saw. And you were the one person in Keokuk who couldn't do anything about me. So I took stuff. Your cap. Your lunch. It was like, if I took enough, then you'd be the one who looked small, not me. Not me in that kitchen." He put his face in his hands for a second and rubbed it hard. "That's messed up. I know that's messed up. I didn't know that's why until like Friday night. I was lying in bed and it just came to me. Like a word you forgot."
The porch light buzzed. A car went by slow with the radio playing Cyndi Lauper.
"I saw it," Garrick said. "The day with the trash can. I was at the kitchen table. I saw you through the window."
Shug did not move. "I figured."
"I didn't tell anybody. Ever."
"I know. You didn't tell Amundsen, either." Shug lifted his head. "That's the part I keep thinking about. You had me. One sentence. You could have told the whole bench. And you didn't."
"It wasn't mine to tell."
"It was, though," Shug said. "It was as much yours as mine. You were there."
They sat a while longer. The night was getting colder. Somewhere down by the river a train was going over the bridge to Hamilton, a long low rumble that went on and on.
"What did he say?" Garrick asked. "That day. At the end of the driveway. I saw his mouth move."
Shug told him. "You don't get a real bat."
Garrick turned it over. Five words. They seemed so small for what they had done.
"Do you want it back?" he said.
Shug looked at him, startled. Then he looked away, out at the street, for so long that Garrick thought he was not going to answer.
"No," Shug said at last. "No. It's yours. Your mom pulled it out of the garbage. You swung it five hundred times a night in some basement, I'll bet, didn't you? You did. I can tell from your hands." He shook his head. "It stopped being mine the second he set it in that can. I just. I didn't know that till now."
"Okay."
"But I want to know what you did," Shug said. "This winter. To go from two-forty to four hundred. Because it's not the bat, Thiel. We both know it's not the bat."