If I Was Your Girl(60)

She had made too much food like she always did. We were going to be eating leftovers for weeks. We mostly ate in silence, which could have been awkward but was somehow comforting. Mom knew I wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened and I loved her for giving me the space. Halfway through dinner I heard a scratch at the door.

“Could you let the cat in?” Mom said.

I opened the front door and the cat trotted through, giving me three loud, terse meows to register her complaint at having been made to wait. The cold, wet air was bracing after the drowsy heat inside. I stepped out to the porch and leaned against the rail with my eyes closed for just a moment, enjoying the chill. My eyes snapped open again when I heard the sound of tires crunching down the driveway. I recognized Dad’s car immediately. I didn’t say anything as he stepped out of the car with a covered casserole dish under his arm.

When he neared the porch I smelled his sweet-potato casserole with the marshmallow crust on top.

“Hi,” he said, looking rickety and out of place. He tried to smile and, despite everything in the last few weeks, I couldn’t resist smiling back at him. “Am I late?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked instead. He stopped just inside the door and looked around quietly, like our living room was a strange foreign country.

“Amanda?” Mom called from the other room. Her chair squeaked and I heard her feet coming from around the corner. “Is someone—oh.” She froze when she rounded the corner. Dad finished taking off his coat and waved sheepishly.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said. I leaned against the back of the couch and looked back and forth between them, waiting for the detonation. I had always wondered what would happen if they ever saw each other in person again, and the most likely outcome seemed to be a full thermonuclear exchange. Instead, Dad said, “Your home is lovely,” and Mom replied, “Thank you. Come join us.”

The conversation didn’t improve much when Dad joined us, but that was okay. We finished the meal in silence and Mom started to clear away the dishes. Dad got up to help but I touched his forearm to get his attention.

“Actually,” I said, “could we go for a walk? Rain’s been gone for a few hours.…”

“Yeah?” Dad said.

“I just thought,” I said, “there’s a baseball diamond they keep lit at night.” Dad stood there, holding a stack of plates, blinking slowly. “We could, you know, play catch … if you still want to.”

“Oh,” Dad said. He put the plates down and thought for a moment. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“I’d like that,” Dad said.

Mom was more than happy to keep us out of the kitchen, since she had her own arcane way of loading the dishwasher that nobody could ever get quite right. The gloves and ball were in an old box, unused and dusty after more than a decade. The squelching and slipping as our boots worked their way through the wet leaves and muck made me glad my ankle had almost completely healed. Dad was silent for the entire walk, staring from the sky to me and back again.

“Something on your mind?” he said.

“A lot.”

“That’s understandable.” Dad shoved his hands in his pockets and stared up at the streetlamps.

We arrived at the baseball diamond, the mist making the light from the floodlights weak and pale. He stood where the batter would stand and I stood on the pitcher’s mound, mitt on my left hand and ball in my right.

“Why do I have to wear the mitt on my left hand?” I said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to catch with my right?”

“Sure,” Dad said, “but can you throw with your left?”

“Oh,” I said, nodding. I hauled back, cocked my arm, and threw the baseball to him as hard as I could. It sailed over him and a few feet to the left, clanking into the chain link fence protecting the bleachers. “Oops! Sorry.”

I saw him smiling as he jogged back into position and couldn’t help laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he said, tossing the ball in the air absentmindedly.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just sometimes I wonder what my past self would think if she saw me, and I wondered what our past selves would think if they saw us right now.” He thought about it for a moment, his smile widening more and more, until we both snorted and the laughter popped out of us. We carried on like that for a little while, him throwing, me failing to catch, me throwing so wildly that he had to duck out of the way or run halfway across the field to retrieve the ball.

“So when your mother and me talked before you came to live with me,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence, “she told me your therapist said you were real fragile after what happened last summer, at the mall. I wouldn’t—” he started and faltered. “If anything like that ever happened now…”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging. “I think maybe I’m stronger than that now.”

Dad nodded, the relief plain on his face. “I think maybe you’re right.”

“Yeah?”

“The girl who moved in with me wouldn’t have been okay after that homecoming dustup.” I nodded, thinking of the shocked faces of my classmates in the dim light of the gymnasium, the twisting in my gut when Grant said It’s not true, right?, the horror of racing away from Parker in the darkened woods. “Dustup” seemed like an understatement.