Fragile Beasts (45 page)

No one came up and tried to wake me for dinner. That must mean Miss Jack realizes I’m genuinely upset with her.

We have a very exact dinnertime here and no one is ever allowed to be late. The first few times Klint and I missed it, Miss Jack came up here herself, rapping sharply on our doors and giving us lectures about punctuality and consideration for others.

Once after that, Luis snuck up here to try and save us from her wrath, but Miss Jack heard him and gave him as big a scolding as she gave us.

After that if I was ever late, I’d get a note slipped under my door that read, “Anda ya!” I’m pretty sure that’s Spanish for move your ass.

I open my door as quietly as possible and tiptoe down the hall.

I stop at Klint’s door and tap lightly.

“Klint,” I whisper.

I try the knob and it opens without a problem.

His room’s totally dark. He even has the curtains pulled shut so no moonlight can get in.

I let my eyes adjust. I can make out his shape stretched out on the bed on top of the covers. He’s still wearing his dirty clothes from practice, including his ball cap.

“Hey, you asleep?”

He doesn’t respond, and I walk over to him.

“We missed dinner. I’m gonna go get something to eat. You want something?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?” I ask a little uneasily.

He doesn’t say anything this time.

Normally, I say good night to Miss Jack at ten. She’s usually sitting in the sunroom or her parlor where she gets Luis to light a fire and she reads a book, although more and more often she’s asleep when I come into the room. She says it’s hard for her to read as much now because her eyes give out.

Now that the weather’s getting warmer, some nights I find her sitting on her porch wearing her funny old coat and the scarf I gave her with her hands folded in her lap staring straight ahead like she’s waiting for a bus.

She has a huge house but hardly uses any of the rooms. She’s got millions of dollars but never spends any of it. She’s got brains and wisdom but hardly ever shares any of her knowledge because she doesn’t like being with anyone.

Sometimes I think she’s the loneliest person in the world. Even lonelier than me.

I don’t want to talk to her tonight. It’s not because I’m mad at her for not telling us Mom was coming. I’m over that. She shouldn’t have done it, but she didn’t know any better.

I’m avoiding her because I’m not good at asking for favors and I need to ask her for a big one.

I get to the bottom of the staircase and I’m about to take the back way to the kitchen so I don’t have to go anywhere near the parlor or the sunroom when I happen to look toward the front door and see colorful lights dancing outside the glass like bits of fire made from rainbows.

I have to check it out.

Every single candle is lit on the porch. It seems like hundreds of them. They sit inside mosaic glass holders of all different shapes and sizes and as they burn, brilliant colors flash everywhere. It’s like standing inside a kaleidoscope.

Miss Jack is sitting in the middle of it wearing her coat and scarf and staring off into the velvety black night searching for her bus.

Mr. B is with her, sitting upright in one of the wicker chairs, his eyes big and yellow, his head jerking from side to side as he follows the flickering lights.

“Hey, Miss Jack,” I greet her. “The candles are cool.”

“Yes, they are,” she says.

“It must’ve taken a while to light them all.”

She keeps looking ahead and not at me.

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I shouldn’t have interfered. You and your brother are old enough to decide if you want to see your mother or not.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m not so sure that it is. How is your brother?”

“He won’t come out of his room but I talked to him. He’s okay.”

“I had met your mother once before but I’d never seen her with the two of you. I have to say the effect she has on your brother is very disturbing.”

“Yeah.”

“Have they always been like that?”

“No. Things got weird between them, I don’t know, maybe a year or two before she left.”

“Weird in what sense?”

“I don’t know. They just sort of stopped liking each other. Then after she left, he started hating her.”

I walk over to Mr. B. I’ve stopped being sore at him, but he’s still sore at me for having the nerve to be sore at him. He looks up at me like I must be kidding if I think he’s going to share his chair.

I pick him up, sit down, and plunk him on my lap. He starts to purr instead of trying to break free and run off. He is getting old.

“I don’t like to be wrong,” Miss Jack tells me.

“Who does?”

I pet Mr. B until he gets tired of it and jumps down off my lap.

This is the perfect opportunity to talk to her and as much as I’d like to just say good night and go grab some food, I know I’ll regret it if I don’t take care of this now.

“I know we’ve had our ups and downs, and I know Klint and I haven’t really been the most grateful people in the world.” I start talking before I’m sure what I’m going to say.

“Especially Klint,” I add smiling.

She doesn’t smile.

“But we’ve really appreciated you letting us stay here. More than we could tell you even if we tried.”

I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and let everything come out in a rush.

“Can we keep living with you? Just for another year. I mean, I can go live with my mom but Klint won’t do it.

“He’s going to graduate next year and go to college. His grades aren’t great
right now but his game is on. Something’s gonna happen for him. Something has to happen.

“Please,” I finish.

“Por favor,” I think to add.

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She doesn’t look at me, either. I’m beginning to wonder how long I’m obligated to sit there. What is the required time period in polite society for enduring rejection before one may go to his room and curse?

“As long as I have a home, you and your brother will have a home,” she says.

“Thanks, Miss Jack.”

I jump up from my seat. For the first time ever, I’m tempted to hug her but even though she’s a mentally powerful woman, her physical self always strikes me as frail, like a hug or a hearty handshake might break all her bones.

I walk over and give her a kiss on the cheek instead.

She smells like lilac and baby powder, and her skin against my lips feels soft like tissue paper.

“Luis left your dinner in the kitchen,” she tells me. “You’ll need to heat it up.”

“Thanks.”

I rush back inside but turn around at the door to see the candles once more.

Miss Jack takes a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and raises it to her eyes.

A
couple weeks go by and we don’t hear anything else from Mom. I don’t hear anything from Starr or Shelby, either.

Miss Jack gave me an update about Starr, though. She’s really in India this time, and no one knows when she’s coming back. This information should have been enough to make me abandon all hopes of having sex with her again, but instead I’ve started fantasizing about doing it with her in front of the Taj Mahal.

Miss Jack also told me that Shelby’s very busy with school, which I know is bull because Shelby coasts through school because she’s smart, and the teachers like her, and she’s Cam Jack’s daughter. Talk about having all the odds in your favor.

Even if she was busy, she could still find time to answer my texts. She’s obviously mad at me and the only reason I can come up with is Starr told her about us, but I don’t know why that should make her mad.

I’d be her boyfriend in a minute. She has to know that. If I made it any more obvious I’d be stalking her.

All I can figure is even though she’s not interested in me, that doesn’t mean she wants me to stop being interested in her.

From what I’ve seen of girls, they want to be wanted but they don’t want to be taken. They’re like delicious pastries in a display case that would rather stay behind glass and be admired than be taken out and gratefully devoured by someone starved for sweets.

Shelby can be mad at me, even if it’s for a stupid reason, but she can’t hide from me. One thing I hate is people who get mad at you and won’t tell you why. It’s what my mom did.

Since Shelby’s not playing fair with me, I decide to do the same thing to
her. I know it’s wrong and it’s mean, but I sent her a text last night telling her Klint wanted her to come to his game today.

She didn’t write back. Now I’m waiting to see if she shows up.

Today’s a big game because the Flames are playing Laurel Falls, one of the only teams that have a chance of spoiling their undefeated season.

Like a lot of towns around here that have scenic names, Laurel Falls is misleading. Hearing it conjures up images of a picturesque village nestled in a valley full of flowering trees and a babbling brook ending in a silvery waterfall. The reality is a sooty gray shuttered town that’s been dying for forty years. The only color comes from the red and yellow McDonald’s and the bright orange rust streaks on the water tower.

There’s still enough people there to have a small high school, but I have no idea what they do to make a living. Considering the poverty and bleakness of the place, I expected the residents to be frail and skinny like prisoners of war, but they were meant to be farmers and miners—strong, robust men who did hard physical labor—and instead of their bodies surrendering to disuse and shriveling up to nothing, they’ve mutated into something even bigger than before from the amount of junk food they consume and the amount of bitterness they swallow.

Their baseball team is made up of kids who spent countless hours standing in their backyards looking at the abandoned mining complex on the hillside that no longer employed their fathers and hitting rocks with their chipped, hand-me-down L’il Slugger bats before they were even old enough to go to school.

Their star pitcher is a guy whose dad used to make him throw golf balls through a Campbell’s soup can, with the top and bottom cut off, hung on its side from a tree, until his arm needed to be iced and then he was allowed to go inside and watch cartoons.

The other thing they’ve got going for them is everyone on their high school team has been playing together since they were little kids. No one ever leaves Laurel Falls, and no one ever moves in.

Big schools like Centresburg that have a lot of different middle schools feeding into them pick their varsity squads from guys who might have been playing against one another up until a few years earlier.

They can’t read each other’s minds. They don’t know exactly how each one
of them is going to react to a ball in play. And they’re also usually plagued with hotshots only concerned about their own stats, trying to be stars.

Not Laurel Falls. Their team is a well-oiled machine, and each man is a perfectly functioning and strategically placed cog or gear, but even so they’re not best known for finesse plays or outsmarting the offense. They’re known for hitting the cover off the ball.

The stands are crowded. It’s a perfect day for a baseball game. Everyone’s in short sleeves and enjoying the sun. A lot of fair-weather fans have showed up along with our usuals: Coach Hill’s daughters but no Mrs. Hill; the Mann clan; Cody Brockway’s dad who can only come to games when Cody’s mom’s not here because of the restraining order; Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, arriving separately and leaving separately but sitting together and talking to other people.

Mrs. Richmond is wearing the cotton-candy pink tracksuit she always breaks out near the end of the season along with her matching pink visor and her huge sunglasses. In the past I’ve looked forward to this moment—Brent’s mom is pretty hot—but today I’m too distracted thinking about seeing Shelby again and worrying about Klint.

I’m not worried about Klint playing. He’s having the season of his life and for Klint, that’s saying a lot since he’s never had a bad one.

Serious college recruiting doesn’t usually start until summer but scouts have already been contacting him, and a few have even showed up at some of his games from as far away as Texas. They all say they’re concerned about his grades, but no one has ever mentioned that he has to bring them up.

Considering all this I was amazed when he accepted Coach Pankowski’s invitation last week and agreed to go check out the team at Western Penn.

I had a great time. Everyone was nice, and there were a lot of cute girls walking around. Even the dorm rooms weren’t bad. They weren’t any smaller than the one Klint and I used to share before Mom left with Krystal and we each got our own.

But the best part was listening to Coach Pankowski explain his baseball philosophy. He’s trying to build a winning team just like every other coach, but he’s not recruiting based solely on talent. He uses a criteria he calls the 3Ps: potential, personality, physical conditioning.

When he said this, I told him Klint would fail the personality part. Klint just glared at me.

Coach laughed and said it didn’t mean he was looking for someone with loads of personality, it meant he took each player’s individual personality into consideration when designing his team. Would a guy fit in well with the other players and more important, was he decent, smart, and motivated? Where did he come from? What was his family like? What kind of goals did he have?

I didn’t comment on any of that.

Coach was very proud of the potential part of his 3Ps. He showed us statistics on some of his players. He had about a half dozen who’d only had average records in high school but were top guns now. He said the key was being able to see what a guy was capable of doing if given the right motivation and the right training, and then given the freedom to use his knowledge to become the kind of player he wanted to be. He didn’t believe in cookie-cutter coaches who tried to mold a team of identical baseball drones using a single unbendable, one-dimensional coaching style.

I glanced over at Klint when Coach Pankowski mentioned this. I knew we were both thinking of Coach Hill and his coaching style: instilling fear. But I was thinking Coach Hill was wrong while Klint was thinking he was right.