Shug was behind him. Shug was saying something. Garrick could not hear it through the glass, but he could see Shug's face, and it was a face he had never seen on Shug Kettleman before, a twelve-year-old face, red and crumpled and wet.
Vern did not break the bat. Garrick would always remember that, and later he would understand that it mattered, that it said something about Vern, though he was never sure exactly what. Vern did not break it over his knee or smash it on the driveway. He just walked down to the end of the driveway where the trash cans stood waiting for Wednesday pickup, and he lifted the lid of one, and he set the bat in it, handle first, carefully, the way you would set an umbrella in a stand. Then he put the lid back on. Then he turned around and said something to his son. Garrick could see his mouth move. Five or six words. Then Vern walked past Shug back into the garage, and Shug stood at the end of the driveway in the July heat looking at the trash can for a long time, and then he went around the side of the house, and Garrick did not see him again that day.
Years later, on Garrick's front porch, Shug would tell him what the five or six words were. "You don't get a real bat." That was all. Not cruel, exactly. Not shouted. Just a ruling, the way an umpire calls a strike. You don't get a real bat. As if a real bat was a thing you earned, like a driver's license or a paycheck, and Shug had shown in four at-bats in Burlington that he had not earned it.
Ruthann Thiel saw the bat in the trash at four o'clock that afternoon, when she carried the kitchen garbage down to the curb, which was part of her job. She stood there for a moment with the lid in one hand. Then she looked up at the house, and the garage door was shut, and Vern's truck was gone, and nobody was watching. She lifted the bat out of the can and wiped it off on her apron and carried it back up the driveway and put it in the back seat of the Chevette around the corner on Fulton Street, under a beach towel.
On the drive home, she said to Garrick, without looking at him, "A good piece of wood shouldn't go in a landfill."