time looking at the bat in the corner by the window, with the streetlight from Concert Street falling across the brown patch where the name had been, and he thought that the word "anymore" was even bigger than he had known when he said it. It was not only Shug who had been taking things for seven years. Garrick had been giving them away. Silence was a thing you could give away, too, a little at a time, until you did not have any left.
Shug came to the house on Sunday night.
Garrick heard the truck before he saw it, a rattle in the street and then the engine cutting off, and when he looked out the front window there was Vern Kettleman's old red Ford pickup parked at the curb on Concert Street with Shug sitting behind the wheel not getting out. He sat there for almost ten minutes. Garrick watched him from behind the curtain the way, he realized, Berniece Kettleman must have watched from hers. Then he went out and sat on the porch steps, because it seemed like somebody had to go first.
After a while the truck door opened and Shug came up the walk with his hands in his jacket pockets. He stood at the bottom of the steps.
"My dad thinks I'm at Ty's," he said.
"Okay."
"I just. I don't know." Shug looked up and down the street, at the plaster deer on the corner, at the Hy-Vee sign glowing two blocks down. "Can I sit?"
Garrick moved over. Shug sat on the step below him, which put them about eye to eye, and for a while neither of them said anything. It was a cool night and you could smell the river, that wide brown muddy smell that got into everything in Keokuk in the spring.
"He keeps a notebook," Shug said.
Garrick waited.
"My dad. A spiral notebook, the green kind, from Ben Franklin. He's got one for every season since Little League. He writes down every at-bat. Every pitch, almost. Ball, strike, foul, what I swung at, where it went. He sits in the third row and writes it all down and then when we get home he sits at the kitchen table and goes over it with me. Every game. Line by line. 'Why'd you swing at that one. Why'd you take that