Vern Kettleman looked up when Garrick got close. He was not a big man, Garrick saw, up close. He had always seemed big from the bleachers. He was maybe five foot nine, thick through the middle, with a weathered face and pale blue eyes and a bad knee he stood off of. He looked at Garrick with no expression at all.
"Help you, son?"
"Mr. Kettleman," Garrick said. His voice shook a little. He let it. "He hit the ball hard today. Four times. The fly ball in the third would've been out on a day without the wind. And he tied the game."
"I was there," Vern said. "I've got it written down."
"I know you do, sir." Garrick swallowed. Shug was staring at him. "I just wanted to say. He's not a one-ninety hitter. He never was. He's a good hitter who's been worried about the wrong thing."
Vern's face did not move. "And what's the wrong thing?"
Garrick did not answer that. He did not have to. Instead, he held out the bat. Handle first. The way you hand a knife to somebody.
"This is his," Garrick said.
Vern looked down at the bat. He did not take it. He looked at it for a long time, the ash grain, the trademark, and then, slowly, at the brown patch beside the trademark the size of a matchbook. Garrick watched him see it. Watched him understand. It moved over the man's face like a cloud shadow moving over a field, and then it was gone, and his face was still again, but it was not the same stillness.
"My mother took it out of your trash," Garrick said. "July, 1980. She sanded his name off. I've been using it ever since. I'm sorry I never told you. I'm telling you now."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Berniece Kettleman in the passenger seat put her hand flat against the window glass.
Vern reached out. He did not take the bat. He put two fingers on the barrel, just below the brown patch, and ran them a few inches down the grain, the way a man checks a board at the lumberyard, and then he took his hand back.
"I stood in that store an hour," he said. He did not say it to Garrick. He said it to the bat, or maybe to nobody. "Checking the grain."
"I know, sir," Garrick said. "He told me."