Garrick sat at the far end of the bench with the bat across his own knees and his ear ringing. Shug sat at the other end, by the water cooler, in the good spot, and stared out at the field. They did not look at each other for the rest of the inning.
And here is what nobody in that dugout knew, except the two of them. Here is the part that would take the rest of the spring to come out, and some of it would never come out at all.
The bat was Shug's.
Or it had been. Once. For about six weeks, in the summer of 1980, when they were both twelve.
Ruthann Thiel had cleaned the Kettleman house on Tuesdays and Fridays for nine years. It was not on Grand Avenue with the limestone houses. It was a split-level ranch out on Plank Road with a two-car garage and a basketball hoop over the door and a lawn Vern Kettleman mowed in perfect diagonal stripes every Saturday morning at seven, and Berniece Kettleman, Shug's mother, worked as a teller at the State Central Bank and did not have time to clean it herself and did not like anyone to know that she paid someone to. So Ruthann came in through the side door by the garage, and she parked her blue Chevette around the corner on Fulton Street, and when Garrick was too young to stay home alone in the summers he came with her and sat at the Kettlemans' kitchen table with a coloring book or a library book or, when he got older, a transistor radio turned down low to the Cubs game out of WGN.
That was how it started, really, the whole long before. That was why Garrick had never said anything. Because when you are nine years old and your mother cleans a boy's house, and that boy takes your red cap off your head in the dugout at Rand Park and puts it on his own and says, "This looks better on me, huh?" you do not say anything. You do not say anything because somewhere in your nine-year-old mind there is a picture