of your mother on her knees on the Kettlemans' kitchen linoleum with a bucket and a brush, and you understand, without anyone ever telling you, that the Kettlemans are the kind of people who could make that picture go away. And that if they did, the light bill would not get paid.
Nobody ever told him that. Ruthann would have been horrified if she had known he thought it. But he thought it for seven years, and it worked on him the way water works on limestone, slowly and completely, until the shape of not saying anything was just the shape of him.
The bat came on a Tuesday in July of 1980.
Shug had turned twelve that June, and for his birthday Vern Kettleman had driven to the sporting goods store in Quincy, across the river in Illinois, and bought him a real wooden Louisville Slugger, the 125, the same model the big leaguers used, the same model Garrick had seen in the glass case at Western Auto and had stood in front of for so long that the clerk asked him if he needed help. Vern had taken the bat out to the garage and, with a wood-burning pen he used for marking his tools, burned his son's name into the barrel just below the trademark. Not Shug. Verlin. VERLIN KETTLEMAN, in neat capital letters, because Shug was a nickname from a baby who used to say "sugar" for every sweet thing, and Vern did not believe in nicknames on things that mattered.
Shug carried that bat to the Babe Ruth all-star game in Burlington on the fourth Saturday of July. Garrick was there, in the bleachers, because his mother had a rare Saturday off and he had begged. He watched Shug go oh-for-four. Two strikeouts, a pop-up to the catcher, a weak grounder back to the mound. Nobody went four-for-four in an all-star game against the best twelve-year-olds in the region, and nobody much cared, except that on the drive home Vern Kettleman did not say a single word, and Shug told Garrick years later that the silence in that pickup truck was the loudest thing he had ever heard.
The following Tuesday, Garrick was at the Kettlemans' kitchen table with a library copy of The Hobbit, and his mother was vacuuming the den, and through the window over the sink he saw Vern Kettleman come out of the garage carrying the bat.