The Bookseller(25)

I nod. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Of course, there are no baseball stories for nine-year-olds who can’t read. I look through our catalogs, I go back to Decker, and I even make a trip to the downtown library—my second time there in as many weeks, I note, and the reasons couldn’t be more different. But I find no stories that would appeal to Greg.

So I decide to write some for him.

I start by asking him questions. “How exactly does the game work, Greg? What are the rules?”

He rolls his eyes. “Everyone knows the rules of baseball, Miss Miller.”

“Well, pretend that I don’t. Pretend you’re explaining it to someone who’s never heard of baseball. Maybe someone from another country, where they don’t play baseball.”

He looks astounded. “Don’t they play baseball everywhere?”

I smile and shake my head. “Actually, they do not.”

It’s a warm evening, and we’re sitting on my porch, he on the railing and me in my aluminum rocker. I have a notebook in my lap. As he talks, I take notes on what he says.

“In major-league baseball, there are two leagues, the American League and the National League,” he tells me. “The best team in the National League right now is the San Francisco Giants. They’re a shoo-in for the series.”

“The series?”

He scoffs at me. “The World Series, Miss Miller.” He looks up, thoughtful. “You know . . . it’s funny that they call it the World Series, if they don’t even play baseball all over the world.” He shrugs. “I’ve never thought about that before.”

I smile again. “Neither have I, actually.”

“Anyway,” he goes on, turning back to me. “My favorite player is Willie Mays. He’s colored, and some kids at school say you shouldn’t like him because he’s colored, but that’s just stupid, if you ask me.” His eyes narrow. “If a player can hit the ball, who cares what color his skin is? Not me. You should see Willie Mays hit. He can send it screaming out of Candlestick Park—that’s where the Giants play, in San Francisco.” Greg looks up at the twilit sky. “I would give anything—anything—just once, to sit in a major-league ballpark and see Mays hit a home run.”

“Anything,” I repeat, scribbling in my notebook. “Wouldn’t that be something?”


Two nights later, I knock on the Hansens’ door. Greg answers.

“I’m sorry the pictures are so basic,” I tell him as I hand him a set of stapled, handwritten pages. “I’m no artist. But I thought you’d enjoy this story anyway.” I smile. “And even if the drawings are terrible, it’s nice to have some pictures to go with the story.” Unlike the first books I tried to read with him—the books by Beverly Cleary, and the Hardy Boys stories—in the book I’ve written for Greg, I have included drawings, minimal as they are, on each page.

Greg shuffles through the pages. “It’s about baseball,” he says, scanning the artwork and maybe—maybe!—even the words.

I nod.

“It’s about Willie Mays.” He turns page after page. “I know how to read his name from the headlines in the sports section of the newspaper. You wrote a story about Mays . . . and . . . and . . .” He looks more closely at the pages. “And my name is in it, too.” He looks up. “What am I doing in the story?”

“Well.” I smile. “I guess you’ll have to read it to find out.”

“I’ve never seen a book about baseball that I could read.” Greg is beaming. “And I’ve never seen a story that had Willie Mays and me in it.”

I reach into my dress pocket and pull out another item: a stack of about twelve index cards. I have punched a hole in each card and tied them together with a string. On each card, I’ve written a single word: bases, pitcher, strike, catcher. For each word, I’ve drawn a picture—again, terribly basic—that illustrates what the word means. “These cards will help you read the book,” I explained to Greg. “If you get stuck on a word, look in this stack of cards and see if you can find it. Once you learn to recognize these words every time you see them, reading will get easier, because you won’t have to stop to think about words you already know.”

He takes the card stack I hold out to him, closes the book, and puts both items under his arm. “Thank you, Miss Miller,” he tells me. “I can’t wait to get started on this.”

His words are music to my ears.


Besides the joy of teaching a child to read, there is another benefit: for more than a week now, the dreams have disappeared. Each night of that week, I sleep well, solidly, like a stone, without any dreams.

During the day, my energy level skyrockets. I hustle around the store, rearranging everything and creating a fall display in the window: leaves that I cut from red, yellow, and brown construction paper and scatter artistically (or so I tell myself) about the window shelf, best sellers that I set up in display racks, and a banner I’ve made: COLD WEATHER IS COMING! COZY UP WITH A GOOD BOOK!

Frieda rolls her eyes and tells me I’m getting downright annoying. “I liked you better when you were as grumpy as me,” she says.

“I’ll take it into consideration,” I reply.