in the first inning and then noticed, in the third, that his mother had moved. She was not in the top row anymore. She was sitting in the third row, at the very end, next to Berniece Kettleman. They were not talking. They were just sitting there side by side, two women in their forties with their purses on their laps, watching the same ball game. Garrick did not know what to make of it. He decided he did not have to make anything of it. Some things you just let be.
Shug went oh-for-two in the first four innings. A strikeout and a fly ball to the warning track in center that the Burlington outfielder caught with his back against the fence. Garrick could see him in the dugout afterward, sitting on the bench, his hands opening and closing. He could see Vern in the third row, writing.
Garrick got a single in the first and walked in the fourth. Keokuk trailed five to three going into the bottom of the seventh, which in high school ball is the last inning, and the Burlington pitcher, a tall left-hander with a mustache he was clearly proud of, had thrown a lot of pitches and was starting to hold his elbow between batters.
Pinky Brockway led off the seventh and walked. Ty Vosberg bunted him to second. Rene Paquette grounded out to the right side, and Pinky went to third. Two outs. Runner on third. Keokuk down two.
And Garrick Thiel came up, with the bat.
He would remember that at-bat later, in a way he would not remember most things that happened to him. Not the pitches so much. The sound. The way three hundred people went quiet in pieces, like lights going off in a house one room at a time. The smell of the cut grass and the river. The left-hander looking in for the sign with his glove up over his mustache. And the bat in his hands, the ash 125, thirty-three inches, thirty-one ounces, the grain tight and straight, the brown patch the size of a matchbook just above his top hand.
He took the first pitch for a ball. He fouled the second one straight back. The third was a curveball that started at his hip and broke over the inside corner, and the umpire rang him up for strike two, and somebody in the Burlington bleachers whooped.
He stepped out. He looked down at the bat.