ONE
Woodstock, Virginia
Spring, 1992
“Seven-zero.” Gary tossed his wallet and keys on the chipped edge of the formica countertop. “Seven. To. Zero.” He punched the air with the numbers. “Did you hear me? Seven zip. Another shutout. I almost made the boys walk back.”
Only silence answered, the kind that gets louder as the sun sets on an empty home.
“Where are you? Moses?” Gary walked down the long hallway of his brown paper bag plain ranch home to the back bedroom. “Moses?”
Two legs poked out from beneath the California King bed that left no space for anything else in the room. “Moses? You napping?” Gary slowly bent over, his seventy-year-old knees creaking in harmony with the wooden floor boards. He gently tugged on a warm, black paw. “Moses?”
The lab panted and sighed—a familiar song.
“Come on, pal.” Gary grabbed Moses’s paws and pulled him forward until the lab’s large head cleared the edge of the gray metal bed frame. “Tough afternoon?”
Moses lifted his chin and Gary heard the whack-whack of his tail thumping the floor under the bed. “All the way out, pal. Let’s go.”
On most days, Moses might have stayed hidden in the shadows, content to nap until the dry dog food hitting his metal bowl invited him to dinner. But today Gary’s hands smelled like grass, peanuts, chalk, and defeat.
Baseball.
Moses, Gary’s eleven-year-old best friend, followed him down the hallway and into the living room. “Up, up,” Gary said, sitting on the cloth couch decorated with spring flowers and fresh ketchup stains. “Seven to nothin’. We lost again,” Gary said, stroking Moses’s side. “That kid Dye can’t pitch. Dunno why we keep putting him out there.”
Moses made eye-contact and seemed to agree.
For the next hour, Gary Gorton ran nearly pitch by pitch through the latest loss for the Shenandoah Senators, his hometown minor league baseball team based in Woodstock, Virginia. The ritual calmed him, and though Moses wouldn’t admit it, he enjoyed the recaps more than ever.
Gary and Moses used to attend every game together, sitting in the same spot on a yellow, matted patch of grass up the first base line. They knew most of the other regulars by name, and when Moses stopped tagging along, even the players noticed.
Moses stood, two legs on Gary’s thigh and two on the couch cushion. He circled twice, licked his right paw, and settled next to him with his head now resting on Gary’s lap.
“I don’t know why either,” Gary said, scratching Moses behind his ear. “I figure if I knew why they were still sending him to the mound, I’d be the manager instead of the team bus driver.”
As the sun said hello to the evening horizon, Gary kicked his tennis shoes off and slid deep into the couch. Shadows grew across the floor and entertainment center that hadn’t been dusted in a year or three. Moses was asleep again, breathing heavily, wheezing in rhythm.
Then, when dusk begged every other house in the valley for the lights to be on, when neighbors began their evening routines of barbeques and bike rides, Gary was alone.
###
This wasn’t his choice, of course. Or so Gary would tell friends when his wife Meg packed her things for Florida. After thirty-nine years of marriage, the only girl he’d loved met him on their front porch on June 2, 1989. She took only a rolling suitcase, her maroon sewing tote, her favorite purse, and a handbag of hurt feelings. Her sister, Sandi, sat in her brand new Ford Taurus in the driveway, engine running and trunk open. Moses watched through a living room window.
Now, almost exactly three years later, the conversation had become the show he’d never wanted to rewatch. But no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, the memory ran on every channel.
“Goodbye, Gary.” She’d said.
“Goodbye?”
“Yes, goodbye. It’s what we say when we leave.”
“Leave?”
“Yes, Gary. Leave. As in, I’m finally leaving.”
His knees locked. His stomach began twisting and wringing itself out. The taste of pretzels and salt rose up like heat off the July asphalt.
“For what? Where?”
Meg gestured toward her sister’s car and the Florida license plate.
“Why?” Gary said, still standing halfway up the front walk and facing her.
“Why?” Meg turned again toward the driveway. “He wants to know why, Sandi.”
Her twin sister shook her head and said nothing, but her eyes said plenty. Get in the car, Sis. It’s a thirteen-hour drive to Gulf Breeze.
Gary absorbed the moment. The wool-thick Virginia humidity. The next door neighbor watching from his garden. Moses’s wet nose so close to the window that his breath left a foggy spot of breath and snot. Another neighbor watched too, but at least pretended to be busy hammering a Bill Clinton for President yard sign into the ground near his mailbox.
“Gary, it’s time. No more whys. No more lost days. No more. No more of any of it.”
Time stalled. Sputtered. Spat.
Meg stepped off the porch, turned toward Moses watching from the window, blew him a kiss, and walked toward her husband. Inches from the eyes she’d fallen in love with, she smiled. “I love you, Gary Gorton. The day I said, ‘yes,’ I loved you. The day I said, ‘I do,’ I loved you. And every day since. I have loved you with everything I have.” She paused, breathed back in her words as if saving them to remember later when the Florida days were lonely.
Then Meg placed her hand on Gary’s stubbled cheek. She traced his jawline with her thumb. “But today? After all these years? I don’t have anything else to give but goodbye.”
She moved past him and walked across the uncut grass. Everything she thought she’d need for her remaining days went into the trunk and she fought the urge to look back at the man on the front walk.
As the car rolled back into the street and pulled parallel to the only home they’d lived in together, the passenger window slowly dropped.
Gary’s eyes lifted. His hope awakened.
“Please take care of Moses,” Meg said. “Please,” she repeated, choking on the word and covering her mouth. “And yourself.”
Even three years later, her final plea rang in his ears.
Gary watched as the two sisters disappeared down the quiet street.
“Please stay,” Gary whispered to the empty road.
Inside the house, still clinging to the glass like an inmate wishing for a single lap around the yard and just one breath of fresh air, Moses thought the very same thing.
Please stay.
TWO
Gulf Breeze, Florida
Spring, 1992
The blue cloth recliner smelled like ginger ale. It had been a week, at least, and Meg could still feel the sticky spot on the inside of the left arm rest. The moment made her miss Gary, 1,000 miles and three years away at their old home in Virginia.
She looked at her watch.
2:40 p.m.
Wheel of Fortune.
With her eyelids closed just enough for the ambient light to turn gray through her thin lashes, Meg pictured Moses and Gary sitting on the couch she’d picked out staring at the obscenely oversized television across the room.
Meg’s legs were sore and achy. She’d walked to the family room she’d shared with Sandi three times already since waking up late. “Oh, Sis.” She sighed and glanced over at her sister’s matching recliner. “Do you remember?”
Silence.
“Do you remember the day Gary bought the baseball bus? I thought about it this morning, still in bed, looking up at the ceiling. Not sure why. Maybe the water stain from the neighbor upstairs . . . Was that back in January? I know . . . I said call the super . . . I’ll get that looked at and painted over.”
She looked again toward Sandi’s spot and waited.
“I was so mad. You remember? I called you from the cordless.” Meg allowed her arm to dip back into the sticky patch of ginger ale. “He parked it on the street, right in front of the house. That stupid big bus. I hated that. All of it. Him smirking at me as he opened the door and just sat there. Sat there looking down at me wearing his Senator’s jersey and hat. I hated it. The whole thing. You remember?”
This time Meg didn’t wait for a response. “Of course you do. You knew what it all meant and I just . . . didn’t. Not then.” Meg pressed her palms down on her thighs and moved them toward her knees, pressing down, filling her lungs and letting out long breaths. Her muscles asked for more, and she massaged the tops of her legs again with the heels of her hands.
Meg peeked at her watch again and knew exactly what was happening on the television in Woodstock.
2:55.
Pat Sajak was walking the day’s winner to the big wheel for the Bonus Round. He picks up an envelope. A few final letters chosen. Vanna turns the lettered panels. The contestant, maybe a teacher from Nashville, furrows her brow, maybe her entire face if the newly revealed letters are sparse, and time ticks down.
No winner, not today, Meg imagined.
But Gary and Moses? Well, they probably knew the answer. They were rarely wrong about game shows. Or life. Even when they were.
2:59.
Pat and Vanna wave goodbye and the show credits scroll at a hundred miles-per-hour on the right side of the screen.
Meg’s eyes opened and wandered to the window between her recliner and Sandi’s. A gulf breeze snuck in and teased the leaves on the fiddle-leaf fig her sister bought for their condo last year on Easter weekend.
Another slight tilt of her right wrist.
3:02.
Tears gathered courage and pooled in Meg’s tree bark colored eyes, surrounded by wrinkles of grief and boredom. “Thank you, Sis.” She softly whimpered. “For listening.”
Across the room, on a mantel next to a photo of the seventy-two-year-old twins, a black and burnt-orange urn sat still.
Sandi’s memories said you’re welcome.
Her ashes said nothing.
THREE
The pads of my paws smell like Fritos, Moses thought. Not that he really knew, since Fritos were on the “too salty for Moses” list he’d heard about. But Gary had made the comparison at least once a week since Moses came home from the shelter as a hyper puppy a decade earlier.
Moses lay on the couch and let the sun warm his thinning black coat. His head rested on the side of his right leg. He felt like Gary must have anytime naptime hit and the bed was too far for either of them to walk.
Moses’s mind wandered, as it did most afternoons when Gary was at a game. Moses, he thought. Moses, Moses, Moses, Moses.
He hadn’t always been Moses. Back in his shelter days he was simply “the obnoxious black lab in cage four.” Dozens of families had stopped to study him during those weeks at the Shenandoah County Animal Shelter. But when Moses leapt onto the gate, excited, barking and growling and spitting and scratching, mothers pulled in their children and macho fathers cursed. “Git down, ya dumb dawg!” They’d demand, kicking or slapping the fencing and sending Moses back to the corner to sulk until another family appeared and the act began anew.
Even with the daily disappointment and depression, Moses confessed life at the shelter was better than the home he’d been rescued from on Back Road. The man who’d pulled him into his truck one afternoon as a puppy walking down Rt. 11 confessed he was using him to win back the girl from the gas station. Moses didn’t know precisely what he meant by ‘win back,’ but he suspected it hadn’t worked because the girl he’d only seen a few times left swearing and throwing what looked like engine parts.
Wait, Moses thought, I did see her another time. But she didn’t come in. She pulled into the driveway when the man must have been at work or drinking or both. When she left, Moses remembered the man’s shiny black motorcycle had flat tires and was lying down in the grass.
After a few weeks of being kicked in the ribs and drinking nothing but toilet water, Moses was grateful when the man took him to the shelter early one morning before they were even open and tossed him out.
Weeks later, after the daily parade of sad eyes and rejection, Gary Gorton appeared in front of cage four. But this time, Moses didn’t bounce up. There was just something about the man. His baseball cap. His large hands. His saggy khaki shorts.
Moses had stood, yes, and walked to the gate. But then he sat, stuck his snout through an open square section in the fencing, and watched Gary in the same way Gary studied him.
Maybe it was his eyes, Moses thought. A little lonely. Dark brown, almost black, like his own. His hair also black, but graying at the sides. His nose bumpy and his ears a bit floppy for a man. His teeth white and clean, but also crooked.
Moses looked even closer, pressing his nose so far into the opening his skin stung from rubbing the metal. It’s like I’m looking in a mirror, Moses thought. But before he could bark his observations, Gary nodded and walked away.
Later that afternoon Gary returned, this time with one of the women who walked, cleaned and fed Moses and the other dogs. Gary carried a clipboard and as they stood again in front of cage four, Moses already felt something growing inside him.
Before they were home, Gary had looked at his adoptee in the backseat and said, “You look like you know things. Do you know things?”
The grateful dog barked.
“You have answers?”
He barked again.
“I think I’ll call you Moses.”
###
When Moses began to feel overheated from his customary spot on the couch, he tumbled off and walked to their bedroom. It had been a long time, years he guessed, since Gary asked the men with the matching T-shirts to deliver the giant bed. Even Moses knew Meg had been right all along. The room wasn’t nearly big enough for a California King.
On the day the bed arrived on the boxy white truck, Gary had moved the dresser, small desk and two nightstands across the hall to the other bedroom. When the new bed was in place and made with the new sheets and blanket, Gary looked at the skinny walkway remaining and swore.
Moses tucked his head and shimmied underneath. The wood floor and dark shadows cooled and comforted him. As the afternoon eased past, Moses slipped into a deep sleep.
He dreamt of Meg and her Sunday pot roast. Her perfume. Her impatience. The day they celebrated their grandson Troy’s eighteenth birthday, his last in their home. Meg had made a cake for the adults in the shape of a baseball field’s home plate with a white ball sitting on top that must have also been made of cake because Troy ate it first.
Meg made a small cake, too, and it smelled like bacon and chicken broth. Moses was nearly done before the birthday song ended. Even lost deep in his senior citizen’s nap, Moses’s tail awoke and wiggled at the memory.
Moses missed Troy. He’d lived with Gary and Meg even longer than Moses had, and the day he moved out to play baseball in Texas was almost as sad as the day Meg moved to Gulf Breeze.
“His dreams are coming true,” Gary had said during another argument.
“Are they?” Meg wondered.
“It’s professional baseball.”
“It’s minor league,” Meg said.
“It’s professional baseball,” Gary repeated.
“It’s room and board,” Meg said.
Moses didn’t remember much anymore. He didn’t know who’d won Wheel of Fortune the night before, or even what Gary had eaten for dinner. But he did remember that night in the living room.
“It’s not even a single A league,” Meg raised her voice.
“It’s baseball!” Gary said, his fists together as if pretending to hold a bat. “It’s a chance to play with big leaguers who are rehabbing. It’s what kids dream of. They pay his rent. They pay for meals.”
“Gary,” Meg said. “You think Troy or any boy dreams of growing up and living in someone’s garage apartment? Eating fast food? Riding an old bus from tiny town to tiny town? Just so they play?”
“Play what?” Gary asked.
“Baseball.”
“Then yes. That’s exactly what they dream of.” Gary swung the pretend bat and watched an invisible ball sail across the room and break through the front window.
A few days later, Troy left for Texas, Gary left for a drive, and Meg left for a week at her sister’s.
Back under the bed, Moses wheezed and stretched his aging body until his back legs poked out from underneath the bed. Then he waited for the game to end. For the bus to return home and stop in front of their house. For Gary to come looking. For the smells. The recap. The scratches and strokes.
But for Moses, the waiting was about so much more than just affection. He longed for the surge of adrenaline that would swallow him up when Gary silently reminded him of the lesson of that day in cage four.
Love is a choice.
FOUR
Gary was annoyed. Some overweight man in basketball shorts and a snug polo was sitting in a red ripped canvas camp chair in Gary’s traditional spot. The chair’s black metal legs begged for relief and as Gary set up his own chair some ten feet away, he secretly hoped the plump man’s chair would collapse and strangle him. The image brought a thin smile to his face; his first of the day.
The Shenandoah Senators were back home in Woodstock after a four-game road trip. They’d gone 2-2 and their bats had suddenly come alive. The season had another three weeks and if they could get on a run, there might still be hope for the final spot in the league playoffs.
Nice crowd, Gary thought, surveying the outfield stands and the small section behind home plate. He had the ideal view in the grassy area away from the fans in the stands, and when the team’s manager suggested it wasn’t safe to sit so close to the field in foul ball territory, Gary said he’d take one in the forehead if it meant the guys were actually making contact at the plate.
The Senators played on the same field the local high schoolers used and it didn’t take many “rears in seats,” as the announcer liked to say, for the place to look busy.
Buying and donating the retired county school bus had been a sizable gift, but if he really had money he’d build them their own ballpark.
“Hi Gary,” a woman said as she walked between him and the fence on the first base side of the infield. She wore a Senators jersey, capris and a smirk that suggested, You don’t remember my name, do you?
He didn’t.
Capris, as he’d long referred to her in his game recaps with Moses, was just another woman in town who’d become friendly in the three years since Meg moved to Gulf Breeze. Gary assumed she and the others knew he was still married, although he’d never actually told them and he’d stopped wearing his wedding ring a year after Meg left.
“Nice night,” Gary said to her, but it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the weather or hoping she’d walk away and have one.
Capris smiled anyway and kept moving to her own seat behind home plate with the other widows and divorcees who came to the games to do everything but actually watch baseball. He’d seen them knit, read books, play cards, and write letters. He once saw them using a bunsen burner to make chili.
“Gary Gorton, how are you?” A voice said from behind.
“That you, Greyson?” Gary said, his head turned just enough to make it look as if he cared.
“How ‘bout them Senators?” Greyson said, coming into view and stopping between Gary and his fat neighbor in the dying camp chair. “Making a charge, huh?”
“Something like that,” Gary said.
“Think they’ll keep it going?”
“We’ll see,” Gary said. “I figure tonight they’ll get some home cooking. They always hit better here.”
“True, true,” Greyson said. “Oh hey, how’s Troy?”
Gary loved this question, even though he didn’t always know the truth. “He’s good. Third year in Fort Worth. He’s with one of the Astros’ minor league clubs.”
“Starting?” Greyson asked.
“Of course,” Gary said. “You don’t have control and a fast ball that hits ninety-four without being a starter. Next year he’ll move up the ladder.”
“No doubt. No doubt.” Greyson said. “What about Moses?”
Gary instinctively looked at the spot on the ground to the left of his chair. “He’s fine. Getting old.”
“He been to a game this year?”
“A couple, back around Memorial Day, opening week. But doesn’t get too excited anymore when I tell him it’s game day.”
“Right, right,” Greyson said, and the announcer invited the crowd to their feet for the national anthem.
Gary stood and tried to not make it obvious he was watching the man next to him struggle to free himself from his chair. Eat some celery, Gary thought as the man finally stood and pried the chair frame from his robust hips.
After the anthem, the men sat and Greyson said goodbye. Gary didn’t have to watch him to know where he’d end up. Like the majority of the Senator’s fans, he’d plant himself in the same spot he did at every home game.
Soon the mayor, Kensley Dalton, threw out the first pitch and waved to the crowd. She stopped at home plate and posed with the catcher for a photo bound to appear in the paper the next day.
The innings marched by slowly, just as Gary liked them. Neither team had much working and the visiting team’s pitcher was so slow the umps had given him two warnings already. Gary wondered if the guy even wanted to be out there. Or, perhaps, playing at all.
The stale pace gave Gary time to people-watch. He enjoyed scanning the crowd and wondering who they were without having to talk to anyone. Meg had loathed this habit and Gary knew it. But with Meg living happily with her sister on the beach five states away, Gary gawked at strangers more than ever.
During the seventh inning stretch, the man who’d stolen his spot didn’t bother to stand. Gary watched him from the corner of his eye taking sips from a red water bottle and wondered what beverage he’d snuck in.
In the bottom of the eighth, the Senators finally scored on a double that brought home two. “There we go! There we go!” Gary stood and yelled. “Moses’ll like that.”
In the top of the ninth, with the score still 2-0 and the Senators’ manager taking his time on a pitching change, Gary noticed one of the valley’s familiar silver Colonial Cabs pull into the gravel lot near the concession stand.
A tall young man with just above the shoulder length barely-blonde hair got out of the back seat, reached in for a duffle bag, appeared to hand cash to the driver through the open window, and turned to face the field.
Troy?
FIVE
“Step into my office,” Gary said, pushing open the door of the Senator’s team bus.
“You still drive this thing even to home games?” Troy asked. He wore leather sandals, baggy shorts he knew Gary hated and a Montreal Expos baseball jersey
“Why not? It’s mine. And I figure it’s great marketing.”
“Whatever,” Troy laughed and fell into a first row seat. “You just like parking close and not having to walk from the outfield lot. Old man.”
“Whoa. Watch yourself now,” Gary feigned offense and sat in a seat across the narrow aisle from his grandson.
“Good win tonight. They playing well?” Troy asked.
“They’re playing. Well? Not really. They’re on a bit of a roll, won a couple road games last week.”
“Playoffs?” Troy asked.
Gary raised his right hand, fingers crossed.
For an hour the men talked about the team bus and the new VHS player Gary paid to install, the Virginia weather, and the disastrous promotional free taco night that nearly shut down one of the valley’s most popular local food trucks. They discussed the Atlanta Braves, politics, movies, and Moses.
When the conversation rolled to a lazy stop, Troy shifted in his seat to face his grandfather. “You’re not going to ask?”
“Ask what?”
“Please, Pop.”
Gary shrugged.
“You’re not curious?” Troy asked.
“About what?”
Troy laughed and looked up at the off-white ceiling of the bus. “You’re the worst.”
“Thank you?” Gary said, and they sat long enough in silence that they both noted the parking lot had emptied. When the field lights were finally turned off, the bus fell dark. “I guess I just figure you’ll tell me what you want to tell me, Son.”
Troy had always liked being called ‘son’ by his grandparents. They’d raised him for most of his twenty-two years and although his birth certificate said otherwise, they’d been the only parents he’d ever known. Or at least remembered.
“I’m hurt,” Troy said.
“What?”
Troy stuck his right arm out. “It’s my shoulder.”
“Oh,” Gary breathed. “How bad?”
Gary couldn’t tell through the 10 p.m. darkness, but Troy had closed his eyes. “They cut me. I’m done.”
“Oh,” Gary repeated, though it now sounded more like an apology. “You were pitching well though, right? Aren’t you under contract for one more year?”
“I was. They bought me out. I’m useless to them.”
Gary let loose a long dry sigh. “I’m sorry, Son.”
“I know. Me too.”
“How long? To recover? It’s rotator cuff?”
When Troy didn’t answer quickly, Gary pressed. “Rotator? Surgery, I figure?”
“Yeah, not sure. I’ll get an appointment here soon.”
After another quiet beat, Gary reached across the aisle and punched Troy’s legs. “OK, so how are these skinny things?”
“Uh, my legs? Fine, why?”
“Because the grass at the house is tall,” Gary laughed.
“And?”
“And, I’m old.”
“Yes,” Troy said. “Yes, you are.” Both men laughed, and when the noise drifted and disappeared out the open bus windows, Troy turned again to face him. “So, it’s cool then?”
“If you mow?”
“If I move. Like, move in.”
“It’s your house, Troy. You don’t have to ask.”
“Thanks, Pop. Can I ask something else?”
“Sure.”
“How’s Mom?”
END SAMPLE
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