanted to be someone whose thoughts she
did
care about.

“Alright,” I said,
and since she’d turned back to her locker, I walked off feeling
like I’d somehow said the wrong thing.

Every other girl at the school
had seen me play ball—but not Emily. So instead of flirting
with me or acting like I was someone she needed to impress, she’d
sized me up as if waiting for
me
to impress
her
.
It was kind of funny. And you know what was even funnier? I wanted
to.

Two days later, I’d seen
her around and I could have sworn she had smiled at me once. But to
be honest, a girl as pretty as that, I was liable to convince myself
she was smiling at me just because I hoped she had.

I was at practice, close in
playing shortstop, where I belong in life. Crucial to the team, in
with all the action. I liked playing shortstop. School had been out
for a couple of hours or so, and practice was almost over. No one was
hitting anything anywhere near me, and I saw Emily walking through
the parking lot. I could have sworn she was stopping to check out my
truck.

A couple of the guys had newer
trucks, trucks with bigger engines, more gears. Damon drove his dad’s
dually. Sam’d had a lifted 4x4 until he’d rolled it a
couple months back. But my truck—my dad’s truck—was
something special. An ‘84 Ford F150. Nothing fancy, just a
truck that was still running fine twenty years and three hundred
thousand miles into her life. I know it’s the kind of truck
I’d
be checking out.

The ground ball rolled right past
me and it took me five, ten seconds to even register it.

To hell with it. I let that ball
stay where it was, ambled over to the parking lot. Let people yell
all they want behind me—it was just practice. I had my
priorities straight.

Emily saw me coming, and she
stopped walking. She leaned up against the tailgate of that Ford and
she put on a smile I would have killed someone for.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“My name’s Luke
Cawley,” I said.

“I know.”

When she smiled that time, I knew
it was for me.

She took me to see horses. I’m
the one who drove, but she told me where we were going. It was her
uncle’s brother-in-law’s farm, about thirty minutes out
of town, and no one was around but she swore up and down they
wouldn’t mind and Emily wasn’t the kind of girl to swear
to nothing lightly. I knew that much, right off the bat.

“You like horses?”
she asked as we pulled off the back highway, over the irrigation
ditch and onto the farm.

“I don’t know,”
I said. “Probably.”

“You’ve never ridden
a horse?” she asked.

I was worried, for just half a
second, that I’d disappointed her. But then she broke out into
that grin again. The one that lit up everything around her.

“That’s
amazing
,”
she said. “I get to put you on your first horse!”

I grinned back. It was getting
easier to talk to Emily but in that moment I didn’t know what
to say. Maybe there weren’t any right words anyhow. So I just
smiled as I drove over the grass to a good spot to park.

“I rode horses all growing
up,” she said. “I could ride before I could walk.”

“You were in the rodeo?”
I asked. Jennifer had told me that much.

“I weren’t in it,”
she said. “Wasn’t,” she corrected herself. It was
cuter the first way, though. “My mom and dad were. Dad still
is.”

“They split up?”

“Naw, but my mom says we
got to live in one place now that I’m in high school. We tried
it out in Kansas but Mom got a better job in the city so here I am.
Dad’s home often enough.”

“The rodeo, though,”
I said. It was easy to get her to talk about herself. That was even
better than doing the talking, because you can’t say the wrong
thing when you’re listening. If you only say a few things, and
you say the right ones, people will listen to you. That’s what
my dad told me.

“I’ve never known
anything else, I guess. Just horses and roads and crowds.”

There were about six horses
grazing in the field, and Emily walked up to one of them, a black and
gray one. “This is Rooter,” she said.

“Rooter?”

“You get on him, and he
doesn’t like to move. Just roots in one place, won’t
listen to anyone. So they named him Rooter.”

She started petting him between
the ears and down his neck. I must have looked nervous, because she
took my hand.

That’s when I knew she had
me. Right then. She didn’t snag me the first time I saw her,
nor the first time we talked. It was the first time we touched. Her
hand was warm but there was something more to it than that. I felt
energy going between us in a way I couldn’t explain then or
now, like us touching was its own living thing. But I didn’t
need an explanation. The magic itself, that was enough.

While I was petting Rooter, she
ran off, came back a few moments later with a saddle and some gear I
didn’t recognize.

“Wait a second,” I
said.

She put the bit in his mouth,
strapped the saddle to his back. Rooter looked bored. I probably
looked terrified.

“You said this horse
doesn’t listen to anyone.”

“He’s my favorite
horse here,” Emily said. “So I’ll teach you on
him.”

I started laughing, and she
smiled at me, and her teeth weren’t perfect but they were
perfect.

She helped me up, and she taught
me how to ride.

The sun didn’t last more
than another thirty minutes, and that went by way too quick. We were
back at the truck, and she was leaning against the tailgate like
she’d done in the parking lot, and her legs went on for miles.
And the cowboy boots? The cowboy boots made sense. They fit her.