one. You dropped your back shoulder in the fourth.'" Shug laughed his short, unhappy laugh again. "Some nights it takes longer than the game did."
"Every game?"
"Since I was eight." Shug picked at a splinter on the step. "Sophomore year was okay. I hit everything. He'd go over it and there wasn't much to say. This year." He shrugged. "This year we're up till eleven. He's got this thing now where he says if I'm not over three hundred by the end of the season, I'm done. No summer ball, no Legion. He'll get me on at the elevator with my uncle and I can, quote, find out what hitting a bale of soybeans feels like." He shook his head. "He played, you know. Catcher. Two years at Southeastern Community College, and then he hurt his knee and that was it. He's got a box of scorebooks in the basement. He doesn't talk about it."
Garrick thought about the man in the third row with his arms folded and his green notebook. He thought about the kitchen on Plank Road where nobody laughed.
"Is that why you took it?" he said. "The bat?"
Shug was quiet for a while.
"Partly I just wanted to know if it still worked," he said. "You were hitting four hundred with it. I was hitting nothing. I thought, maybe it's the bat. Maybe it was a good bat all along and he took it and that's why. I know that's stupid. I knew it was stupid when I picked it up." He turned the splinter over in his fingers. "And partly I just wanted to hold it. That's all. I wanted to hold it one time. And I didn't know how to ask. I've never asked you for anything. I've never asked anybody for anything. I just. Take it. That's what I do." He looked at Garrick then. "You said 'not anymore.' In front of everybody. And I thought, he's right. He's absolutely right. I've been doing this to him since we were nine. And I wanted to give it back right then. And I couldn't make my hands let go."
Garrick looked out at the street. "Why'd you do it? All those years. Not the bat. All of it."
Shug took a long time to answer.
"I think," he said slowly, "because you were there. At my house. In the kitchen. Every summer. Sitting there with your book while your mom cleaned. And you saw stuff. You saw him." He swallowed. "And I couldn't stand that somebody