He did not say anything. He was looking at the towel in the back seat.
"I'm going to sand that name off," she said. "And then it's going to be yours. But you listen to me, Garrick. You don't carry it around in front of that family. You hear me? You don't make that boy look at it."
"I won't."
"I mean it. That's the deal."
"I said I won't."
And he did not. Not for almost four years. He kept the bat in his room, and he used it only in the basement and in the backyard and once in a while at the empty field behind the Catholic school on Sundays, and he played Little League and Babe Ruth and his freshman year of high school ball with the dented aluminum the league provided. His mother sanded off VERLIN KETTLEMAN with a sheet of fine-grit paper at the kitchen table one night, and the name came off, but the burn had gone deep into the grain, and there was a pale ghost of the letters left, so she took Vern's trick and darkened the whole spot with a wood-burning pen she borrowed from a woman at the plant. It left a brown patch the size of a matchbook. You could not read anything there. Unless you knew.
Garrick did not start carrying the bat to school until the spring of his sophomore year. He did not know exactly why. Partly because he was fifteen and growing and the school bats were too light and too short. Partly because Shug, by then, was Shug, a star, with a black Easton aluminum from a catalog in Chicago and his picture in the Gate City, and it seemed impossible that he would remember a wooden bat in a trash can from four summers ago. And partly, if Garrick was honest with himself, which he did not often have the courage to be, because some small hard part of him wanted Shug to see it. Wanted him to remember. Wanted, just once, to have something Shug Kettleman did not.
He had broken his promise to his mother. He knew that. She knew it too, the night she stood in his doorway with the laundry basket. She had looked at the bat in the corner, and she had not said anything, and that was worse than if she had.