Evvie Drake Starts Over(52)
“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Spring Dance!” she said into a microphone with pink baubles around the handle that was reserved for her alone. A roar. “How’s everyone enjoying it so far?” Another roar. “Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Another. “Sometimes we like to invite very special friends to play in this game, and we bend a few rules”—she leaned teasingly to one side—“to make it possible.” She glanced over at the Claws’ dugout. “We are very pleased that this year, we can welcome one of our recent arrivals in town”—the first gasps were here—“to take a turn pitching. Calcasset, give your warmest welcome to the assistant coach of the Calcasset High Hawks and our good friend, Dean Tenney.”
Eveleth saw him jog out of the dugout, and she heard the cheer that got so loud it was almost a buzz in her ear. At the pitcher’s mound, he shook Ginger’s hand, and she walked off the field, waving her pink microphone in the air and pumping her other fist. The catcher, Marco Galvez, who also worked at the Honda dealership in Thomaston, set up behind the plate, and Dean looked down at the ball in his hand. “It’s warm-ups, it’s fine,” she muttered to herself. “Just breathe.” All she heard was hollering, but her mind was still enthusiastically replaying the memory of his fingers finding the skin on her back.
He wound up. He rotated, and the ball left his hand, and 2,500 people knew that whatever this was, they could say they were there for it later.
It went thump into Marco’s mitt, and a cheer went up. Marco lobbed it back. And by the time Evvie looked up again, she saw a sea of phones in the crowd, held up, some briefly to catch a photo and then back into pockets with something like shame, some documenting with video. And some, she assumed, would soon be streaming it live, and one of those streams would be spotted and shared by someone famous, and people would stand at bus stops and sit in restaurants and pause games on their computers and mute the television because there was live streaming video of Dean Tenney, who might be about to embarrass himself by being unable to put the ball over the plate at a game where the national anthem had been sung by the seven-woman, two-man glee club from a local senior center.
She looked at Andy next to her and took a deep breath in. He reached over and squeezed her arm. Monica mouthed, “Good luck.” Evvie watched Dean successfully take a few more warm-up pitches, and then she was almost sure she saw him look into the stands. Should I wave? I definitely should not wave. Should I stand up? Should I have worn brighter colors? She rubbed her hands on her thighs and leaned forward as if to whisper in his ear. You can do it, you can do it, you’re fine.
The batter was Brian Staggs, a compact Freeport outfielder with a squatty stance and a caffeinated or otherwise sloshed cheering section. The program said he was nineteen. That meant that as a fifteen-year-old high school freshman, he had probably been watching Dean pitch for the Yankees. If he came from around here, there was a good chance he was a Red Sox kid. He might be batting against his adolescent mortal enemy. A lot of them might.
Staggs twitched the end of his bat. Dean held the ball at his chest. Evvie sucked her breath in and held it. There went the leg, the body, the arm, the ball. And there went Staggs rotating his shoulders to swing, and there went the bat in an impotent swat, and there went the ball smacking into Marco’s mitt. A fat, deep, punishing punch of a sound that would have sounded great from under the bleachers. Andy bellowed beside her, Rose and Lilly clapped their hands, and Evvie exhaled.
It was one pitch. Just one. Even at his worst, he’d sometimes been able to get off one decent pitch—he’d told her so. He’d even had a couple of passable games. But he’d also told her that very often, right away, even before his problems started, he’d known whether he had his stuff or not. He talked about it as this feeling, like the way you know someone is watching you or the way you know you’re getting a cold when you feel the first dry tickle in the back of your throat. She wondered whether he knew now.
The crowd had gone from revelers at a local charity event to aspiring witnesses to some flavor of history. They’d have been even louder if half of them weren’t texting or tweeting or using one finger to write Dean Tenney in bright blue chicken scratches and draw an arrow on a grainy eight-second video of Dean getting the ball back from Marco.
And it was not just one pitch. A crowd that regularly watches good minor-league pitchers can tell when it’s suddenly visited by very good major-league pitchers. Dean threw hard. Like, hard. His fastball was rude, thrown at guys who could only either watch it as it passed or swing at it when it already had. Staggs, Carlos Stanfield, and Mickey Cudahy all struck out. Four pitches, three pitches, and four pitches. Cudahy had been kicking around for years, and he’d even batted against Dean once years before. When the last of the four pitches to him was called a strike, Evvie saw him smile at Dean and point at him with the bat.
Dean Tenney, who had walked off the field in New York being called a fuckin’ head case, walked off the field in Calcasset, Maine, being figuratively lifted onto the shoulders of 2,500 people cheering and who knew how many glued to their phones. Marco ran out and leapt at him for a righteous chest-bump that was perfectly captured by Charlotte Penney, a ninth-grader in the front row on the first-base side. Charlotte tweeted the video, which was passed on by her cousin Brenda, then by Brenda’s boyfriend Steve, then by Steve’s dad Rick, then by Rick’s college roommate Michael McCasey, a sports journalist at a very small news site, and then by Walt Willette, a sports journalist at a very big news site. This all took four minutes.