Vern looked at his son then. Shug stood very straight. He had not looked away.
"It's not mine anymore, Dad," Shug said. His voice was quiet but it did not shake. "It's his. He earned it. I'm not taking it back." He paused. "And I'm not doing the notebook tonight. I'm going to Pizza Hut with the team. I'll walk home."
There was a long silence in the gravel lot. Somewhere behind them Rene Paquette was honking a car horn in what sounded like the rhythm of "Louie Louie."
Vern Kettleman closed the green notebook. He did not say yes. He did not say no. He looked at it in his hands for a moment, a cheap spiral notebook from Ben Franklin with the corners worn soft, and then he opened the truck door and set it on the dashboard, and got in, and sat behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two. Berniece leaned over and said something to him that nobody else heard. He nodded once. He started the truck.
Before he pulled out, he rolled down the window and looked at Garrick, and at the bat, and then at his son.
"Back shoulder stayed in on that last one," he said. "That was good."
And he drove off, slowly, out of the gravel lot and up Concert Street toward the river, and Shug stood there watching the truck go until it turned the corner, and then he let out a breath that seemed to come up from somewhere around his cleats.
"I don't know what that was," he said.
"Me neither."
"I don't know if he's going to be waiting at the kitchen table when I get home."
"He might be."
"Yeah." Shug wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "Yeah. He might be. But I'll be later."
Ruthann Thiel was standing by the Chevette with her thermos and her seat cushion, and she had seen all of it, and she did not say anything about it, then or ever. She just said, "You boys want a ride to the Pizza Hut?" And they did.
Keokuk lost in the second round of districts to Davenport Assumption, eight to two, on a cold wet night the first week of June. It did not matter much. There was summer coming. There was Legion ball, and Shug was going to play it; nobody said anything more about the elevator. Garrick finished the year hitting .391. Shug finished at .268, which was not .300, and which was, Shug said, the best .268 anybody ever hit.