Shug stared at him. The furnace kicked on with a whoosh and the bulb swayed a little on its cord.
"You've been swinging at the third row," Garrick said quietly. "Not at the ball."
Shug did not say anything for a long moment. Then he turned back to the carpet square and set his feet and took a swing, short and flat and level, and the bat went through the air under the joists with a sound like cloth tearing, and he stood there at the end of it with his hands out in front of him, looking at them like they belonged to somebody else.
"Again," Garrick said.
He swung again.
They were down there until a quarter to eleven. When Ruthann's Chevette pulled into the driveway, Shug went up the bulkhead stairs and out the back way and around the side of the house to his father's truck, and Garrick put the bat back in the corner of his room and turned off the light. His mother came up the hall and stopped in his doorway and sniffed.
"Why does it smell like a locker room in here?"
"Shug came over," Garrick said into the dark.
There was a long pause.
"Well," Ruthann said finally. "Open a window." And she went on down the hall, and he could have sworn, though he could not see her face, that she was smiling.
He came back on Tuesday, and on Thursday, and the Sunday after that. He always parked the red Ford around the corner on Exchange Street, which Garrick noticed and did not mention, because he knew exactly why a person would park a car around a corner. They did not talk much. They swung. Sometimes Shug talked about his father, a sentence here and there between swings, and sometimes Garrick talked about the Kettlemans' kitchen and what it had looked like from the table, and neither of them made a big thing of it. It was easier to say true things when you were looking at a carpet square and not at each other.
At practice they played catch in warm-ups because Coach had told them to. The first week it was stiff, both of them throwing too hard, like an argument with a ball. By the second week it was just catch. Rene Paquette