“Fine. Then tell her I swung by.” With a scathing smile, Jo added, “I’d stay and wait, but you might take up throwing knives next.”
Once again, he watched her ponytail shake with fuming steps away from him. She certainly had a knack for jumping straight into his line of fire.
“Hold on,” he called out weakly. Her shoulder flinched, indicating she’d heard him, but she didn’t stop.
He marched after her. “It wasn’t you, okay?”
Ignoring him, she opened the front door. He caught hold of her sleeve.
“Jo, please.”
She didn’t face him, but her feet held.
“I just got a lot on my plate, with baseball and finals and … everything.”
Gradually she wheeled around. Her bronze eyes gave him a once-over. “That supposed to be an apology?”
TJ found himself without a response. He had lost the skill of presenting a proper sorry. It was tangled up in the net of regrets that a million apologies couldn’t change.
“You’re welcome to stay”—he gestured behind him—“if you wanna wait for Maddie.” Padding the peace offering, he told her, “No knife throwing, I swear.”
A reluctant smile lifted a corner of her mouth. She glanced past him and into the house, considering. “I dunno.”
Man, was she going to make him crawl over hot coals for her forgiveness?
“Looks like we’ve both been cooped up too much,” she said. “Come on.” She waved a hand to usher him down the steps.
He had to admit, it was a nice night. From the smells of leaves burning and cookies baking next door, he sensed his stress dissolving, making her offer tempting. Still, he felt the tug of obligation, recalled the equations that weren’t going to solve themselves.
“Stop your fretting,” Jo said. “Your books aren’t gonna run off. Or your pencil—wherever it landed.”
He gave in to a smile. “All right, all right. Let me grab a jacket.”
TJ glued his gaze to the asphalt to avoid the lineup of houses they passed. It wasn’t the string of gingerbread cutouts that made him want to scream, but the normalcy.
Middle class to upper class, nearly every ethnicity peppered the neighborhood—Russians, Mexicans, Jews, you name it. The families’ after-supper scenes, however, varied little. Fathers smoked their pipes, slippered feet crossed at the ankles, reading newspapers or books, or playing chess with a son eager to turn the tide. Mothers in aprons tended to children all bundled in nightclothes; they double-checked homework or darned socks beside the radio; they nodded to the beat of a youngster plunking away at a piano. Some even had the gall to hang Christmas decorations—December had scarcely arrived!
TJ was so intent on blocking out these lousy Norman Rockwell sketches, he didn’t give any thought to destination until Jo spoke up.
“This is it.” She jerked her thumb toward the sandlot.
“This is what?”
She rolled her eyes, making him wish he’d just played along. “You know, TJ, you’re about as good at apologizing as you are at listenin’.” She continued into the ballpark, collecting rocks from the lumpy dirt.
TJ slogged behind. By the light of the moon, he took inventory of the place he hadn’t visited in at least a decade. The park was even more run-down than he remembered, and smaller. A lot smaller. When the new ball field had opened several blocks away, complete with kelly-green grass and shiny cages and splinter-less benches, kids had immediately shunned the old hangout. It was a toy they’d outgrown and dumped in a dusty attic.
Only now did TJ detect a sadness etched like wrinkles in the sandlot’s shadows.
“Right over there.” Jo pointed out a set of sagging bleachers. “That’s where I carved my initials, front row on the left. My own VIP seat. Every weekend Pop and I would come here and watch my brothers play. I tell ya, we missed a heap of Sunday Masses, but never a Saturday game.” She jiggled the rocks in her hand as if seasoned at throwing dice. Even TJ would think twice before going up against her in back-alley craps. “One day the coach got so tired of me nagging about wanting to hit, he put me in. Thought it would shut me up.”
“Well, obviously that didn’t work.”
Without warning, she flung a pebble that TJ barely dodged.
“And that, buster, was with my left arm.”
TJ shook his head. A quiet laugh shot from his mouth as he dared to follow her.
On the sorry excuse of a mound, level as the Sierra Madres, Jo planted her loafer-clad feet. A pitcher’s stance. She transferred the rocks, save for one, into her coat pocket. With her right hand, she drew back and slung the stone at her target, the lid of a soup can dangling from the batter’s cage. Plunk. The tin rattled against the warped and rusted fence.
Not bad. For a girl.
“So, how’d you make out?” he asked. “Up at bat?”
“Walked,” she said with disdain. “A beanball to the leg.” She flipped her cap backward with a sharp tug and set her shoulders. Sent out another nugget. Plunk. “My brother Otis was pitching. Told his buddies he wanted to teach me a lesson, which was baloney. He was terrified of his little sister scoring a home run off him.” She wound up and threw at the lid again, as hard as her expression. Another bull’s-eye. Three for three. Without daylight.
TJ tried to look unimpressed. “How long ago all this happen?”
“I dunno. Eight, maybe nine years back.”
A smirk stretched his lips. “And … you’re still holding a grudge?”
She pondered this briefly, rubbing a fourth stone with her thumb. “Irish blood,” she concluded. “Forgiving wasn’t exactly passed down by our ancestors.”
TJ, too, had a dash of Irish mixed into his hodgepodge of European descent. Perhaps this explained his shallow well of forgiveness. He dreaded to think what other traits he’d inherited from his father.
Averting the thought, he focused on the road that had delivered them there. “I gotta get back.”
“No,” Jo said.
He turned to her. “No?”
“Not till I show you why I brought you here.” She tossed her rock aside and sat on the mound. Then she slapped the dirt beside her twice, peering at him expectantly.
He scrunched his face. “Um, yeah. As nice as it would be to hang out and tell ghost stories, I do need to get some studying done.” His future at the university sadly depended on it.
“Two minutes and we’ll go.”
“Jo, I really need—”
“Would you stop your moanin’ and take a load off?”
Clearly arguing would get him nowhere. And he couldn’t very well leave a girl, no matter how self-reliant, alone at night in a deserted park. Safety aside, it was just plain rude.
“All right,” he muttered, “but make it quick.” He took a seat on the packed slope.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it? Now, lie back.”
“What?”
She groaned at him. “Just do it.”
Concerned by her intentions, he didn’t move. The two of them had never really hit it off, but if any other girl had invited him to cozy up like this, he’d know where it was leading.
“Don’t flatter yourself,”